Tell them I said something

So the paper isn't just a paper anymore, but rather a "24/7 news organization."

I could go on here about the future of the newspaper business and all of the opportunities and potentialities and pitfalls of newspapers online, but I won't because: A) that conversation sounds a bit too 2001 (not as in "A Space Odyssey" but as in five years ago); and because B) none of the people planning this transition to a "24/7 news organization" seem to be up to speed on those conversations from 2001, or 2002, or 2003 …

No lie, a couple of weeks ago I heard someone talking about how to make the paper's Web site "sticky." Remember that? It's like somebody got a hold of AOL's business plan from 1999, the section titled "Google: A Fad That Will Fade."

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the "temporary, for the next six months or so" overnight schedule* I've been working for the last two years is even less likely to be temporary. …

CARRIE FISHER: I don't think he's ever going to leave her.

MEG RYAN: Nobody thinks he's never going to leave her.

CARRIE FISHER: You're right, you're right. I know you're right.

The other upshot of this is that instead of listening to the iPod all night, I get to listen to the police scanner so as not to miss any of the Important Breaking Local News that might be occurring between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.

This is another dismaying step in the ongoing Action-News-ification of the newspaper trade, and I would say more about that here, about how the drafters of the Bill of Rights didn't enshrine the freedom of the press right there in Amendment No. 1 because they believed democracy was impossible without traffic-and-transit-on-the-twos-and-stay-tuned-for-weather, but that's not really my point here.

My point is that without the iPod, I sometimes get songs stuck in my head.

Sometimes songs I don't know the lyrics to. Like last night. "Pancho and Lefty," in point of fact.

Great song. I love that song. When I'm listening to that song, I can sing along with Townes, or Emmy Lou, or Merle and Willie, but without their help, and distracted by the dispatcher's chatter about complaints of a too-loud party, I start getting the verses mixed up. So first I tried reconstructing the song from the fragments I could remember, using the rhyme scheme as a kind of blueprint, just like that time my friend Kevin managed to get a Denny's full of strangers to reconstruct all of "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening." (Old lady in the corner booth frowns and closes her eyes hard and I swear you can hear her trying to dredge up memories from high school 40+ years ago. Then after about 20 seconds, like something out of Awakenings, she opens her eyes and shouts "He gives the harness bells a shake"** and busts out in this ear-to-ear grin.)

And but so that didn't work either, so eventually I Googled the lyrics (ta-da!) and, being able to sing the thing through in my head, was able to exorcise the tune.

But still there was a stretch of several hours there where, willingly or not, I found myself thinking about the lyrics of "Pancho and Lefty" and especially about the lyrics of the final verse, the only one I remembered well:

The poets tell how Pancho fell

Lefty's livin' in a cheap hotel

The desert's quiet and Cleveland's cold

So the story ends we're told

Pancho needs your prayers it's true,

But save a few for Lefty too

He just did what he had to do

Now he's growing old

This verse suggests something of the scandal of grace. The singer is willing to extend that grace to Lefty, to forgive him his greed, cowardice and betrayal. But what gives the singer the right to do this? It was Pancho who was betrayed, after all, so it seems that only Pancho should have the right to forgive that betrayal. By usurping that right, the singer seems to be claiming something like the divine prerogative.

This is, after all, what God is like. God is willing to forgive our enemies for wrongs they have committed against us, to extend mercy where we are unwilling or unable to grant it. That hardly seems fair. Not only that, but God is always going on about how we have to be willing to join in this prodigal grace, to join in the party for our prodigal brothers, to join the Ninevites in celebrating that the capital of Babylon itself can be spared. And if we insist on simple justice and responsibly refuse to join in this wanton confetti-showering of forgiveness, God has the nerve to suggest that we're cutting ourselves off from that very same grace.

Some people, of course, don't think that this is an accurate picture of what God is like. They believe that God is not as merciful as Townes Van Zandt. That seems to me to be a theologically precarious proposition, which is, I guess, my point here: If there is a God, then God must be, by definition, bigger and more merciful than Townes Van Zandt.

So, here endeth the blog post. It's hastily composed, rambling and tossed onto the Web without so much as a spell- or fact-check. I used to hear some of my colleagues at the paper sneering about blogs due to these very traits (real or imagined). Now, instead, I hear them insisting that our "24/7 news organization" must learn to emulate them.

But don't worry. Like they say about the weather in the Midwest, if you don't like the latest trends in "New Media newsmedia," just wait five minutes and it'll change.

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* Thus requiring the intake of Large Amounts of Caffeine, resulting sometimes in a restless inability to sleep, resulting, in turn, in overcaffeinated blogging, for which I apologize.

** Close enough. Oh, and if you're tracking my train of thought here, you will probably have already noticed that you can almost, but not quite, sing Frost's poem to the tune of "Pancho and Lefty."