Good morning.
I was just down at Dominick’s cafe, scanning the pages of The New York Times over coffee and eggs, looking at the astonishing mess that has been exposed in Illinois. Never underestimate the power of Uranus to bring about change, and we are also getting a window into Pluto in Capricorn.
A lot of people are wondering how these scandals happen. A governor tries to sell a senate seat? What was he thinking? (When a seat in the United States senate is vacated, that state’s governor makes an appointment to complete the term. He can appoint himself by resigning from office and having the new governor give him the job.) Scanning over one article after the next, about Gov. Blogowitz (as I call him, since his whole scene is great for bloggers and his name is impossible to spell), his bossy wife, Jesse Jackson Jr. and lots of other demented surprises, I was reminded of a moment shortly after taking over the campus magazine at SUNY Buffalo.
The prior editorial board had been thrown off campus after a scandal (I will skip the details) and I was hired at age 20 to reconstitute, rename and start the magazine over. I called it Generation, and it was a beautiful thing (still in print, by the way), built on a reasonable budget and my usual knack for attracting talented artists and writers. Shortly after beginning, the owner of the printing plant where we printed 10,000 copies of the magazine each week, HMS Printers of Lacawanna, called me and our photo editor, Henry Rappaport, into his office. He had a deal for us. We would overcharge for printing and he would give us some of the money back.