The Devil's Presence: a Novel by James Oliver Goldsborough

Author:James Oliver Goldsborough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Point Press
Published: 2023-02-28T16:46:48+00:00

Chapter 14

As long as he remembered, the Los Angeles Times had been downtown at First and Spring. It was there before he was born and still there when he went to work at the Times in 1990. The building was as much a downtown fixture, and nearly as magnificent, as Los Angeles City Hall, built across from it on the other side of First Street during the Depression and an iconic symbol of law and order since the days of Dragnet.

The Times was still there when he retired at age sixty-five, and he dropped in from time to time to see his former colleagues and have lunch with them in the upstairs restaurant. But the Chandlers, who’d owned the newspaper during most of the twentieth century, tired of the game, and before the century was over a new generation of cousins and in-laws decided they would rather clip coupons than work. They sold out to a Chicago real estate guy who stripped the paper and sold to a hedge fund, which stripped it some more before selling to a billionaire who moved it to El Segundo, a town near the airport known mainly for its oil refinery, the second one built in California by Standard Oil, thus the name. The newspaper was on life support. Already it was impossible to find newsstands in the city.

He’d never visited the El Segundo site, thought he never would, but after reading the paper one morning, he called Russ Posner, an old editorial page colleague, and asked if he could drop by. What caught his attention was a full page of letters to the editor from readers who said they intended to vote for Trump in November.

The wheels of his newspaper mind, idle for so long, had begun to grind.

Trump won barely a third of the 2016 vote in the nation-state of California and surely would do no better in 2020. He was not welcome anywhere on the West Coast, and certainly not in Los Angeles. The Times opposed him in 2016, and its editorial page and letters page had since been highly critical of his actions and policies. To see a full page of letters backing him was unique, editors stating that his supporters should have their day. Okay, they paid for subscriptions, too. The page carried ten letters. There would be more that weren’t published, and Andy wanted to see them all. Understanding how any Californian could support such a freak was the first step to doing something about it.

The El Segundo building bore no resemblance to the monument on First and Spring. Abutting a freeway, it was plain glass and frame panels with all the elegance of your local Best Western. Even Posner, once a jolly, engaging type, seemed thin and dreary, like he’d been down-sized along with the newspaper. The page of Trump letters, he told his visitor, had been prompted by an op-ed piece predicting that Trump, despite a national approval rating in the low forties, would win the November election with more votes than he received in 2016.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.