Funeral for an Imaginary Friend/Love Flies Screeching

I know I heard the news a while back that the current, Aug. 27 print edition of Weekly World News would be the last.

But it really hit home when I flipped to the back page of Time magazine and caught columnist Joel Stein's "Requiem for Bat Boy."

It all went downhill from the headline -- Stein actually had the gall to dance on the grave of our dear neck-gnawing scamp before his coffin had even been closed. Stein quotes a Weekly World News contributing writer saying the reading public is now "too jaded for it," and chimes in with how "I can't help but thinking that's a good thing."

Let Latin America have its new, goat-bloodsucking chupacabra monster. I want to live in a place where information is so pervasive that people are too smart for tall tales and Photoshop tricks, where our fake headlines are metajokes in the Onion or skewering irony on The Daily Show.

First off, I hope I never reach the advanced stage of paranoid, self-conscious intellectualism necessary to use the word "metajokes." Second, remind me again what percentage of the population still thinks we found WMD in Iraq, then tell me more about how people aren't buying the News anymore because they've stepped up to something more cerebrally rigorous and are no longer moved by irrational fear. And come on, don't be a chupacabra hater, that's just mean.

But there's more:

It's actually a sign of progress for a society to go from inventing gods and monsters to seeking catharsis in the real life of Paris Hilton. ... If we have to sacrifice Bat Boy on the altar of knowledge, then he's a small offering.

Stein then ends his piece with a dud one-liner (oh, excuse me, a wearily ironic, thoroughly modern "metajoke") -- "Besides, he's totally freaky looking." -- instead of enumerating what exactly is so great about a world without Bat Boy if his cave's new tenant is Lindsay Lohan.

Sure, she and Britney and Paris are "real," whatever that means. But what does it say about our supposedly advancing society if we're no longer compelled to conjure up fictional perversions of humanity with which to entertain ourselves, because real ones have skulked out from under their rocks (making markedly unladylike exits sans undergarments) to fill the void?

And at least Bat Boy, the sexually confused Sasquatch and the laundry-eating, Oprah-worshiping, politician-canoodling aliens made us laugh, instead of eliciting whatever that feeling is we experience when we gawk at these new, eerily relatable characters fatally hemorrhaging their allotment of our basic human dignity.

For another perspective on the News' passing -- and some of the shocking, true story behind the paper itself -- check out Peter Carlson's Washington Post article:

In their quest to make fake news seem real, WWN's writers found an unexpected ally -- reality. The real news reported in real newspapers in those days frequently rivaled anything that WWN writers could concoct. For instance:

Americans elected a president who'd once co-starred in a movie with a chimpanzee. Rich women hired "surrogate mothers" to bear their children. The Soviet Union suddenly dropped dead. Scientists invented a magic pill that gave men erections. California cultists committed suicide, believing that the Hale-Bopp comet would carry them to heaven.

The list goes on -- the point is, if Stein gets to conflate what's basically business fallout into grand ruminations on our culture, I want to play, too: The demise of Weekly World News is a profound symbolic loss for the unabashedly easily amused.

Weekly World News was plausible enough to be engaging, but not so plausible as to be ultimately depressing. Jon Stewart and The Onion are both funny, to be sure, but they're a different kind of funny, a heavier kind of funny.

Weekly World News wasn't so encumbered by its context. It dispensed with the tragic irony, the world-weary angst, the trendy (met)asshattery and just let itself be silly.

Consequently, in public, enjoyment of the News was always a guilty pleasure, indulged only in shifty-eyed passing in the checkout lines. When caught, educated, thoughtful front-page-readers discretely but sternly hedged that we were laughing only because, you know, those other people, down below us, find this entertaining. Or because this stuff gets produced and consumed at all. Or because we made some retroactive inside joke with ourselves so we can still feel like we're laughing from above when we find ourselves carried away.

But to a girl who spent her youth reading ghost stories and writing about cross-dressing marmosets, prairie dog-walrus hybrids and laudanum-addicted Pomeranians, Weekly World News was pretty much the best thing ever. After I moved past my phase of wanting to be an archaeologist during the week and a cake decorator on weekends, my default "dream job" became to write for it.

Weekly World News was never like those friends who always have something funny to say, but ultimately disappoint when you realize they lift nine out of ten laugh lines from someplace else. At the very least, it could be counted on for something unique.

I still respect Weekly World News, simply because it dared to be original. Whether it soared or whether it crashed and burned, it did so with its own, delightfully twisted material.

And damn it, I still want to work there.