If only I were Theodore Dreiser, in the good old sensational days of American journalism, I could get a job in the Heart of America.

If only I were Theodore Dreiser and this were the good old days, I might get a job with the The Kansas City Star, I speculated shortly after my arrival in the Heart of America.

Wow! That would be great! Maybe then I could meet rich and famous people and even get to hobnob with them. For example, I could sniff out the mayor, jump onto her lap, hang on to her every word, and lead the cheering with my tail, wagging it in my every report and column!

Of course I was just dreaming again. The Kansas City Star workplace columnist warned me that it would be impossible to get a job at the newspaper, even if I were one of the best writers in the country. I inquired further with a Star editor, and with a big boss too, but I received dead silence in return. Wherefore I reverted to my old motto: If you can't join 'em, fight 'em. I mean write circles around them, pausing to tear one of their pieces to shreds every now and then.

Excuse me, I must confess that I also submitted work to Kansas City's irrelevant counter-cultural free sidewalk rag, The Pitch, foolishly thinking that, at the very least, I could give away one of my brilliant essays or articles for nothing but vanity - as if I don't have enough of that already! But I was dreaming again. First of all, I was told that my casual interviews with ordinary local people were invented, at least they seemed affected, and that I should focus on what is really happening in Kansas City - several of my anonymous sources guffawed when I told them that our conversations had apparently been fabricated or affected. Therefore I sent along my article on H&R Block, and then my piece on Mystical Downtown Revitalization - no dice - I learned that those pieces are bitter cups of tea, or "screeds", meaning interminably boring. Well, then, I opined, my work is not yet worthy of the Star if it is not good enough for The Pitch, so I shall write circles around them both.

Such is Equality of Opportunity in the Heart of America - the competition for the box seats is awfully stiff, and they are very expensive. Things have changed since the good old newspaper days when Theodore Dreiser sat by the door to the alley every day and finally hounded an editor into giving him a job. Of course my dream of hanging with the rich and famous comes true for a few journalists who manage to play the box, get box credentials and climb into the box, providing they do not mind getting under the censoring thumb and refrain from thinking outside of the box while in it. He might eventually become something besides a good fact-lister and superficial thinker, rehash the facts and write an objective, fact-ridden book about some event or person. As for Dreiser, as a reporter he wasn't too keen on facts: editors had to fill in the blanks.

Now I must say something more about Dreiser since anything more said about me would be even worse than a screed. Young Dreiser wanted very badly to be a newspaper reporter because he thought being one would give him a chance to hobnob with the rich and famous and lead a fine and glorious life. He could barely write a complete sentence, but he got together sixty-five dollars, went to Chicago, and by sheer persistence managed to get a temporary job paying $15 a week, with two weeks guaranteed, from the editor of the Globe - the black sheep of Chicago journalism. From Chicago he went on to St. Louis, where he landed a job with the Globe-Democrat writing a new gossip column called, 'Heard in the Corridors' - he noted what he overheard in hotel hallways and lobbies frequented by wealthy and famous people. A terrible disaster - a chance train accident - turned Dreiser into a real reporter. His realistic reporting of the gruesome details from the scene including quotes from those present won him a big tip from the editor and a reporting job. The style he and many other reporters resorted to was called 'realism' in Europe, 'naturalism' in America. Realism came into vogue and was soon derogated as 'sensationalism.'

Sensationalism's sometimes lurid descriptions, ample quotations, its more conversational and emotional approach to news is not very much appreciated nowadays by newspapers and journals. A more descriptive, "objective" style, consisting of a pyramidal list of "facts" ranked in their presumed order of importance, is preferred, never mind that the ranking might be arbitrary and that the most important facts left out. Interpretation and judgment is supposedly left to the reader. Hopefully he will be competent to the task without very many good examples before him. He may believe that he already knows the "truth" because he has read the "facts." Opinion articles are written in the same unemotional style, and gullible readers may believe that the opinions are as true as the facts.

Newspapers served as training camps for young aspiring novelists in those days. Balzac and Zola were the models for literary naturalism, but Dickens was Dreiser's favorite author. Of course literary naturalism presumed that humans are not motivated by high-sounding ethics but by unadulterated selfishness, somewhat restrained by nature and social pressures; man is a conditioned animal; civilization is a sham; supernatural codes have no authority: only the struggle for existence has any merit.

Dreiser left the newspapers business and joined the ranks of struggling novelists. His Sister Carrie, a novel based on the adventures of his sister, Emma, sold only 500 copies. He blamed Doubleday for the failure and accused the publisher of puritanism, claiming that the book was suppressed because it was about a woman who escaped retribution for her sins and became a rich and famous actress. Dreiser abandoned writing and became a laborer. He moved to New York because he believed it was the "ultimate city", the greatest of cities where one can find in the struggle for survival, wonderful, fulfilling beauty, as well as degrading, destructive ugliness. And there his brother Paul rescued him from the ugly lower depths of depression and desperate poverty, placing him in an upper-class sanatorium - he recovered and took up writing again.

Dreiser struggled with his ambivalent feelings about wealth and his disappointment with his own financial reverses during the course of writing his well-known trilogy: The Financier, The Titan, The Stoic. The trilogy follows the rise and fall of one unscrupulous character christened Mr. Cowperwood, modeled after Chicago traction magnate Charles T. Yerkes, whose unapologetic dishonesty, in comparison to the hollow sentiments of hypocritical businessmen, attracted Dreiser. Like many others who suffer financial reverses and demoralizing poverty, Dreiser, and his robber-baron hero Cowperwood, turned to spiritualism in The Titan. Another work, The Bulwark, is spiritually inclined. Dreiser went on to explode the success myth in An American Tragedy. His work brought him some financial success until the Depression; his work thereafter was unremarkable yet brought him more wealth and secured his reputation.

I am no longer very keen on Dreiser's writing although I passed many enjoyable hours with Sister Carrie. What he learned from his personal experience interests me more than his books. I have come to agree with some of his mature views. For instance, he concluded that the lives of the rich and famous are no more interesting than the lives of the miserable poor people he had lived among at the crummy hotel in Brooklyn. Not that he wanted to be poor and miserable and work at some stultifying job.

I myself have worked as a laborer while living in a fleabag hotel - in Manhattan - and it was not only demoralizing but expensive. I would rather skip that part, and even walk into the Kaw with my hat on, like that man did whose Market Square gambling joint was closed down by the reformers. I do not blame journalists for wanting to wag their tails and suck up to rich and famous people as if they really were their betters. After all, I had that dream just recently.