I saw it on a newsstand leaving the drug store. I had to look and think twice to assure myself that yes, this was the publication; yes, this is what it was saying; and yes, it chose to do so.
Media sources change. Time has gone from being a center-right publication to decidedly liberal. National Geographic has doubled down on conservation and climate change issues, and never mind about broad sweeps of countries or cities that leave you feeling that every place on the globe is marvelous, when it isn't. Sports Illustrated has morphed into something of a 'happy news' publication, avoiding tough topics when it can. Golf magazine has increased its actual size, bigger than any other magazine I get, and moved from far less of a gateway to effective instruction to a review of courses surrounded by resorts that are meant for the very affluent, and equipment that can only be afforded by them.
All this is about more than a change in management. It's also about finding, or maybe re-finding, a reliable following and tailoring approaches to ensure consistent readership. So I get that. But when I saw that USA Today, usually reliably accurate, solidly conservative but never too much so and occasionally wandering left, had run this headline, I just shook my head.
To wit: Hybrid Babies. Hybrid, as in half-something and half-something else. In this case, half-human and half-animal.
Yes. Half-animal. Little infants with horns sticking out of their heads, or at least photographs purporting to demonstrate that. Top of the front page, no subtlety. This weekend's edition. Sitting right there, right on the newsstand.
Full reveal: I did not buy a copy. I let my imagination do the rest. Of course, it ran wild.
There are three ways such a thing could happen, if it can happen at all:
- A human mother to be impregnated by an animal;
- An animal mother impregnated by a human father; or
- In vitro, as a result, one figures, of an experiment or something. Or maybe a mistake posing as an experiment.
I once read about the former in a decidedly porno novel while in college, half a century ago; the owner of it and I had quite the chuckle. I recall the paramour was a German shepherd, who apparently seemed to be enjoying it, as was the young lady. There was no follow-up as to gestation.
And I have heard about the second. In fact it's featured in Toni Morrison's book Beloved, which I also read many years later (No, I don't think I have a fixation on this. Neither should you.). Those recipients were sheep as a replacement for loneliness, paralleling the farm fable--or, maybe, not a fable after all. Not all novelists imagine everything in their novel's contents.
But USA Today? When it first hit the stands, it was criticized as being too homogeneous, too encompassing, too national and too general. Remember its full-page summary of events taking place in every individual state? They were less-than-one-paragraph snippets of items of interest, as measured by whomever perused that state's other newspapers and wanted us to absorb them. The snippets printed weren't that weird.
But at least it tried. It touched every base. It was decidedly mainstream, the kind of thing that hotels often put out on their front counters so that people would have something to tuck under their arms at airports, mildly informative but certainly not offensive. After all, if you're in Des Moines, flying to Seattle, native of neither, the news of Des Moines isn't likely to catch your eye.
In my flyover, traveling days, I used to read it. At least I knew a little about a little, and one never knew when some tidbit of information could be utilized in a speech that demonstrated to people in a particular state that while there's no way you could know all the issues going on within it, at least you were trying, too.
Maybe that page is still there. But I'm not sure what USA Today has turned into now. It sure isn't mainstream. It looks like it has replaced, or wants to replace, The National Enquirer as the tabloid you either really don't want to miss, or really do.
Or, maybe, it sees enough of a public willing to believe damn near anything (the curtain of which has been torn off by ex-'s ramblings) to understand that there is an enormous supply of crazies, so why not dive right in? I looked it up: as of 2019, the Enquirer had 2.1 million devotees each week.
Which means: Either USA Today is trying to cut into the Enquirer's support base, or it believes that there are millions more starving to absorb such bizarre information, or nonsense posing as information, about which of course we have just had four years of being forced into, causing head-shaking angst.
It returned in that moment, and I'm trying to get it out of my head. It'll take a while. Horns? Must be a cow, or maybe a goat. Or maybe just baloney; photos can be doctored. Can't think of anything else. Don't want to.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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