Joseph's Dream Comes True...By The Scribe Of Greenwich
And we're not talking about the pathetically marginalized Joe Pisani here, the failed and fired former editor of the Local Rag, more generally known as Yellowwich Time. No, dear reader, your scribe is referencing the Biblical Joseph, eleventh son of the Patriarch Jacob, who was sold into slavery by his brothers as a last-minute alternative to killing him outright (good thing that caravan showed up when it did!). The reason for the brothers' actions was that they didn't like Joseph's dream, vividly recounted by him in front of them all, in which his brothers' sheaves of wheat bowed down and paid homage to Joseph's sheaf. What a sanctimonious whippersnapper young Joseph was! Clearly what his brothers were contemplating would have been deemed justifiable fratricide in any modern (or ancient) court of law.
But God had other plans. As you no doubt remember, Joseph then had many adventures in Egypt, including his non-affair with Potiphar's wife, which nonetheless earned him a long stretch in prison (sort of like the late unlamented prior management of Yellowwich Time, Potiphar tended to go with the woman's side of the story, regardless of where the truth lay). There, of course, Joseph carried on in the dream business, interpreting those of his fellow prisoners. Eventually, his talent came to Pharoah's attention, and the rest, as they say, is legend. Including, of course, Joseph's brothers bowing low and doing him homage when the wheat supply ran low back home in Canaan. So there. Who says that dreams don't come true?
The relevance of all this to 21st-century Greenwich is that the once proud and mighty Yellowwich Time has now knuckled under to the once-puny Greenwich Citizen. Just as in Pharoah's dream the lean cattle swallowed up the fat ones, and just as David bested Goliath, our longtime local weekly paper's boss, Michelle McAbee, has replaced the ousted John Dunster as publisher of Yellowwich Time and The Advocate. Go, Michelle! About time Hearst got around to cleaning house in our neck of the woods.
The downfall of the Local Rag can be traced to 1974, when it was sold to the family who owned The Advocate in Stamford. They then sold it to Times Mirror a few years later, who in turn sold it to Tribune, who in turn sold it to Hearst. Under the inauspicious leadership of Bill Rowe (who named his yacht the "Rowe Boat" - isn't he just too cute for words?), the paper lost any semblance of impartiality, and began to slant and/or ignore any news that suggested Greenwich might not be Disneyland East. From there, it was a short step down the slippery slope to the point where truth no longer mattered, and then it was that your scribe told Bill Rowe just to go ahead and change the color of the masthead from green to yellow to reflect the quality of the journalism he was publishing. Rowe choked on his martini, and has never spoken to your scribe since that day.
But it's a new day in Town, part of the "100 Days of Change" promised by Hearst. As loyal readers of this column know, April 1st is the drop-dead date for those who don't take the proffered buyout, and one certainly hopes that retread editor Bruce Hunter, widely known as an alter ego of Joe Pisani, will fade back into obscurity by then, if not before.
And thus, dear reader, we may all hope to see some semblance of truth-in-journalism restored to our fair Town this spring. True, the Local Rag will no doubt die, to be resurrected as a local edition of the Connecticut Post, and true, the Citizen will likely take over as the real estate newspaper of record here in Greenwich. But finally, the citizens of our fair community will no longer be able to joke about the Local Rag being published in the basement of Town Hall, since it will be printed in Bridgeport instead - as, in fact, it already is.
Your scribe wishes Ms. McAbee well in her new position. One hopes she will restore journalistic integrity to Greenwich, where it has long been absent, and perhaps find us some reporters who know how to use and spell the English language. If they can also show some independence of thought and action, that would be a bonus. Too long has the real news gone unreported in this Town. Perhaps, dear reader, that is about to change. Your scribe devoutly hopes so.
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