Helping the Cause in the Penny Press!

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, I let the subscriptions lapse on most of the periodicals I’d been reading up to that point. This wasn’t an easy decision, since I’d been subscribing to and attentively reading those dozen-or-so magazines and newspapers for decades – no longer reading them left what felt like a distinct void in my lunch hour reading time. I missed the excellent book coverage that such magazines reliably provided, missed seeing the work of some friends and colleagues, favorite reviewers particularly of the latest nonfiction. But I decided that November to spare myself even the brief remedy of simply skipping all the political coverage in the front pages and going straight to the “back of the book” to get my review-reading – a brief remedy that would nevertheless have been painful, summarily discarding over half of every issue: I could practically hear the voice of Me Sainted Ma saying, “Y’er not made o’ money, y’know.”

And even given my firewall, some of those dozen-or-so remained unavoidable, sometimes justifiably so. Perhaps The New Republic would manage to get a nice long ruminative piece out of Sam Sacks; perhaps friends would tell me about a terrific author-profile in Harper’s; several times, I was alerted to “can’t miss” pieces in The New Yorker.

The New Yorker was, in fact, by far the toughest of those dozen-or-so to let go, although they were also in theory the most self-evident case of necessity. I knew they would find the Trump gang irresistible, and I don’t even much fault them – it’s their remit, after all, in addition to showcasing great writing, to reflect American society-at-large, and nobody does it better. I’ve been reading The New Yorker for a very, very long time. I had an entire file of clipped articles. New Yorker cartoons were my there’s-one-for-every-situation shorthand long before emojis came along. New Yorker covers have been the sentimental GPS of my adult life in all its moods and seasons. A new era of not-reading this particular magazine seemed unbelievable (some cases, of course, actually were unbelievable; budding autocracy or no budding autocracy, life is not possible without the TLS or National Geographic)(and an honorable exception can be allowed for Vanity Fair, whose editor has been warning the public about this public-auction Pinochet for thirty years). And yet, it had to be.

Issues still come to my attention; the break has not been clinical. I just recently read the July 24 issue, for instance, and it was full of reminders of why I stuck with the magazine for so long. There were some wonderful cartoons; there was an interesting short story; there was the always-dependable Anthony Lane doing his Kael-goes-slumming shtick with the new popcorn movie “War for the Planet of the Apes.”

And there was a “can’t miss” standout piece, the kind of New Yorker piece that always surprises you first because it’s in The New Yorker at all and then continues to surprise by the sheer gold it finds in an apparently prospectless topic. This time around it was Kelefa Sanneh’s long profile of the great country singer George Strait. Sanneh’s piece betrayed not one ounce of the knee-jerk condescension you might think would sell it to the typically-imagined New Yorker audience – instead, it was smart and passionate throughout, managing at every turn to make fascinating reading about a man who’s spent his entire career cautiously avoiding being fascinating:

A George Strait concert is a masterclass in the art of restraint. “He just stands there,” an executive once marvelled, “and people go fucking crazy.” Strait leans away from the high notes, sways gently with the up-tempo songs, and says just enough to remind fans that they are not, in fact, listening to his records; all night, he strums an acoustic guitar that no one can hear, maybe not even him.

But this issue also sported a picture-perfect example of why I don’t read and try not even to see magazines like this anymore (I subscribed to Architectural Digest and Condé Nast Traveler and Birds & Blooms instead, and I happily went back to Science Fiction & Fantasy, Analog, and the mighty Asimov’s – my mailbox isn’t quite as crowded as it used to be, but at least its inhabitants get along with each other, and with me) … and it was literally a picture: the noxious front cover. It’s by Barry Blitt and it’s called “Grounded,” and it shows a stern Donald Trump kicking his son-in-law Jared Kushner down the stairs of the freshly-landed Air Force One while dragging his oldest son Donald Junior behind him by one tugged ear. It’s a revolting image, not because it’s poorly drawn or politically provocative but because it strives by implication to domesticate the horrifying. Here is a dour Papa Trump who wants to be concentrating on serious policy-making and international diplomacy but instead is forced to deal with the bumbling ineptitude of his little boys. Here is a picture asking us to laugh not at Papa Trump but right alongside him, as we sympathize – as indeed how could we not? – with a beleaguered parent who just wants to get things done.

Never mind that Jared Kushner is 36 years old and had a long career of fraud and failure in two different fields before he came to the White House and added deceit, misrepresentation, and treason to his résumé. And never mind that Donald Junior is 39 and lost whatever lingering shreds of childhood he might still have possessed when he lined up endangered African animals in his rifle scope, pulled the trigger, and laughed over the corpses. And never mind that Papa Trump is more bungling and juvenile than either of them even when they were actual children. And never mind that at every point in the 16 years of his presidency so far when he might have concentrated on getting things done, he has instead voluntarily turned all of his attention to petty fights, personal insults, and stretches of free-association babble. Blitt’s cover is, in other words, a whopping big lie, premised on half a dozen whopping big lies, and designed to sell a whopping big lie to anybody who looks at it. It’s designed to soften into comedy what is deadly serious.

And it’s of course also a reminder: this break has to be clean. If I can be blackened into a grim mood by the mere sight of a cover, it’s pretty clear I can’t indulge in dipping-in occasionally. And in the meantime, at least now I’ve got a fantastic roster of George Strait songs playing in my head.