I speak imperiously. Of course it is not for me to declare that Germany NEEDS County Highway, or that a country like that COULD USE a tabloid like that. But with journals of all sorts pretty much vanished (was the last one I ever saw the one I bought in Paraguay in 2023?), I hope no one thinks I am picking on any one place or culture.

How I arrived at the foregoing idea is, if not wholly logical, certainly linear. I was reading in County Highway, the American one, a long article about Delray Beach, Florida, which the writer claimed is this country’s rehab capital. As someone who (1) once bicycled uneventfully through the town and (2) once did a lot of chemistry elsewhere, I was intrigued to learn, forty years after both, of a certain synthetic cathinone. Then – hopping through Wikipedia, which itself is a kind of news source – I read of “designer drugs,” then of a synthetic cannabinoid. And then the article about the chemist who invented that one. There, on the subject of what has proven to be a way-too-popular intoxicant, he is quoted as follows: “I figured once it got started in Germany it was going to spread.” I followed the hyperlink to the interview, and I see the chemist didn’t name any other country. And so I’m wondering what’s so obvious about Germany. What’s the story?

And should a periodical like County Highway be telling it?

Maybe not. Or, not yet. County Highway is meant to make you aggressively interested in fresh journalism. So far, though, it has only made me aggressively uninterested in young journalists. There is a lot of paranoia in its articles. This one about Delray Beach posits offhandedly, speaking of things which are supposed to be obvious but to me aren’t, that drug companies engineered an opioid epidemic. No; it’s dumb people making dumb choices who make such things happen. Well, County Highway may someday start covering those folks a little more critically. If you call your publication America’s Only Newspaper, the field is wide open. Competition is nil – even if there is across the ocean Germany’s Only Newspaper.

Well, I don’t know. I have hardly any experience of the place. But, further on the subject of drug abuse being accelerated by who knows what or whom, I recalled specifically about synthetic opioids a book titled Dreamland. This was written by an American who had once worked as a reporter in Mexico. I did not know, because I failed to check when I posted my own examination of it, that it had already been reviewed on Ricochet. Much more capably and thoroughly than I had done. I had been mainly interested in the Mexico angle, and then only because I find that country so alien. I am more than ever convinced that Mexicans are not “extreme Texans.” They’re something else.

But whatever they are, wouldn’t it be stimulating (I was going to say “nice” but that is probably not the right word) if Mexico itself covered itself, candidly. If you are lucky enough to live next to the U.S.A., how can you so underachieve? How can you not notice that you have underachieved? Or maybe the real truth about Mexico is that it has in fact maxed out: what you see is all it’s got. Since newspapers have disappeared, and online stuff is mostly subliterate, I cannot assert that this or indeed any country is really lacking in self-awareness. It may have plenty. There may be Mexicans who are devastatingly frank and funny and wise on the subject of themselves. But how to find them?

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Now that I think about it, I have seen overseas just one example of intentionally witty information-transmission, in newspaper format though hardly filled with news: Brazil’s version of The Daily Planet. But that was decades ago. It is possible that I learned through it things I would not have learned otherwise, although maybe the staff was making up that item about Pelé and Xuxa being an item. I’d repeat the wisecrack – it alliterates in English as well as in Portuguese – but nah; it was pretty coarse.

It is perhaps inappropriate to expect wit from journalism. Anywhere. But I expect it anyway! County Highway is so damned earnest. And so is the Austin Chronicle. It is encouraging to see some vigor on the other side of the spectrum, The Babylon Bee supplanting The Onion. But there is unoccupied space in between.