Realignment, continued (indefinitely)

The world being what it is - always in flux and constantly shifting in the winds of economic necessity - it is time to revisit the realignment of college sports, the congressional districts of Central Swing State, the map of Europe, and most volatile of all, the publishing industry. Common sense occasionally plays a role in this process, but that depends entirely on whose common sense you are considering. I propose the following alignments based on physical and cultural geography, historical alliances and rivalries, and my personal bias as a sexagenarian with letters after my name, which means you have to listen to my opinions.

First and foremost, the Big Ten needs to expand further east to include Syracuse and Pittsburgh and further west to include Kansas and Oklahoma. The Southeastern Conference, you know, the NFL subsidiary with colleges attached, can have Missouri, Texas A&M, whatever. The Atlantic Coast Conference, which at one time was comprised of universities in close proximity to the Atlantic coast, should look at a map and consider adding Rutgers and Connecticut. The remnants of the Big 12, including Texas, Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Baylor, and Texas Tech, might want to return to its Southwest Conference roots by incorporating New Mexico, Colorado State, Utah, Brigham Young, and UNLV. If the various commissioners and/or university presidents would like me to join the conference calls in which these arrangements are made, I would be happy to fit them into my schedule.

Those agreements will be child's play compared to getting a couple dozen Ohio legislators to agree on a map of the state's reduced number of congressional districts. I suggest that they think the unthinkable, and simply look at the de facto demographics of the state county-by-county, and draw the new lines to balance district populations. Although it will take all the fun out of the ruling party's celebratory gerrymandering, redrawing lines to create 17 districts from the existing 18 should not be rocket science, and these state legislators are NOT rocket scientists. If they can wrap their parochial podunk minds around groups of contiguous counties forming a district, I think the white, rural counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with, and the multi-ethnic urban counties would elect a member of Congress they can live with. This will happen when hell freezes over.


Across the pond, where tribes have fought for longer and made progress toward civilized coexistence, the EU should just excise the UK, which can form its own economic community - perhaps with Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, and - thinking outside the box just a bit - Russia. Britain has never been part of Europe anyway, and the Norman conquest didn't make it so. The European Union can then become a true continental entity by building around the core nation states of France, Germany, and Italy and the historical inner ring of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Spain, and Portugal. Given sufficient democratic and capitalist development, the EU will then extend eastward to include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and yes, Greece. That hole in the middle, of course, is Switzerland, which someday should take its place as the Eurozone's official banker and protector of the Euro.

The neighboring league across the Bosporus will eventually become a friendly, or at least non-hostile rival, a Southwest Asian Union (SWAU) that includes Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kurdistan, Iran, and Pakistan, with Israel as its Switzerland. We're talking long-term. Next door to the aforementioned Shekelzone will be the Rupeezone, based in India but also including Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. You can guess what rival league looms across the Himalayas: the Yuanzone, otherwise known as China, along with its regional trading partners Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Okay, so the socio-economic map of the world has been settled. Now comes the hard part, reorganizing the industry that collects, compiles, composes, and disseminates information to the aforementioned markets. Call it the knowledge business, if you will, or the content management business, or educational products and services, or some other five-dollar phrase that hasn't been coined yet. This is an economic entity in flux if there ever was one, and the only thinking that even addresses reality occurs outside a box that isn't made of paper. Printing on paper will continue, of course, but as a small appendage of the real publishing action, which is already occurring in pixels, not pages.