The motto of Irregular Times is, and has been for some time, All the News Unfit for Print. The motto emphasizes our irregularity, and casts us as a kind of alternative shadow universe to the world of the New York Times. We’re small, they’re big. They’re the paper of record, and we’re off on the periphery. They define the media establishment, and we sit outside that establishment, sniping in. Maureen Dowd writes for the New York Times, but Maureen Dowd has no idea even who we are.
Or so it seemed until this Saturday morning, when we read what Maureen Dowd had written in her column. The subject was the growing scandal of the attempt to snatch Google’s gigantic database of user information by President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales. Google did the right thing and stiffarmed the President of the United States, keeping Bush from spying on your online activity.
Dowd had this to say about the revelations:
“If you want to know why the Grim Peeper is willing to turn this country into a police state to take his version of a democracy to other countries, just do a Google search under “antiterrorism,” “government snooping,” “overreaching” and “fruitcake.”
Well, okay, we were game. We did the Google search just as Maureen Dowd suggested, and you can see here what the search result was.
Really there only was one search result, in the entire Google database, that brought together those search terms: Our own very own collection of articles on the subject of Homeland Insecurity.
Did Maureen Dowd really mean to direct her readers to Irregular Times? Well, that’s one interpretation. Another is that Dowd was trying to make a creative rhetorical statement, and just happened to direct New York Times readers to find our site. I don’t know Maureen Dowd myself, so I haven’t had the opportunity to ask her.
It is both flattering and frightening that there are searches like this that only our little band of writers here at Irregular Times satisfies. I had assumed that there would be many more articles out there about the overreaching antiterrorism conducted by fruitcakes in the Bush Administration that has led to government snooping into the most private aspects of Americans’ lives.
I became very frustrated when I tried to understand if the New York Times was making an intentional nod to the little people of Irregular Times, or if it was all just some accident of chance. You see, Maureen Dowd’s column was not easily available online this Saturday, although it was one of the prominent op-ed pieces of the day. The New York Times now requires its readers to pay money to access much of its content online. They call it Times Select.
I was curious, and so I paid for a trial Times Select membership, but still I couldn’t see the column. It turns out that the system decided my membership should begin two weeks from now. Am I to suppose that nothing until then that is fit to print will be found in the New York Times?
Rest assured, irregular readers, that we here at Irregular Times fully intend to keep our own little database of articles available to you free of charge in perpetuity. As long as there is a perpetual War on Terror, there needs to be a perpetual Irregular Times. And gosh, if the government does change its mind and decides to end the War On Terror sometimes after all, we will stick around anyway. After all, you never know when the next dictator who dares to call himself President of the United States of America will come along, and start up a whole new War On Terror, just to keep the customers satisfied.
