I usually find the A section of the Washington Post on the front seat of my car when I go to work in the morning. I made an agreement with certain night spirits that they would place the newspaper there if I made devotions to them. The paper wasn't there this morning, and I've contacted my spirit lawyer, but that's not my reason for writing this.

Without the newspaper, I felt unwell, so I asked my coworker if I could read the front page of The Baltimore Sun. He brings it in every day to do the puzzles and read the sports section. He handed me the A section, and it felt okay. It seemed like a real newspaper, felt like a real newspaper. I smelled it, and the smell was okay. I licked it, and it tasted fine. Comforted, I began reading, only to discover that I had been handed a cheap imitation of a newspaper, something like a Fischer Price stove set. It looked like it would work, but it didn't. Perhaps the CIA prepared it for me, as part of a plan to replace my office with a sophisticaed facimile while they searched the real one for terrorist suspects. I don't know. All I can say is that this newspaper had what looked to be articles about what, at first glance, looked to be significant news. Whenever I began reading them, however, they proved to be either minor stories about small-time issues in Maryland, or else badly written treatments of a random collection of world events. The former were almost unreadable, as they lacked coherence usually provided by background context, significant information about the actors involved, or an adequate and well-ordered description of the events being reported. The latter, the random collection of significant news, read like a summary of articles written for real newspapers, perhaps to be presented as a high school history class project. Sources were sparse, analysis was nonexistant, and the paragraphs might well have been the result of Microsoft Word's summary function.

I imagine that if I were to read this faux-newspaper every day, it wouldn't take too long for me to lose all memory of real news coverage. After a while, I would begin to lose my sense that anything important happens in the world; that my country's government is often accountable for major changes that affect real people; that this government has a two-party system fueled by debate between two sides of roughly equal strength; that things happenening in other countries aren't inexplicable and random events; that my own country's government studies these events and has a stake in them because the people of the country have a stake in them; that decisions of leaders in my government are often questionable and ought to be considered from many perspectives; that the changes in my own area are connected to the regional economy, which is part of the national economy, which is part of the world economy; that this sentence does not have to be indefinitely continued simply as an exercise in writing.

And indeed, the articles in this faux-newspaper seemed to be exactly that: exercises in writing. They give the impression that they exist only becasue the editor wanted his writers to generate a few articles about the events other newspapers were covering, in order to keep up the appearance that The Baltimore Sun has a staff devoted to activities other than publishing and revenue-generating.

What I can't figure out is why the CIA was able to replace every other aspect of my office perfectly, fumbling only on my newspaper. They're an information-gathering agency, aren't they? You'd think that they would excel at informing the public.