Poor George Will. Poor Jane Bryant Quinn. Poor Robert J. Samuelson.

What do these three fine writers have in common? They all write for Newsweek magazine. Why do they deserve our sympathy? They all write for Newsweek magazine.

For 33 years, with a few breaks here and there, I have read Newsweek. My parents subscribed through my high school years, and since that distant date I have either read the magazine in libraries or have received it as a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. If you stacked up all the Newsweeks I have read over this past quarter century, they wouldn’t reach to the moon, but they would surely reach to the ceiling of my room. I suppose, therefore, that I am qualified to say a word about the current state of this magazine.

But I havent quite decided what that word might be. Stinky? Crummy? Sad? Pathetic? Sophomoric? The bottom of a compost heap? A waste of good wood?

All those words together sum up what I have felt about Newsweek for the last 10 years. It was probably a mistake to bottle up my dislike of this rag for so long; all my hostility has reached a sort of peak with the latest issue and has nowhere to go but into this review (This is a book column, but in this case I’m following the lead of the United States Postal Service, which two weeks ago officially changed “Book Rate” to “Media Rate”).

This issue of Jan. 22, introduces a new low for a magazine which in recent years has crawled lower than shoe leather. Let’s look first at the cover story. Here are seven pages of color photographs of Bush’s cabinet. The full-page photos of Cohn Powell and Dick Cheney in particular look like men’s clothing ads from the old Sears and Roebuck catalog.

The article itself contains enough baloney to open a delicatessen. There is a lengthy discussion of John Ashcroft. Would Ashcroft blur the line between the church and state? Newsweek solemnly asks. Golly gee, he is a (gulp) Christian, after all. And what about that comment he once made describing Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as patriots? Newsweek takes a dim view of this opinion, giving us the idea that Ashcroft is insensitive in the matter of race relations (Never mind that Lee and Jackson didn’t own slaves, or that Jackson was teaching black children to read and write before the War. Never mind, I suppose, the sheer stupidity of such a comment).

Next comes an article on the difference between rural and urban voters as reflected in the recent unpleasantness. Newsweek dumbbells make a mistake here by reproducing the map that must gaff many urban Democrats, that infamous map which shows Bush winning about 80 percent of the territory of the United States. (Newsweek makes such mistakes frequently; in an issue on health care last year, they printed a comparison that showed AIDS patients receiving more federal funding than cancer, heart, and respiratory patients combined).

Newsweek then visits Pennsylvania to compare urban Scranton to rural Towanda. In the picture of Towanda -- which is near the home of one of my grandparents, now deceased -- a farmer stands by his barn in the snow with a rifle under his arm. In the picture of nearby Scranton, we are shown black and white middle class people packing up food for the poor (One of them, a plump little nun in civvies, sighs: “I just dont think compassion and conservatism mix.”) The message is clear: rural people bad, city people good.

We move along to the farewell article on Bill Clinton, where he is compared to Professor Harold Hill of The Music Man. Most of us, Newsweek blithely tells us, liked Bill Clinton’ way of striking up the band. Bill Clinton, Newsweek tells us, found the key to our deeper selves. Is there really anyone out there who would want Bill Clinton -- or George Bush, for that matter -- claiming a key to our deeper selves?

What follows next are several slim articles on genetics, the Big Bang, the California energy crisis compared to the better conditions in Texas (who was governor there for the last few years? Newsweek has apparently forgotten).

News from overseas: Zilch. Nada. Nary a thing. It’s nice to know that the rest of the world doesn’t matter to us at the moment (Well, there was a short article speculating on the identity of the next pope; this is Newsweek’s way of wishing the present pope a short life).

News about religion: Nada. Zilch.

News about business: You got it.

Book reviews: Don’t be silly.

Where Newsweek does excel is in its coverage of trashy televison and other forms of entertainment. We can’t have a book review, but we can read a two page spread on “Survivor 2” (People who watch this show, with its bogus survival theme and its very real message of cruelty and treachery, are ordinary run-of-the-mill idiots; people who read about it as well as watch it are leading damn sad lives.) We read of John Adams and his “El Nino,” an oratorio on Christ’s nativity; this composer’s comments are so inane that I am forced to quote him in order to give you the essence of his stupidity:

“..I suddenly find myself in interviews having to answer a lot of alarmingly personal questions about my beliefs. I’m not a practicing religious person, and I didn’t have any sound bytes ready. But now I’m interested in continuing to work with this mythology. In rereading the New Testament, I’ve been stunned by all the miracles there. They make anyone who’s even remotely logical profoundly uncomfortable.”

Confronted by such ignorance, one can only read on, gape-mouthed and profoundly uncomfortable.
The final page of this magazine features a “got milk?” ad with Elton John in a purple polka dotted suit. Having digested the magazine and then this picture, I have decided to swear off milk for the next week.
I suppose it’s time to swear off Newsweek as well. It is a magazine written for children by children. My only regret in writing this review is that I lack the skills -- the sharp wit of a Voltaire, the savageness of a Jonathan Swift -- to drive home how much this magazine appalls me.

Still, I hope you get the message.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars Bookstore in downtown Waynesville.)

 

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