Jake Rudnitsky
Alright, so we’ve changed editors, and the new one spent half a page on a rant about how he plans to spruce up the Post. Fine.
At times Greg’s letter was incoherent, at times funny, but the gist of it was that the Post was going to stop being so damn serious.
In principle, I couldn’t agree more. It is bad enough when large, well-funded papers think they have risen above humor.
But if a backwoods paper like ours tried to mimic the misplaced, no-jokes attitude of the big boys Р well, thatХs just stupid. It’s like an over-painted Ukrainian farmer’s daughter dressed to the nines in her patent polyester pants and tight Titanic T. She thinks she’s hot, but everyone laughs at her anyway.
Alas, agreeing in principle — as anyone who has been in Ukraine for more than a day knows — is far from agreeing completely with his message.
Let’s take a look at his vision for the culture section, which, mind you, he didn’t mention to any of us, from the section editor to the grunt journalists. We will soon expand our culture section to include satire, cartoons, reader columns and Fun (yes, that would be with a capital “F”). I’m all for the satire idea, but everything else is tantamount to creating a handy pull-out section for, in Greg’s own words, hamster beds.
First, when was the last time anyone has read a mildly entertaining comic? That genre reached its pinnacle with Dick Tracy in the 1930s and has been in constant decline ever since. Think of our options: Garfield, who should have hemorrhaged years ago? How about Gary Trudeau’s pseudo-leftist, sixties sell-out, apologist Doonsbury?
In our business section, we already rerun the same Dilbert strip every week with new pictures and words, but the same recycled punch line. How much more can a reader take?
Moving on to the idea of reader columns: You are readers for a reason. We are trained (well, at least acclimated) to what we do.
Hell, some of us might have even studied journalism. Readers, on the other hand, may have a lot to say, but no idea how to say it. Reader write-in columns are doing well if the author’s immediate family members can make it to the end. Certainly, the wider community has no interest in them.
This lame-ass movement toward interactive media, which has swept the U.S. and which Greg wants to import into Kyiv’s sublimely insensitive media must be resisted.
Say no to opinion polls, say no to feel-good articles and, please, please, say no to The Last Word-esque columns.
But I have saved the brunt of my wrath for Greg’s last suggestion. What the #$*% (with a capital “F”) does he mean by Fun?
Have we returned to our kindergarten Sesame Street days? Maybe each week will be co-sponsored by a Latin and a Cyrillic letter?
Or maybe Fun has a more sinister ring. Fun with a capital “F” sounds like some sort of Soviet state-sponsored gymnastics tournament for factory workers. They all go and have Fun, because they know they’ll be rewarded with a bottle of vodka by a government eager to prove the Fysical Fitness of its workers.
So, before Greg starts enforcing Fun as Kyiv Post policy, maybe he should ask us what we here in the Day and Night section think.
And then hopefully he’ll stick to editing, the readers to reading, and weХll go about our business of telling y’all where it’s at in Kyiv.
Greg’s note: “Fun” (to be distinguished from “fun.”) is defined as the idiot’s illusional utopia.
For the idiot, Fun is beyond both entertaining and funny Р itХs ecstasy. Fun is not a level of emotion the sane man can achieve Р at least without good drugs. Yet perfectly sane Kyiv Post readers will be able to achieve that elusive plateau, drug-free, when we introduce our expanded Day and Night section. Consider yourselves lucky.
