The Super Bowl and Super Print

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The Chiefs’ Super Bowl LIV victory set off a scramble for special print editions of the Kansas City Star celebrating the team’s professional football championship. Fans were after full-size, two-fisted newspaper pages that could be spread wide and admired, even mounted and framed for hanging.

Dan Thalmann, who owns and edits the Washington County News, is among those fans. Washington is roughly 165 miles west and north of Kansas City but long ago The Star ceased distribution in the area. Thalmann plans to log on to the Star’s web site, click through the digital maze and order the printed pages that tell the Chiefs’ historic accomplishment. In another simpler time he’d have saved the Monday paper.

Thalmann is savvy to the trends in online digital news, and his newspaper keeps with the challenge in print and on the Web. But the Star’s special print edition and the swarms of fans who want a copy (or several), got him thinking about the durability of news in ink and on paper.

“Nobody celebrates a (Super Bowl / national championship / state title / World Series) by showing off a printout of a Facebook post.!” Thalmann said.

Many people, he said, still love the authenticity of a print edition newspaper. “It is a keepsake, and we need to remind people about that.”

Print may be old school and out of step but a newspaper in hand is the real article, firm and immutable. It cannot be hacked, jimmied or altered. Nor can it be smothered down to the nether regions of cyberworld where yesterday’s data, no longer relevant, becomes history lost, incompatible with today’s ever-changing software.

For now, print on paper is Super News, form that lasts forever. The digital version is good only for the ten or 15-year life of its technology. What does that say for the next family album, the class reunion, or the next election?

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America’s embrace,

gone in a flash

In one city, a belch of intolerance. Then in another, and another, one place after the next, the welcome mat is gone.

The mayor of Springfield, Mass., announced late last month that he would no longer allow refugee resettlement there. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has blocked resettlement statewide, an abrupt reversal for a place that once had welcomed more refugees than any other in the last five years. And on Jan. 31, President Trump added six countries – Nigeria, Myanmar, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan and Tanzania  – to a list of nations that face bans or harsh travel restrictions.

During the long, dark Brownback era, the Kansas governor banned refugees from Syria.

Trump, by executive order, has granted local officials the power of veto over placement of refugees in their communities. This carries the administration’s anti-immigration agenda from the White House and Congress into city hall and the courthouse. The federal immigration cap for this year is 18,000, down from 30,000 last year. Four years ago, during President Obama’s last year in office, the cap was 110,000.

This policy was forewarned. A year ago this March, Trump issued a stark message for immigrants who sought refuge in the United States. “Our country is full,” he declared. Then he went on, hammering old pegs into that glorified picket fence gathering sand and heat along our southern border.

“No Vacancy” is a squeak straight from the bigots’ playbook, re-churned in the name of “immigration policy.” It’s a way to revive the old prejudice, a gussied-up Jim Crow.

The costume may be fresh but it holds the stench of old times: An un-white or an odd-looker shows up, wants gas for the car, or a seat in the restaurant or a room for the night, and up goes the sign: Out of Gas. Kitchen closed. No Vacancies. We’re fresh out, full up, closed. Put another way, we don’t serve your kind.

Our country is full, declares the president.

It was a mistake to think that we’d moved on long ago, after Kansas was born bleeding, after Ellis Island and the Statue’s flame, long after immigrants, including the ancestors of presidents, had set the footings of this republic.

We believed that today’s America was not yesterday’s confederacy. America was alive because we put the welcome mat out and the light on. People came here and were grateful and worked hard and led rich lives and America prospered because of it.

How silly to think it would last. Generations of sweat and struggle, of reconciliation and redemption, of tolerance just over the hill and embrace on the horizon? Gone in a flash. All it takes is a fresh “No Vacancy” sign, crisply ironed bed sheets for the Kluxers, and a president who loves hatred.

 

 

 

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