The height of depravity, cruelty and arrogance

The only positive from The Tennessean's cruel Christmastime layoffs is that I have been hearing from former colleagues, all good pros who gave their best to the place now so corrupted.

And I also heard from one 56-year-old colleague who got laid off with a phone call at home. She has been on disability after contracting Lyme disease and buried under mounting medical bills because she had to go out of the health insurance network to get properly diagnosed. She also has a son in college.

Yet none of that mattered to Publisher Ellen Leifeld and Editor Mark Silverman. Nor did it matter that they laid off a single mom with two young children or a man with acute diabetes. These poor folks had to pay for that pair's ineptitude. And they'll be getting bonuses in the new year like those going to Wall Street fatcats whose firms had to be bailed out with billions in your tax dollars.

Yet the greatest insult from this massacre of morality was the editorial that some calloused bastard decided to run in The Tennessean the day after the layoffs. It was headlined "Blue, Blue, Blue Christmas".

The Tennessean outrageously wrote, below the endorsing names of Leifeld, Silverman, Dwight Lewis, Knight Stivender and even John Seigenthaler, chairman emeritus:

We are in the midst of what the holiday song calls "the most wonderful time of the year."

But that is not the case for many Americans, and perhaps fewer will feel the holiday cheer in 2008 than they have in a number of years.

Anxiety, loneliness, even depression mark the holiday season for millions who either are hard-pressed to meet demands of family and tradition or feel isolated because of financial or other difficulties.

This year, the financial-hardship part of the equation is elevated, and it has health and social-science experts concerned. Individuals who have lost their jobs already are stressed, and the feeling that they still must celebrate Christmas and exchange gifts ups the anxiety, they say.

What a bunch of bullshit!

Meanwhile, The Tennessean was destroying 92 lives and families in its newsroom with layoffs. And it was deserting its responsibility under the First Amendment for the first of many dollars to keep making more than a 21 percent profit annually.

The editorial concluded:

Ultimately, having friends or family who care about you and who will seek medical help are the best medicine. They can make the struggling individual see that their well-being is the best gift they can give to anyone.

Easy for those Tennessean bigwigs to say. They didn't lose their jobs, even though each has had a big role in screwing the newspaper up. As for the best gift, for the people whose lives and careers these bastards decimated three weeks before Christmas, the fulfillment of the following truth will do just fine:

What goes around comes around.