The Hurt Locker, a film about a bomb squad in Iraq is a most amazing film, and one of the few films of recent vintage which actually tells the truth about what it means to be a professional soldier. Indeed, it is so different from the usual politically charged tripe about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that one wonders how the director Kathryn Bigelow ever got it made.

Indeed, ever since Vietnam, American servicemen, especially those in enlisted status have been characterized by the media mavens as using the services as a kind of last resort, a collection of losers at the bottom of the social barrel who join the military to suck up benefits they could not get as civilians. Hollywood, which gets its cue from the same source, has often failed to understand the motivation of the professional soldier.

At the screening I attended, Kathryn Bigelow was on hand to answer questions posed by the audience. It was a theater in the west side of Manhattan, a place that is normally characterized as ground zero of the liberal intellectual elite, where ferment, contention and argument are in the oxygen.

By itself the movie is mesmerizing and the puzzle of the bomb defuser’s motivation is posed by a quote at the beginning that indicates that war was as addictive as drugs. The soldier defuser, despite the danger and risk, clearly loves his work. Played by a superb actor, he brings to his role absolute fidelity and while those who asked questions admired the movie, they seemed unable to understand the man’s motivation, which was far from what passed for the prevailing opinion in this area.

I wished I had gotten up and asked a question largely because I wanted instead to make an assertion based on my own experience as a soldier. I was more of an observer, a reluctant conscript, but I did observe the professional soldier in action. Like any true professional, a dancer, a writer, a mechanic, an athlete and on and on, the consummate professional is indeed addicted to his work. In the case of the hero of this movie, yes he is addicted to his job, not war, but the job itself.

This man is proud of his expertise. Despite the horrendous risk and danger, he loves the defusing process, the challenge of the wiring, the instinctive discovery of how the bomb was constructed and placed for maximum impact. He must get into the mind and motivation of the bomber to fulfill the objective of his job.

The bottom line of his effort is to prevent the bomb from killing people. Thus, the movie at its heart is about saving lives. By the tenor of the questions asked of Ms. Bigelow, the audience seemed reluctant to admit that it was possible for a soldier to love his work and to be proud of his expertise.

Indeed, the movie makes clear that the soldier feels never more alive than when he is doing his job on the battlefield. In recent years, however one feels about the origins and conduct of the various wars in which America has been engaged, somehow the military man and woman has suffered the brunt of the negative criticism. This movie turns that concept on its head.

Looking back on my years in the Army, I have come to deeply respect the professional soldier. I saw many of them in action, doing their job with professional pride, just as in any occupation and calling. These are not people at the bottom, not, as some have portrayed them, life’s losers. No way. We are lucky to have them.

Kathryn Bigelow and her team are to be congratulated for their courage and persistence in getting this independent film made.

I have been attending various meetings of this sort for the past ten years, ever since I committed my authorial presence to the technology of reading on screens. Ten years ago, through rights reversals, I put all my previously published English language books on every digitized platform I could find.

Even after ten years, I appear to be the only author with my output that attends these conferences. Indeed, I did attend what was billed as a major conference on e-books sponsored by The Authors Guild. The house was packed. The lack of knowledge was overwhelming.

For what its worth, here is what I learned at the “Tools for Change” conference:

1. The overwhelming consensus is that e-book will one day be the dominant method of reading content.

2. Reading devices will proliferate exponentially throughout the world. It surprised me somewhat to discover that many are reading e-books on their laptops. The trend, however, is a shift from laptop to reading devices e.g. Kindle, SONY Reader and others entering the market place.

3. A vast marketplace is opening up for reading on smart phones that projects a market of billions of devices worldwide.

4. The traditional print publisher, regardless of a valiant last stand, will implode at an ever-increasing rate as more and more devices and digitized content hit the marketplace. The same will be true for big box bookstores and independents.

5. Metrics providers at the conference told us that the e-book market is currently at 4% of sales but rising fast. I do not believe their conclusions. It is probably undercounted. They did not provide the one crucial ingredient in their presentation, which is that the dedicated reader who has been the first wave of device buyers is purchasing and reading e-books at an astonishing rate largely because of the convenience of downloading on devices without having to go to a brick and mortar book store. According to their metrics, the leading category purchased by e-book buyers is general fiction, which, for most people, is a one-time read.

6. Traditional publishers are swiftly losing their monopoly on distribution, marketing, publicity and content. While existing brand name authors will continue to sell print hardcovers, albeit in ever decreasing numbers, the branding devices of the mass media are becoming less and less potent as newspapers decline and methods of book information dissemination become fractionalized into even more niches.

7. Brand name authors and those authors with large output (more than 25 books) will eventually create their own publishing and marketing vehicles through online outlets, since they will discover that the traditional publishers will no longer wield the marketing power and financial clout they once held and they will do a lot better on their own. Some are already doing it, creating more heartburn for publishers and agents. As advances recede more and more authors will take this road.

8. The avalanche of authors trying to enter the publishing world is exploding. Without taking into account the quality of their work or their commercial potential, most have, for whatever reason, not been able to attract the attention of traditional publishers and agents in today’s hard pressed economy in a declining print based industry. Conversion houses and marketing and publicity purveyors have sprung up designed to help these authors enter the e-book and print-on-demand world and post their books on all major online stores. While getting one’s book onto the online publishing world will satisfy the hopes and dreams of the author, the likelihood of reaching anything close to brand name status or even to sell a respectable number of books is infinitesimal. Nevertheless one cannot discount the power of hopes and dreams. Anything is possible. Despite the awesome odds in a lottery, some lucky bastard does win.

9. The use of the social networking sites to sell books is, in my view, uncharted territory. I don’t discount their use for this purpose and I do see their potential. They do create communities and encourage people to enter a conversation with others of like-minded interests and they do enhance awareness of authorial identity. There are now a vast number of “specialists” attempting to monetize their familiarity with these sites and a number of those exhibiting their wares at the convention cited these networks as an add-on sure-fire sales and marketing tool. We shall see. There is a kind of one-on-one aspect to these sites and many are addicted to their use, but since their use is hands on, I wonder how many authors will devote a large chunk of their lives to using their time for marketing purposes. I wonder, too, if a “ghost” who poses as the author can really gain authenticity.

10. There were a number of presentations at the convention about the “enhanced” book, meaning a book that is accompanied with video or some other add-on to compliment the reader’s experience, a kind of upgraded model of the graphic novel. I guess I am the wrong person to make an evaluation since I am committed to the idea that the images created by the printed word in the imagination of the reader is the core experience of story telling. A book of fiction, for example, takes place in the imagination and cannot be replicated through other media. This does not mean that I am against adaptations into visual media. Heck, they have provided a great enhancement for my career, but I am against the distraction of anything visual or audible on one’s concentration during the reading process. It is a stand-alone experience, trancelike and isolated, requiring deep emersion and total focus. Any distraction of this process diminishes the experience. On the other hand I do believe that visual enhancements can be extremely useful in instructional books where a visual demonstration can be compelling. But then why would one need a book as an enhancement of the visual?

11. I did detect some interesting marketing efforts to take advantage of niche penetration for authors and publishers. The idea is to slice the marketing targets into “relevant” categories of potential readers and pursue them on the Internet. With the potential demise of the mass media and the proliferation of infinite sites in cyberspace these attempts to connect with bits and pieces of potential readers seems to have promise for the author seeking to build his awareness level and find readers. We shall see.

12. While there are still many unanswered questions of how the future of electronic publishing will evolve, one thing is certain. It is here to stay. It will dominate the publishing business. It will forever change the output and lives of authors. It is no longer a question of why or how but the speed of when.

Sledge’s account of his ordeal as a nineteen year old combat Marine in the bloody battles against the Imperial Japanese Army while taking the islands of Pelelui and Okinawa in the closing weeks of World War II offers startling insights into the bloody nature of war and the horrific sacrifices required of those we send into battle. The comparison of then and now is essential if we are to make any sense out of what the “new breed” of Marine must face in the baffling revised rules of combat.

“With the Old Breed” was published twenty years after the events took place and republished twice since then, the last time with an impassioned introduction by Victor Davis Hanson which is a mini masterwork in its own right. Known by his Marine buddies as “sledgehammer”, Eugene Bondurant Sledge, this slight 135 pound sensitive and observant young man chose to enlist in 1943 as a Private in the Marine Corps and was assigned to a mortar company that confronted fanatical Japanese defenders with arguably superior weaponry and zealous suicidal tactics that decimated the American invaders.

Both the islands were taken, but at a horrendous price in American lives and the necessity to kill almost all the Japanese defenders. Some Japanese prisoners were taken, much to the chagrin of their comrades who considered capture a humiliating gesture of cowardice. Sledge describes an orgy of barbarism and hatred on both sides on a corpse strewn battlefield where Marines lived in foxholes for long periods of time, often unable to be reinforced and provisioned and slugging it out in circumstances of unbearable hardship and suffering.

Sledge’s descriptions of the battlefield spare no details. One can sense that each observation was carefully chosen by him to graphically illustrate the hellishness and waste he was determined to convey. He described the noxious all pervading and perpetual stink of dead and rotting flesh, the armies of maggots that infested the corpses and spilled over to the living troops, the disgust at living in a swamp of human feces, the rot of disease-inducing rain soaked shoes, socks and clothing, enduring the Japanese strategy of shooting at medical corpsman and stretcher bearers, the night time raids by lone snipers, the sudden gruesome death of a bonded buddy beside you, the screams of pain, the thirst and hunger when it was too dangerous to re-supply food and ammunition, the terror of friendly fire which accidentally killed many of our own, the endless cacophony of bursting shells and bullets, the disgusting mutilation of dead bodies by both sides, the ugly thirst for souvenirs, the savagery of hand to hand combat, the horror of exposed wounds and entrails, the rivers of blood, the agony of mental breakdowns and the devastated, eerie and ghost-like landscape.

How does a good young man like teenager Sledge, religious, moral, honest, loving and decent cope with such sights and smells, such barbarism and brutality? He takes great comfort in the camaraderie of his fellow Marines, the old fashioned sense of friendship and honor towards his fellow warriors to whom he has given his deep trust and loyalty. It is all there in this book which cannot be read without shedding copious tears and knowing that these young men were engaged in a conflict not only for themselves but for all Americans.

There is little mention of civilians caught in the line of fire, except what one must imagine were almost certain casualties caused by the pre-invasion bombardments that gave cover to the invading Marines who stormed the island beaches. There were, after all, native populations on these islands, perhaps less clotted than in the European theater but nevertheless subject to damage which did not have the distinction of being dubbed “collateral.” The objectives were clear and single-minded; destroy the enemy, secure the territory. Winning “hearts and minds” had not yet been factored in as an essential weapon in offensive warfare.

Sledge’s observations are profound and moving and he concludes that “war is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste. Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors were my comrade’s incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other…and love. That esprit de corps sustained us.”

Fast forward to modern times and here we are in Afghanistan once more engaged with a fanatical suicidal foe but the combat tactics of our Marines have undergone a radical change. Armed with the most destructive weapons in the history of warfare, our Marines and soldiers must cherry pick their enemy combatants who, knowing the new avoidance tactics employed, use the flesh of civilians to shield them from harm.

It is, of course, obvious that I am looking at this from the point of view of the combat Marine, who has voluntarily put his life on the line to fight what has been declared the “necessary war” by America’s political overseers. He has been ordered not to shoot unless he actually sees a weapon in the hands of an enemy combatant. He must avoid shooting this combatant who, instead of sandbags and barbed wire of previous wars, uses the flesh of women and children to assure his safety from return fire.

What is he to think if the buddy beside him is ripped apart by a bullet that comes from behind these “sandbags” made from the living flesh of civilian men, women and children? Must he hold return fire because the shooter fights and kills behind his human shield? How would Sledge and his buddies have reacted if the Japanese had lined their defenses with island natives?

We are told by the Generals who have created this strategy which has been approved by our political leaders that this tactic is an essential part of the “hearts and mind” strategy that will eventually stabilize Afghanistan and win them over to our side. In Iraq, they tell us, this strategy has worked and we are able to declare victory at last and extract our troops from the country.

I know I have a weak hand in this discussion. Having been trained as an infantryman during the Korean War and never seen combat service in Korea, I have little credibility, except the knowledge that soldiers with my training were thrown into the line in Europe, the Pacific theater and Korea, many as replacements, and quickly killed or maimed by enemy fire. Nor am I second-guessing our political and military leaders. I hope they’re right.

Still, I am conflicted by the ethical dilemma posed by how warfare is to be conducted against an enemy who uses the human flesh of civilians as armor. The Israelis have been paying a heavy propaganda price for their conduct in the Gaza war where the enemy clearly pursued its defense behind forced barriers of civilians. Apparently our Marines in the Helmand province of Afghanistan are being confronted with exactly the same tactic.

I would hate to see a young Marine die because he has been prevented from defending himself from an attack by a murderous combatant hiding behind a wall of civilians.

I’m certain that the issue will be the subject of much debate in the future whether the tactic of “hearts and minds” is successful or not. It will take time to see if the ethical standard was worth the candle.

As for me, I am haunted by Sledge’s final assessment that war is essentially a barbaric enterprise where ethical standards cannot apply. What Sledge and many others have termed the “insanity of war” cannot be subjected to any humane codification. It is a bloody killing enterprise where ethics, mercy and morality are, however rationalized, absent from the equation.

But if our young men and women must be combatants, for whatever reason, it seems cruel and unjust to leave them defenseless against a ruthless enemy on the possibility that any illustration of our compassion and selective offensive tactics will convince them to throw down their arms and join a humane society.

Think of it this way. Every time a dedicated reader buys a digitized reading device whether it be a Kindle, SONY reader, Vook, iPad, the upcoming Google device or others crowding into the marketplace, the big box stores and small hard-pressed independents selling hardcover or paperback books lose one customer. That one customer, if he or she is a truly dedicated reader, can be counted on to buy at least one book a month.

Thus, the potential customer for both the big box and independent stores stocking books by traditional publishers can lose ten to twelve sales or more a year. Let us further calculate into the mix that most of these books are one time reads, the industry’s highest profit category.

It is estimated that within the next few years, these reading devices will, by most counts, mount into the multi-millions. There can be no accurate measurement since the number is dependent on numerous factors including the price point, which is bound to be lower and the fact that the content on these dedicated readers are already morphing into mobile smart phones.

Considering the erosion of his customer base, can the retailer locked into the sale of physical books survive using his traditional business paradigm? Does he need the display space to sell his shrinking flow of paper product? Without getting into the esoterics of the retail end of the business with its bizarre contingency methods and pay for placement ploys, he will have to reduce his space as fast as his leases allow and try to save his sales volume by quickly converting his content stream to digital devices. Case in point, the Vook by Barnes and Noble.

His loss of retail customers will be directly proportional to the rise in the number of e-reading devices. Considering the ease of purchase, the endless assortment, the sheer convenience of buying content on these devices, his future will pretty much resemble what befell the music industry. His real hope is that the proliferation of digital reading devices will be slow enough for him to make a sensible retreat and create a new business plan to counter the shrinkage of his paper book customer base.

Unfortunately, when technology creators smell a buck, new innovations swiftly follow and soon products find a price point that fit more and more pocketbooks. Expect the cost of reading devices to dive as more and more people discover that the e-book experience does not impinge upon their comfort with and enjoyment of the content.

What about his principal supplier, the book publisher? The publisher has long held a monopoly over content, advertising, publicity and marketing, along with his partner, the big box bookstore and his on-line partner, chiefly Amazon, which, by far presently holds sway over the physical book business.

With his content, advertising, and marketing monopoly eroding, the publisher has finally awakened to the fact that he is endangered by the slimmer margins he had to swallow by Amazon having set a price point of $9.95 as the price of that content. Fighting back, he has forced Amazon to reprice its book output. There is a growing consensus that this price surge has come too late in the process and will quickly default to Amazon’s $9.95 cap or less.

The publisher, like the retailer, is betting that sales of the digital reader device will move at a pace slow enough to get him to reorganize his resources and cut costs to protect his margins while he noodles ways to continue to show profits to his parent company. If he does not protect his bottom line his number masters will either jump ship or strangle his resources with penny pinching.

The publisher has another problem. He has relied on his skills at branding his authors and impressing them on the public mind. But his branding of new authors will be stymied by the catastrophic shrinkage in the print media and the vast splintering of attention going on in cyberspace. To get traction on the Internet and feature an author above the chatter is a challenge beyond merely flacking him or her on book and social networking sites. Yes, book marketing depends mostly on word of mouth, but it needs a head start somewhere.

One can expect dedicated reading device companies to devise various promotional opportunities for suppliers of digital content, but in a vast marketplace of millions of books multiplied by Google’s ambitious plan to digitize all out of print books and new author generated publishing entries, this will present a challenge that no one has yet come close to mastering.

There is always the possibility of promoting a book on television or direct mail but the margins of single sales may not allow that to equate with a sensible return on dollars spent on these types of promotion, especially for an unbranded author.

One must not discount the creative power of the publisher and the retailer to come up with business saving solutions, but the economic and historical realities will have to be factored in. Which brings us to the author, the producer of the raw material for the publishing trade.

The publishers can still count on their best sellers to lead the pack, although even those who write these books will suffer diminishment in their advances. Like the movie business, the publishers will expect their top sellers to carry the load with the rest of their authors holding up the rear at lower and lower advances, their survival based more upon the necessity to keep alive the concept of a “publisher” who produces many books, which gives his reputation heft and viability. Expect authors who no longer can depend on publishers to provide them with a comfortable living to set out on some alternative publishing path made possible by the ease in which they can enter the fray with the new digital devices.

Of course authors who have not been vetted by the traditional publishing gatekeepers, who keep their eyes peeled for customer trends in every genre, may stumble on their ego generated belief that they can either buck the trends or come up with creative ways to shoehorn their work into traditional genres. Some will succeed. Most won’t. The best shot at alternative publishing will be that author who has been multi-published by the traditional media and can capitalize on his previous books, some name recall and actual participation in the marketplace.

Others may try to emulate the savvy publishers of Romance and Science Fiction genres that now dominate the e-book market, but that strategy will come up against both branded authors of both genres and a glut of product.

Thus, the content monopoly once enjoyed by publishers but no longer as potent, will further diminish their power, along with their marketing monopoly. Still the playing field will not be level for the entrepreneurial author and it will not be easy for him to strike out on his own. He may choose to go with third party digital sellers or hook on exclusively with digital device providers or perhaps join author cooperatives that might or might not achieve results. Deprived of ample advances he will certainly have to pony up his own resources, if he has them.

Indeed, even the branded author with a multi-million book sales experience, might one day take it on his own to sever his relationship with the traditional publisher and set up his business as a marketer of his own books. There are already signs of this alienation beginning.

Rising above the chatter, finding sales traction among millions of books, will be a challenge of enormous proportions for both the publisher and the author, not to mention the impact on backpack manufacturers, bookcase manufacturers, printers, binderies, libraries, artists, and any other trades that have feasted on the publishing business for many years.

One thing is certain, the digital revolution will be game changing for all concerned in the publishing business. It will be deep and profound. Nothing in the business will remain the same. The question will be how long it will take for the e-book
tipping point to arrive.

In my opinion the publishing business might have just enough time left for an orderly retreat. It will make a valiant stand, but in the end it will be forced to surrender to the relentless forces of change.

As a bona fide news junkie, which probably has something to do with having grown up during a period in New York City when there were eleven newspapers which covered what seemed at the time a world choked with events and never ending activity. It was not uncommon to become dependent on two, three or more of these newspapers for our daily fix of information.

Early habits are a powerful influence and it seems perfectly normal to have carried these habits into the age of the Internet, a never ending perpetual flow of endless rivers of information which, as the song says, just keeps rolling along. It is not uncommon of me to tap into more than a dozen so-called information sites even after an extensive bout with my home delivered copy of the New York Times.

I have been a paid subscriber to the electronic Wall Street Journal since it was first introduced and manage to flip through it daily as the first of my computer generated forays into the news of the day. I figure I spend about 45 minutes with the Times, a half hour with the Journal and another half hour running through all the sites I have bookmarked on my computer.

As a full time writer, I spend a great deal of time in front of my computer screen and since I am master of my own schedule, I can choose to spend this much time getting my news fix. If I were a working stiff with a job in an office or a factory, I would be spending time commuting, my mind cluttered with the impending problems of my workaday world. This would also be true if I was a student or, for that matter, a practitioner of any form of labor on any level.

Considering the press of time and the buffet of uses for that time from watching television, to playing computer games, to myriad forms of entertainment, plus the distractions associated with family and other responsibilities, I have been wondering how many people are actually paying more than passing attention to the news at all. Actually I have been more than just wondering, I have been developing a theory based on pure speculation and my own habits, inclinations and observations that there is probably less than ten percent of all adults that pay any attention to the news at all, the large bulk of them falling demographically into what might be described as the mature years.

As for national news, I would opine that most of the sites on the Internet are a traveling road show for the same people, divided into subsets of folks of various political views covering the continuum from left to right. During a national election, this group expands by about five times, persuaded to join in by a drumbeat of advertising and hype that gains traction in the last weeks prior to the national election. Note that I am talking primarily of national news which, by far, occupies most of the Internet sites devoted to news.

All of these sites are mere aggregators of the news, most of it gleaned and sometimes enhanced from the active news operations led by the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the AP with some assist from Fox and CNN and freelance news gatherers who work for various outlets. For the most part the Internet sites, aside from being aggregators, provide an avalanche of opinion pieces offering an endless array of what passes for analysis based on preconceived biases, most of which can be delegated to very few categories, but all subject to the various spins perpetrated by their authors. Hence my references to the many ways to skin a cat.

These cat skinners are ubiquitous. Often they quote each other to prove their analysis creds. They have become a vast punditry, vying for attention, ladling out their convictions like gobs of sticky molasses. They beg for comments which come in various forms, encouraging conversations, more opinions, offering more and more ways to skin the cat.

I keep wondering where all these comments come from. Who has the time or even the inclination to ponder all this alleged wisdom and insistent critiques of this and that policy, this and that instruction of what will work and what not? It is the traveling roadshow of the faux elite who truly believe that the eyeballs they attract are making on impact, although on what is subject to endless speculation.

My hunch is that the level of attention on these sites is bloated, overhyped and suspect. For some like The Huffington Post it strikes me as something of an ego trip for Madame Huffington who seems never to have encountered a policy with which she didn’t agree or reject at one time or another. She is merely one example of hundreds too numerous to name. Indeed, even advertisers have caught the skin the cat syndrome and, I suspect that they too will find that the attention span and word overload will eventually prove debilitating to their pitch for eyeballs.

The cacophony is mind numbing and the Tower of Babel seems to be growing exponentially into an infinite wasteland. Of course, I am part of the roadshow, this crowd of cherrypicking news addicts and policy wonks who flit from site to site like bees among the flowers.

I’m beginning to think that all this bloviation is hazardous to our political health which seems to be declining precipitously despite all the digitized sturm and drang racing across our computer screens.

The problem it seems to me, is that while all these potential cat skinners arguing about the most efficient way to part the feline from his furry exterior, the pussy of the Cheshire variety sits comfortably on his branch exhibiting his cryptic smile and watching the human animal chase around in circles sniffing for their lost tails and knowing in his ever beating heart that no one will ever come up with the best way to skin his species.

You have begun a conversation with someone expecting a dialogue and quickly discover that the alleged partner in this dialogue is instead engaging in an interminable monologue. The discovery, while being an affront to your patience, is also a challenge to your essential understanding of the rules of politeness.

The monologue assault is endless, unedited, often repetitive, without insight to the nature of your attentiveness. The speaker, wrapped up in his narcissistic binge hasn’t a clue to your interest. He is convinced that you are enraptured by his monologue, an oral deluge about which you have long lost interest, and your mind is devising ways to protect itself from this onslaught by various strategies of mental avoidance, while you assemble your features as if you were listening to the Sermon on the Mount.

In a sense you are trapped, pinned like a dead butterfly, to the rules of politeness and avoidance of insult that you have been conditioned to obey. You know that you must say to this person that he talks too much, that he is being boring and repetitive, that his monologue has little interest to you, that he is assaulting you with a barrage of words which are being rejected by you internally as useless barbs of boredom. Above all, you fear that any protest will bring insult. Worse, your entreaties might not stop the verbal onslaught since the speaker probably truly believes that his monologue is absolutely necessary for you to hear for your own good.

If I am alert enough, my strategy is sometimes gentle interruption usually to no avail. Even if the interruption is forceful the speaker is sure to return to the subject when the interruption has run out of steam. The poor fellow hasn’t the insight to understand your dilemma. At times you try body language signals, the glazed look or the long yawn or some forceful gesture like repeatedly looking at your wrist watch that might signal boredom or disinterest. In most cases this is an unsuccessful strategy, because the speaker has no clue to your inner emotions, barely noticing such gestures.

Indeed, you always have the sense, even if you quelled his verbal diarrhea for a brief moment, that he is always searching for the right opening to restart his monologue or begin another one, especially one which requires the copious use of the first person pronoun.

Privately you vow never to be put into this position again. Even this strategy has its drawbacks if this person’s spouse or partner is an essential part of your social or family circle and difficult to avoid.

Actually, I have one courageous friend, who, when the monologue reaches a point of no return will rise from the table or whatever venue he feels trapped in and without a word simply disappear, leaving us with the assumption that he has obeyed a call of nature. This strategy, of course, occurs only when the monologist is assaulting a group and not a one on one situation. My instinct is to jump up and applaud him. Unfortunately, I am too timid to emulate his action.

My ultimate fallback strategy is based on something I once read about Bing Crosby of all people. He had opined in the press that even as he was reciting his obligatory lines of dialogue while the cameras were running, he was thinking about how his horse was faring in the fifth race at Santa Anita.

Thus utilizing all the multiple tracks available to the human brain, my perfected latest strategy when a clueless monologist appears in any social setting, is to take flight in my imagination and use my recall skills to wrestle with various story ideas humming in my mind, recall bits of music or memories, tell myself old jokes, go over recent or past expenditures, review my most recently read books, ponder today’s politics or review any options on actions still to be taken.

Indeed, such a strategy has been often recounted in the memoirs of prisoners of war forced to bear the isolation of solitary confinement.

You may argue of course that this bit of written intelligence might be characterized as a monologue presented for your own good, but then you are not obliged to follow its coping directions and figure out your own.
 

Among those that continue to resonate was the story written by the late Meyer Berger of the senseless serial killing perpetrated by Howard Unruh. I was so absorbed in that brilliant journalist’s tour de force that I missed my subway stop and would not rise from my seat until I had come to its end. It took my breath away. Berger received a well deserved Pulitzer Prize for his superlative minute by minute account of Unruh’s rampage.

I continue to revel in the Times’ masterful feature stories, its coverage of the arts and its occasional in-depth exposes of business corruption. In its coverage of the Madoff ponzi scheme it has been superb. Although its theater, movies and book reviews are still of interest, they seem to have less and less influence than in by-gone days when a bad stage review made for a sure fire flop and a smash book review assured a best seller.

Growing up in New York City, newspapers were once in abundance, a cornucopia for the curious, the literate and the passionate. I had eleven newspapers to choose from and as near as I can remember I read many of them. It was ritual to read the News and the Mirror bulldog editions that hit the streets early in the night before their dated publication.

My father invariably read the Times when he went off to work in the city, which for us Brooklynites meant Manhattan. Upon returning to our apartment, he invariably brought home the Journal-American and occasionally The Sun or The World-Telegram and quite often The Post whose coupon giveaways provided me with my first complete set of Charles Dickens.

On occasion I would read the New York Herald Tribune, PM, the Journal American and others. But for me, the Times was my newspaper of habit. And still is.

Despite all the economic hardships of the depression, I believed that everybody read the newspapers. They were affordable on newsstands everywhere. It was our principal source of information along with the radio which spawned other rituals of information sources like Gabriel Heatter, H.V. Kaltenborn, Edward R. Murrow on radio and on Sundays Walter Winchell. In Brooklyn in those days we were sports nuts and getting the baseball results from Stan Lomax on radio and the box scores in the papers were an essential part of our existence, especially in the days when we teenagers were fanatical Brooklyn Dodger fans.

I wasn’t very politically aware as a teenager and probably missed most of the political implications of the Times editorials, although I was well aware that the Times, the News, the Mirror and the Journal-American were dubbed conservative, the Herald Tribute somewhere in the middle. PM was certified left wing and, of course, the Daily Worker was communist. Frankly, the communists scared me growing up with their fearful neighborhood demonstrations and angry fiery speeches and mad faces.

Our politics were simple. In our social and family circles we were all Roosevelt Democrats. During those crucial teenage years, Roosevelt was the only President I knew and loved. Even when Truman succeeded Roosevelt and I was a soldier in the Korean War assigned to the Pentagon as Washington Correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service, I really believed that most people, the good people, the compassionate and right thinking people, were Democrats.

It appalled me to suddenly discover that many of those I associated with in Washington hated Truman. Indeed, it took me awhile to discover that there was a passionate sentiment in others that believed in a contrary political view. I know it sounds naïve and testifies to the limits of my awareness, perhaps ignorance, but, as I get older and less inclined to ingratiation, everything I write begins to sound more and more like a confessional. Truth to tell, the present cast of characters among the Democrats no longer appear to represent my interests.

Which brings me back to the New York Times. From my long and habitual readership, I am both conflicted and amused at what has happened to the New York Times over the years. Its editorials and the way it presents the news have evolved into a hydra headed and confused potpourri of mixed emotions and leftist allegiances that seem in direct conflict with the demographics of their readership. Like me.

While their editorials and most of their letters to the editors rage and rant against the so-called wealthy, implying that anyone who has amassed an economic cushion of some significance is a quasi-enemy, their ads suggest that their principal readers are the very people they rage against. Like me. In fact it is laughable. A recent editorial called for the country’s high income earners and wealthy corporations to “carry more of the burden.” More of the burden in a country where more than 40% of the people pay no income taxes at all and the tax on corporations is one of the highest, if not the highest, in the world?

How can the Times’ editorialists ignore the fact that the first two pages of the newspaper carry ads for Tiffany, Ferragamo, Chanel, Cartier, Gucci, Mikimoto and Prada, all companies that are looking for the eyeballs of the very people the Times excoriates, meaning the people who can afford to buy their very expensive upscale wares?

It gets worse when one reads the columns on the op-ed page. There, the regular columnist, Bob Herbert, beats the politically correct drum for a demographic that probably is the tiniest fraction of the Times’ readership. Even the letters to the editors are so skewed in lock step with the editorial policy that while I read them with mild interest, their predictability never fails to amuse. I do read their other op-ed columnists, the harridan Maureen Dowd whose deliberately vinegar anti-everything columns suggest that she is a prime target for aggressive therapy, but worth the time as a cautionary tale of what happens when the inmates take over the nut house.

And yes, I read Tom Friedman who has dubious solutions for everything, especially for his book writing factory and Nick Kristof, whose forays into the terrible events occurring on the dark continent make one cringe at the evil and hopelessness of that unfortunate snake pit of horror. For those with modest right of center views, the philosophical columns of David Brooks offer what the Times editors see as counter balance to their very left wing manipulations.

As a former newspaperman, I understand all this. The Times’ honchos are proudly militant and arrogantly self-righteous and obviously must reflect the views of their owners and editors. Unfortunately, falling circulation and the rise of cyberspace, has whittled away their once powerful influence. I suppose their editorial policies have some effect on their decline, but their coverage of the arts, the quality of their writing, their excellent features and coverage of the social scene of New York’s richest citizens keep them afloat despite their attempt to provide their version of tough love to their mostly well off subscribers.

Every morning when I pick up the Times outside my apartment door, I note that I am the only subscriber on the corridor that contains ten apartments. If this is replicated on all 33 floors of my Manhattan apartment house, I am both saddened and appalled.

Indeed, after spending an inordinate amount of time reading the Times, I am off to my computer to make a news junkie’s pass at the Wall Street Journal and ten other newspaper and internet sources like The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, both largely a cacophony of forgettable and self-important snippets of gosspip and opinion but worth a minute or two exploration just in case something original pops up. It rarely does. Except for the Journal, I find the Internet websites merely aggregators and repetitive spin-offs of other sources, many originating in the Times, and a swamp of opinions that often make my eyes glaze over.

Yes, warts and all, my newspaper of choice is still and will always be the old grey lady, however disabled and, at times clueless, but when occasional reason and eloquence shines through, surprisingly lucid and satisfying.

In their desperation to shore up their price points, they are overlooking the habits of their most passionate customers, their readers. The fact is that their most dedicated readers, those who buy most of their books, fiction, non-fiction, instructional, back lists, front lists and best sellers are not interested in purchasing a basket of distractions. Their primary interest, their principal motivation, is for the reading experience only, the content provided by words read in isolation and silence, not video, not telephones, not music, not games, not a tsunami of apps.

When the dedicated reader enters a traditional bookstore, he or she is searching for a book, unadorned by other potential lures to their attention. They want the reading experience, whether it be a flight into the imagination provided by story tellers, or instructions on how to improve one’s life or care for their pets or offer varying points of view on politics, spirituality or whatever.

What Apple has created on its new iPad platform is a potpourri of lures and distractions that is technologically dazzling, offering infinite entertainment choices packaged for easy access, but it diminishes the exclusivity of the written word which is the principal reason why people buy books. It can be argued, of course, that books are presently only one among many choices offered to people in the real world and it has always been thus. What Apple has done is create a virtual living room filled with every conceivable way for a person to fill his or her time, a virtual media world.

But of all the media being offered in this marvelous package, the book is the most time consuming, requiring far more intellectual concentration than any of the other media geegaws offered in Apple’s virtual entertainment center. Perhaps I am making a biased judgment as a dedicated reader (and writer of books) who purchases books by the armload and stores and reads them on an electronic reader. As a dedicated reader, I am very mindful of how much I spend for the content I desire and enjoy the size and portability and ease of purchase of my current electronic reading device which has become my companion in all of my travels.

Sure I like the movies, make phone calls and access apps on my iPhone, including the App that allows me to continue reading my Kindle book on the Apple iPhone. Of all the electronic devices I own, I spend more time reading on my portable reading device than I do with any other instrument. Would I schlep around an iPad if I can get my reading fix from another more convenient portable device? I very much doubt it.

Of course there is a place for the iPad. The fact is, I am a loyal Apple fan and have long ago switched from a PC to an Apple, but as a dedicated reader, the iPad does not serve my most passionate need as a reader. Making the book an also-ran in a sea of other electronic gizmos will, in my opinion, not be the panacea the traditional publishers are looking for.