EXTRA is a Paraguayan tabloid, and doesn't that sound redundant? If you were a printing press at the dead center of South America, what else would you output? I am not complaining. I'm just thrilled that newspapers still exist. And I'm agreeably puzzled by their exact level of survival. What's it mean when there are only a few copies of any one paper available any given day? Why doesn't the number drop to, and stay at, zero?

In the issue I bought in the Asunción bus station, there was a story about the upcoming Paraguay-Peru soccer game, with focus on the home team's goalie, a guy born Brazilian but naturalized Paraguayan. This put me in mind of another Brazilian athlete I once read of, in another newspaper, in Manaus: a guy who lived in that city but decided that his training for iron-man triathlons could be better pursued in Paraguay. I still don't know why – heck, you can run on the beaches along the Amazon, and of course swim in it. True, there were hardly a hundred miles of paved road around Manaus, so the bicycling part may have been tougher. But there were lots of other places in Brazil to do all these things. I don't remember who he even was so I can't look him up. I don't know if he changed his citizenship. The important thing is that your and my idea of a land of opportunity may not be a Third-Worlder's. The latter may be quite practical, in ways neither you nor I might even think of.

Maybe Paraguay was simply a cheaper place to live at the time! But there can be sentimental reasons instead or in addition. The goalie probably moved, and took citizenship, because he had roots, however shallow, in the other country. His mother was born there, and his family lived right on the border. Which, like most borders in the Western Hemisphere (motto: "This ain't the Eastern Hemisphere"), is routinely wandered across. As with most countries in the Western Hemisphere, just doing that hardly amounts to an invasion: you're still a million miles from the nerve centers of both countries.

Well, if you decide to become Paraguayan, or just dip your big toe in the water, there is plenty of precedent. Apparently the country is used to folks poking around and possibly hanging around.

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And it has newspapers, barely, still! Other stories in EXTRA: the money-throwing vito, whose aftermath in any language I have without regret failed to follow, and the Prez giving three choices of photo to be hung on government office walls. The options being one of him alone, one with his lovely wife, and neither of the above. Such offices, said the article, are not required to display any such portraits. The reporter suggested mildly that who ordered what would definitely be noticed by the chief executive and/or his wife, who herself might have political aspirations.

Which brings me to something I only occasionally think about nowadays: why I even like, or ever liked, newspapers. I'm still not sure why. I suppose I've not quite forgotten the pleasure they have brought me. And not just in tropical countries – Turkey's were good. It could be their physicality. I like having them at the table. They are right-there companions. Pompous at times, but I still like their chattiness. And their collectiveness: they represent a cooperative enterprise. One with workers who must harmonize, as well as a boss those people have to please, fox, or a little of both. People somewhere who unite to produce, I mean push across a loading dock, and on a rigid schedule, a thing. There's a sociability to all this, one I may be mostly imagining or postulating, but one that online content fails to project at all.

Tags: Reading a newspaper is such a grownup thing to do, You just can't say that about staring at a screen

(9/21/23)