One of the surest ways to my heart remains to bring me back newspapers whenever you go somewhere. Even though I'm over them, as it were, I think they remain the best way to take a core sample of a place and a time. Over the weekend, my wife's trip home from a conference took her through Cleveland, and she brought me the Sunday Plain Dealer. What I learned is that, boy, I'm glad I don't live in Cleveland.
The front page featured three stories. Two-thirds of that was one big story -- a detailed look at LeBron James' possible future by sports writer Brian Windhorst. It was a detailed accounting of what his options are, who the likely suitors will be, and what the timeline looks like from now until free agency begins in July.
The undercurrent of the story is so thick and heavy it needn't be spelled out. One of the fascinating things about this moment in time is the amount of anger and unease the nation is feeling, and the ways it is coming out all cock-eyed. We saw this with the Conan O'Brien debacle earlier this year. Somehow, a celebrity who -- let's face it -- kinda sucked at his particular job and got a multimillion dollar kiss-off became a parable for how ordinary, loyal, hard-working employees felt pushed around by inept, greedy, and selfish companies. The human urge to create narrative and sense out of high-profile situations often overwhelms the details. And the LeBron situation appears to be part of all that. The story is really about a small-market town, down on its luck, with a homegrown superstar who they can't keep away from the brighter lights. It is about the decline of an entire region, and seems to present all the swirling forces that are shaping American life today in an easy to understand story.
What is interesting abotu Sunday's Plain Dealer is how the rest of the front page communicates this malaise as well. Another story is what appears to be a long column by Steven Litt about the Cleveland Museum of Art's search for a new director (its third in ten years) as it precedes with an important building and redesign program. That's what the story is actually about, but it is instead framed by looking at how a much smaller, more nimble Sun Belt museum is building a bright future for itself (the headline: "N.C. art museum gains from strong leadership"). "Seeing it is enough to shake assumptions about whether Sun Belt cities outside California and Texas will always remain in the cultureal shadow of northern cities such as Cleveland," Litt writes. The article explains how museums like Cleveland's benefit from deep stores of cultural heritage and large endowments. About their museum has size and a breadth of collection that smaller, newer museums can't match. But in terms of their mission going forward, in contemporary art, in cultivating new donors and shaping their mission, these newer museums are doing much better.
One of the things that struck me is that the Cleveland Museum, which appears to have such a headstart, was only founded in 1913. It makes you wonder to what extent all that cultural capital is a brief, fleeting thing. If that old alignment that made what we now call "the Rust Belt" such a powerhouse of the American experience was just a blip of the Industrial Revolution, which is now over and done. And if that in turn means that the clock is running out, for good.
The third story on the front is more mundane, but just a part of the drumbeat of soul-sapping news. It is about the federal corruption investigation into a county commissioner, which sounds like it has been painfully dragging on for years toward some eventual, inexorable conclusion. "Even the public is growing weary of the demoralizing drip, drip of the corruption investigation, which flares up in the media each time somebody new is hauled into courty," the story reads.
Sales of Tums must be way up across northeast Ohio. And for the record, I don't think there is anyway LeBron is anywhere other than New York next season.
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