Express: Leave Home Without It

The Express. I don’t ever read it or pick it up. In fact, the Express man at the Braddock Road station not only knows to not bother trying to give me one, he won’t even make eye contact with me, or say “Good morning.” This bothered me for some time, but then I realized, as I often do, I was being ridiculous.

(Besides, it probably has something to do with the fact that I kicked him in the balls awhile back. Ball-kicking generally ensures that empty morning formalities will cease).

I don’t read The Express because it is bunk, like 99% of American media. Full stop.

Strike one.

Strike two: Express exists to give fat bureaucrats something to read on their way from East Falls Church to Farragut West while they are taking up more than one Metro seat. Any nonfat non-bureaucrat should oppose it on these grounds alone. Can you imagine what would happen if a place were made entirely of fat bureaucrats?

(Answer: Washington, DC).

Strike the third: I read somewhere that The Washington Post created The Express because actual paper subscriptions to the News Proper were floundering. But, since I probably read this in some crap American news source, this is unlikely to be reliable information.

But if it is reliable information, this means The Express is founded upon a principle of desperateness, where flashy, ridiculous non-news is supposed to satisfy the Washington DC’ers desire to appear “informed” and “important,” and we are just dumb/complacent enough to go for it.

Due to recent low pressure systems, I grabbed an Express at the Ballston station to use as an umbrella for my walk home from Braddock Road (I ruined my Onion on the walk to Ballston, which is, of course, a perfect waste of a perfectly good newspaper).

I thumbed through The Express waiting for the train, and if, in my head, there were any tiny speck-lets of a doubt that I was being too hard on it, they were put to rest.

My favorite feature in yesterday’s Express was how scientists have cloned fluorescent pigs. No wonder Moral People get so mad about cloning—what purpose does glow-in-the-dark piglets serve? Would this rave-ready pig have allowed Christopher Reeve to walk, or a blind man to see again, albeit only under a black light? What the eff? I’m pretty sure God in His Infinite Wisdom made pigs non-glow-y for a reason…

(Coincidently, I have it on Good Authority that The Express also glows under a black light. I bet that’s how they are trying to increase readership with the younger, not-yet-fat bureaucrat crowd…)