In WaPo's world, everything's dismal, including the loss of a depressing suburban shopping mall.

Look at this array of downer headlines on the front page right now. Even the Iran uprising gets portrayed in a negative light. Click to enlarge:



I'm used to MSM portraying suburban shopping malls as soul-sucking places for boring people who don't know how hopeless they are, but when a shopping mall dies, they don't say, good, these places were always a blight on American small-town life, they bemoan the loss, as if whatever happens in Trump's America must be bad. The challenge is just to figure out how to say why it's bad. Today's story — "First, this town lost its Macy’s. Then Sears. Now, all eyes were on J.C. Penney" — strains to make WaPo readers feel for this town's aching loss. It begins:

HERMITAGE, Pa. — Barbara Cake had made the sale. A man was hovering near the gold bracelets at the J.C. Penney jewelry counter when she said, “Hi, sir, how are you?” Before long, he was swiping his credit card for both a bracelet and a pair of diamond earrings for his wife. But Barbara wasn’t done.

“If she doesn’t like these,” she told the customer, “then tell her you know a lot of ladies who would.”

“I just want my husband to buy me a watch,” she continued. “She should be truly happy with these.”

Barbara ripped the receipt from the register, pointed at the flimsy paper and, in a tone that sounded as if she were revealing a sworn secret, she delivered her favorite line.

“Just wait till you see what you saved.”

There were four days until Christmas, and this customer had decided against shopping online to come to a real store and talk to real people. To Barbara, that meant she had to provide something he couldn’t get from clicking buttons on a computer. Could the Internet assure the customer that he was making the right choice? Could it praise him for being a thoughtful husband? Could it make sure that he was getting the best possible deal?

The internet would not have an in-the-flesh lady named Cake to lure the man into buying bad diamond jewelry for his wife. The internet would not have Cake creepily flirt with the man by telling him he could tell his wife that other women want him. The internet would not bitch about presents it's not getting from its husband. The internet would just show us other things that customers who looked at this thing also looked at and comments by people who bought it telling us what they actually think of it. The internet wouldn't burden us with a "flimsy paper" receipt and lean in and murmur about it.

Oh, but these deplorable people need a mall for human contact. A "hovering" man needs a real-life woman massaging him with sexual innuendo if he is to accomplish what for him is the formidable task of buying a Christmas present for his wife.

That's the weird thing about words. They don't stay right where you put them. Other people come and move them around.

It's like those refrigerator poetry magnets.

I'm laughing at Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed News Media Editor, for his dumb plaint: "I Helped Popularize The Term 'Fake News' And Now I Cringe Every Time I Hear It/After a yearlong battle for its meaning and ownership, 'fake news' is now both an empty slogan and a deeply troubling warning sign."

Cringe on, little man. Or step up and join the world of adults — people who share words with others.

"Later came grad school, Sweet ’n Low, Datsun 240Zs, Tab, thong underpants and free love — it was clear: Life had been lovingly fashioned around us."

"Us" = Baby Boomers.

The line is from "Why Are the Baby Boomers in Such a Bad Mood?" by Marilyn Suzanne Miller (in the NYT).

If you begin with delusions like thong underpants are lovingly fashioned around you, you're on the path to disappointment.

Wikipedia provides this history of the thong:

The thong, like its probable predecessor the loincloth, is believed to be one of the earliest forms of human clothing and is also thought to have been worn mostly or exclusively by men. It is thought the thong was probably originally developed to protect, support, or hide the male genitals. The loincloth is probably the earliest form of clothing used by mankind, having originated in the warmer climates of sub-Saharan Africa where clothing was first worn nearly 75,000 years ago. Many tribal peoples, such as some of the Khoisan people of southern Africa, wore thongs for many centuries. Much like the Japanese fundoshi, these early garments were made with the male genitalia in mind.

It was so not lovingly fashioned around a female Baby Boomer.

A descendant of the loincloth and thong is the jockstrap, created by Chicago sporting goods company Sharp & Smith in 1874. The first historical reference to the thong since then is in 1939 when New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia ordered nude dancers to dress more appropriately...

Prior to its entrance into mainstream fashion, g-strings were primarily worn by exotic dancers. In the modern Western world, g-strings are more commonly marketed towards females but are worn by both sexes. By the late 1980s, the style (for females) had made its way into most of the Western world; thong and g-string underwear became more and more popular through the 1990s due to shows like Baywatch, where numerous females were recorded wearing thong swimsuits.

Maybe you thought that TV show was about you.

In the 1990s, the thong began to gain wider acceptance and popularity in the United States as underwear.... In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some people wore thongs with low-cut hipsters and deliberately exposed them over the top of their trousers....

Now that the history of the thong has reached the 1990s, the name Monica Lewinsky belongs in this Wikipedia article, but it's not there (yet). Oh, wait. There's a separate Wikipedia article, "Social impact of thong underwear." Excerpt:

Monica Lewinsky gave evidence during the Lewinsky scandal that she was flirting with Bill Clinton in Leon Panetta's office, and that she lifted her jacket to show him the straps of her thong underwear above her pants. Some of the news media in America used thong underwear as a metonym for smut in the Starr Report...

Metonym? Let's switch to the "Explainer" at Slate, "The Thong Show" (1998):

There has been much discussion of Monica Lewinsky's thong underwear. Thong underwear has even been adopted as a metonymic for the smuttiness included in Starr's report. (In fact, underwear isn't the raciest bit in the report--"oral-anal contact" is more shocking by far--it's just the raciest bit TV producers will air.)...

Lewinsky's... Aug. 11 testimony says "no one else in the room could have seen [the thong]..." In other words, showing the thong isn't a prudish way of saying that Lewinsky stripped for the president. Showing the thong was a lewd trick Lewinsky knew, something just slightly more salacious than a suggestive wink.

Lewinsky — who was not a Baby Boomer — might have thought the thong was lovingly fashioned around her. And Bill Clinton — definitely a Baby Boomer — would probably agree.

It's all narcissism. We Baby Boomers have soaked in it for a long long time, and if the illusion that it's all lovingly fashioned around us is wearing thin and we have no backup resources, we deserve to be sad.

When, oh, when will the world grasp the import of my self-re(v/f)erential selfie humor?

Says the sadface of James Franco, posing in a shirt patterned with sadfaces of James Franco.

Micro-sads of the morning.

1. I edited a 53+ minute video down to 1 minute, 45 seconds of out-of-context lines, and made a teasing post out of it — "what more do you even need to know?" — and reading the comments, I don't think anyone bothered to watch.

2. Meade has photographed people's dogs and posted the pictures on his Flickr page, and he encounters those people again, and they need to ask again how to find that Flickr page. They can't remember, even though they are pictures of their own dog.

What little twinges of gratification did the internet fail to deliver to you? Become aware of and experience the absurdity of these micro-sads.