Stop the Presses. Please.

In yet another smoke signal heralding the end of civilization as we know it, Simon & Schuster -- yes, that's Simon & Schuster -- announced this week that they've committed to publish a hard-hitting contemporary American novel called A Shore Thing, described by that eminent publishing house as “the story of a woman looking for love amid big hair, dark tans and fights galore on the coast of New Jersey."


This hard-hitting, cat-fighting modern update of An American Tragedy will be written in its entirety -- one hundred percent, every word, even the really really  long ones -- by Nicole Polizzi, an extraordinarily ordinary young woman better known to people on the lower rungs of the Nielsen TV ratings as Snooki.


Using phrases reminiscent of Philip Roth, Snooki said, "I'm pumped to announce to my fans a project that I've been working on for some time. This book will have you falling in love at the shore. It's 'A Shore Thing!'"

While I have nothing against falling at love at the shore, I have no doubt that comment is just as authentically from Snooki's lips as the book will be.  Although "pumped" sounds about right.


If anyone needs another reason to stop bewailing the fate of so-called traditional publishing, surely this announcement will provide one.  Forget business plans, forget ineptitude, forget the fact that they don't know how to sell a book.  Arrest them for pandering.  This is pandering so blatant that it should be illegal.  Once upon a time, books were one of the things that divided those who can think in sentences from those who can't.  Reading books was widely accepted as the way to move from Group B to Group A.  Now, books are what you read when television gets too challenging.


Where's the international Communist conspiracy when you need it?  There must be SOME kind of Grand Unified Theory to explain the hydra-headed beast called the dumbing-down of the West.  Failed educational systems, the complete defeat of common sense in favor of political correctness, TV news so truncated it takes several stories to make up a single sound bite, politicians who will say literally anything and promise literally anything to get elected, and voters witless enough to vote for them.  And now Snooki.


I have a proposal.  Let's close all printing presses and all television networks Monday morning at 8 o'clock.  Let's put all the media execs on the street with some apples to sell, and let the screens go dark.  Let's allow Americans to entertain themselves for, say, six months.  Use some of the money not being spent for broadcast and publishing to keep libraries open 24 hours a day.  Subsidize the sale of books, getting prices down to what they should be, until all the current trash is sold out and people have to read, you know, books.  As opposed to subliterate, television-spawned drivel with a shelf life of 18 months -- 18 months, by the way, that it's crowding out something that might actually be worth reading.  


Impractical?  Okay.  I give up.  Oh, and if Snooki winds up being compared to, say, Edith Wharton, I'll apologize.