Casey Limps Again

Gunfire---the ritualized, celebratory kind---erupted all across southwest Houston early Sunday morning as tens, if not dozens, of the Houston Chronicle’s remaining English-language subscribers unsheathed their newspapers and beheld the news bannered in the above-the-fold “reefer” box: “Rick Casey Rides Again.”

It wasn’t too long, however, before a low collective grumble could be heard metastasizing across the concrete-covered coastal prairie, from inside the Loop to far beyond the Beltway, as the same newspaper subscribers concluded that the writer of the front-page blurb was being wickedly, if not maliciously, ironic.

After a five months-plus “sabbatical,” Casey “rode” back into town (on what sort of conveyance the paper did not reveal, although we now believe that it may have been Casey whom we spotted chugging up the roadway the other day) with a timely column on prospects for the 2009 mayoral race (a subject, by the way, that the paper’s local political columnist could and probably will address with a sharper and better-reported take, at the appropriate time and not as a mere space filler).

If Casey charged his employer for more than the hour (hour and 15 minutes tops) it took to “report” and “write” this blowsy comeback column---or dictate it to a flunky while driving between San Antonio and Houston---then advertisers should immediately demand that the Hearst Corp. slash its ad rates, because that operation obviously has way too much disposable income in its purse. The discerning reader too may have noticed that Casey apparently did not devote any of his down time to learning how to craft a memorable sentence, paragraph, etc.

Oh well. We thnk it was Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, a full century prior to the advent of the blog, who observed: “It’s all asswipe in the end.”