Still Walking After All These Years

On this cool spring morning, almost three weeks since I came home from Italy, with the fog of jet lag lifting, I carried Rocky, now into his 18^th year, off the couch and slipped on his lead.

Rocky stood trembling. I wondered if the time had come to go on Gumtree ―or where ever it is you go to find such things― and buy a pram for Rocky.

My God, you cry ― and not so long ago, I too would have cried out at this laughably sad and troubling trend of old men and women wheeling old dogs around in second hand prams—don’t do it!

Can I do it? At the twilight time of his life, put Rocky in a pram? And push him down the boardwalk on the beach, Rocky looking out at other dogs in prams.

We walk down the hallway towards the front door. Rocky walks slowly behind me, grey faced, head down, gentle, hard of hearing so that when he does hear something, he is startled and stops walking and stands still, the world a threatening place of unidentified sounds – and because his sight is fading — frightening shadows. 

We stand on the footpath beside our front fence. The rose bushes—old now too, some almost a quarter of a century old—are covered in roses. Red roses and pink and cream roses, some with tightly packed petals, some loose petaled and blowsy, gloriously lovely.

 I stand there by the roses with Rocky beside me and I realise that it has been many weeks since we have been to the St Kilda botanical gardens, and I wonder whether the garden beds of pink and orange and white poppies are in full bloom—last time I saw them they were seedlings— and I wonder whether the walk to the gardens is beyond Rocky, the gardens too far away, beyond his reach now.

 Our world together is shrinking, though  most mornings in our shrinking world—there are mornings when we don’t even make it to the beach—we are stopped by people who are taken by Rocky and who bend to pat him and who when they hear how old he is, shake their heads in disbelief and I think that for a moment at least, they think that perhaps old age can somehow be apprehended, defied, become a matter of choice.

We walk this morning, this cool though windless morning, down to Acland Street, past the coffee drinking schmoozers sitting outside the cafes and I think, as we walk by, that the world—beyond the shrinking world  we share most mornings, Rocky and I―is increasingly an alien, unknowable place.

I was a journalist for more than half a century. Most journalists know the world we describe is flawed and half- baked, full of half -truths because the whole truth is undiscoverable. The best journalists are honest about what they don’t know but some things are knowable, verifiable, factually based, recognisable by those for whom we do our reporting.  

 I do not recognise the world offered up to me in what is described as the mainstream media—though is anything now mainstream, anything at all? The degradation of language, the fake solemnity, the pretence of brave truth seeking, and a puffed-up self-importance― I know this is extreme but nowadays, extreme is all that gets heard.

At least the narcissists on social media, some of them rich beyond their wildest dreams—Elon Musk for instance―don’t pretend to be unappreciated and much maligned searchers for truth, the sort of pose of so many journalists. They are world shapers, the Elon Musks, worlds that somehow always compliment their interests.

In the past week, two storied  American newspapers announced, with less than two weeks to go, that they would not endorse a candidate for president— neither Trump nor Harris.

The LA Times and the Washington Post are both owned by billionaires who rescued these papers when each was on the verge of bankruptcy. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The tech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the LA Times. Both these men stopped their papers from endorsing Kamala Harris.

Both newspapers have a history of being left leaning liberal papers.  It is more than likely that both men made the same decision—to stop any editorial endorsement of Harris― for no other reason than to avoid, if possible, offending Trump.

Bezos released a statement today that said he had made the decision to ditch an election editorial because `what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.’

This is laughable. The evidence of too many surveys—and just anecdotally frankly—is that most people have come to believe that journalists are biased, agenda driven, careless with the facts, and activists for causes. They do not need to read an editorial in the Washington Post, for instance, to know that the Post is rooting for Harris.

They do not need editorials to know that the Post—or at least some of its journalists and commentators—are supporters of the current ideologies of the left—anti-colonialism, systemic racism, trans fundamentalism. The Post to me reads like a paper that has been captured by its staff.

And so the fuss over Bezos and his insistence that there be no presidential election editorial in the pages of his paper, is a side show, trivial compared to this question about the paper that he owns: Why have his editors allowed the journalists to decide for themselves the ethical principles that guide their work and that shape the world that they present to their subscribers.

We walk back towards home. Rocky is now almost running, straining at the leash, eager to move faster. He does not stop to drink from the can of water outside the café where the schmoozers sit in shallow conversation, and he knows where he’s going, Rocky does, and it does not involve a pram.

And so we have another morning of hope together, Rocky and I, rooted in this place where we live—these streets, this beach, these gardens, these rose bushes wild with roses.

 It is a shrinking world that we inhabit most mornings now, but it is a more complex and nuanced and life affirming world than the one offered me by media companies like the Washington Post.