When I was just a little boy, back in the days when sex was dirty and the air was clean, I got caught smoking by my parents. They had hosted a party the night before, and I got up before them on the morning after.  I made a bee line straight for the "rec room" in the basement of our house in Tenafly, New Jersey.  My stepfather -- whom we all called Bill -- had built an addition onto our home so we could have a full sized living room.  Below it was the room where they held parties on occasion.

It wasn't all that big a room, but on one end was a beautiful bar, with shelves behind and below it that held glasses and bottles of "adult beverages."  Bill had built in a long and practical cushioned bench around three quarters of the room, so there was lots of seating.  The guests were all folks from the neighborhood.  It was typical of life in those days.  Everybody knew everybody.  Most of the men were veterans of World War Two.  The women were all stay at home mom's whose job it was to keep house, cook, clean, and pack lunch boxes for us kids to take to school.

My fiendish little mind compelled me to raid the ashtrays looking for long cigarette butts I could re-light and enjoy.  Bill caught me and, rather than punish me, offered to bring me something to smoke he bought in New York City where he worked at 630 Fifth Avenue, the building with an enormous statue of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders out in front.  What he gave me was a cigar a foot long, which I had to smoke in its entirety.  I tried to smoke it, got pretty sick, and didn't smoke again for many years.  It was then I learned the meaning of the old saying: "Be careful what you wish for."  How I loved that kind man.  How I miss him today.

It all seems so long ago to me now, and not just because more than half a century has passed.  What makes it so ancient in my mind is that we just don't live that way much anymore.  The men of Bill's generation mostly had one job that lasted for their entire career. They had gone to school under the G.I. Bill and, after what they had been through fighting the Nazis and the Japanese, wanted to be left alone and enjoy what they could of peace and quiet.

Their adult world was where I spent my childhood.  The morning paper was on our doorstep at five, which struck me as mysterious until I got a paper route at the age of twelve.  That's when I found out how the newspaper got there and how I earned enough money to go to the movies every Saturday and indulge myself with popcorn, soda pop, candy, and ice cream.

Mine was a quiet upbringing with my mom and stepfather, two sisters and a brother, my grandmother and grandfather, and various cats, dogs, and birds.  We lived together in blissful ignorance of all the news that now daily commands our attention.  Unknown was the mountain of misery we get nowadays from 24/7 news channels and the internet,  So we were never hammered with endless coverage of famines in Africa, monsoons in India, mudslides in China, Tsunamis in Sri Lanka, missiles in Pakistan, or countries like Iran and North Korea posing nuclear threats.

What we did have was the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union -- what Ronald Reagan would eventually call "The Evil Empire." Of course in those days, Reagan was just a B-level Hollywood actor who hosted the "General Electric Theater" on our tiny black and white TV sets.  Nobody in politics was getting shot at, there was no AIDS, "Made In USA" was on everything we bought, milk was milk and not palmitate and disodium phosphate, cars came from Detroit, and Elvis was the most controversial threat on the musical horizon.

All of that is gone now.  What has taken its place is a world full of troubles and endless yakker's to tell us about them.  It's interesting to me that in America we call our television information givers "news anchors" and "reporters," when they are really what they are called in England: "News Readers."  Because that's exactly what they do -- read the news off a teleprompter and pretend they had something to do with gathering and fact checking what they "report."

Never mind that the public doesn't seem to know or care about the difference between reporting and journalism.  Today's news is simply another division of a larger profit generating enterprise whose goal is money and not the unbiased delivery of facts. Everything is show biz now, and if you want to know how the world turns then just, as Sherlock Holmes advised Doctor Watson, "follow the money."

We are paying a huge price for all of this fakery, and the beauty from the purveyors' point of view is that nobody notices or seems to care.  What matters is not the truth or falsehood of what we see, hear, and read.  What counts is whether the media we ingest is in line with our opinions and beliefs and generates profit rather than enlightenment.  The old New York Times motto "All The News That's Fit To Print" has been replaced by "Whatever Our Audience Wants To Hear."  The likes of Walter Lippman, James "Scotty" Reston, and Walter Cronkite have been replaced by Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, and Keith Olberman.  Posturing has supplanted real reporting.  I doubt seriously that we have the Woodward's and Bernstein's today who would have the guts, integrity, and backing necessary to uncover the next Watergate scandal.  What has replaced that is a news-like substitute reeking of what Stephen Colbert calls "truthiness."

The aptly named English poet William Wordsworth once wrote: "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..."  And so it goes.  In Wordsworth's time -- from 1770 to 1850 -- poets, writers, and philosophers were concerned with the epic battle between Nature and Civilization.  All these years later, the world is still waging this struggle.  The problem is that nobody we can trust completely is telling us about it anymore.