The Economist Habit

The Economist Habit

Doctors always tell us that addiction is a bad thing, bringing damage to the mind and body. A few exceptions come to mind to counteract this argument, Keith Richards still being alive is perhaps the most obvious. But smoking, drinking, taking drugs or spending eight hours a day on internet porn sites will probably do your mental and physical health little benefit. Yet to be tackled appropriately by the mental health world, however, is addiction to a magazine.

Let me explain. Having been deluged with renewal notices about six months before my Economist subscription was to expire (most distasteful, by the way), my subscription lapsed. The pathetic bits of news available on the website for the non-paying customers is nothing more than a tease, like taking a drag of a cigarette or a sip of good red wine and then cut off. The fifteen dollars for the magazine charged at my Brazilian city’s airport further helped me to quit cold turkey.

I was Economist free and quite happy with that until travelling back top the States last month. There it was, beckoning me with its cover, poignant as usual, from the newsstand at the airport. I was hooked with alarming celerity.

I have been an Economist reader for 25 years, all of my adult life basically. What is it that has captivated and induced me to spend literally thousands of pounds over the years purchasing it? Here, me, a struggling writer, feeding the monster.

For starters, it’s got the best obituaries. Being an ecological sort, I like that animals also receive esteemed attention at the end of the issue. A fish and a parrot have been thus honored in recent issues. The parrot was extraordinary because it knew 100 different words or something, limiting communication with this animal obviously but it’s a start. But you learn about the lives of brave and slightly insane British women explorers, or geishas, or failed Presidents, scoundrels and saints, people you’ve heard of, many you haven’t.

You read about places you don’t elsewhere. Coverage of places where misery is never very far away, like Haiti, Bangladesh, Chechnya or Moldova is widely available. But political instability in the Marshall Islands, presidential elections in Togo, deforestation in Suriname, women’s rights in Papua New Guinea, you’ll only hear about it in the Economist.

The Economist likes to use arcane vocabulary which sends all of us intellectual wannabies rushing to our dictionaries so that we can pull these words out at cocktail parties and use them with people who are a lot more successful than us. But abuse by others in this rather unctuous display of erudition is scolded as crass in the Economist, as in the word proleptic being used twice in a book, an unpardonable pretention.

The Economist might, for example, describe as an anabiosis England’s football fortunes under Cappello, or call any scholarship that counteracts the magazine’s philosophy of reverence for markets a case of sciolism which renders worthless the scholar’s lucubration. The five hour perorations favored by leftist Latin autocrats or their steatopygous counterparts in Africa are treated with the scorn they deserve.

There are times when you try hard to fight your demons, and the demons help you with this. The ‘newspaper’s’ decision to support the Iraq invasion and pin accolades on George Bush left the bitter taste of a wretched hangover in one’s mouth. As the disaster unfolded, the ‘newspaper’ could not and still refuses to admit the recklessness of such an endeavor. For many years this undermined the magazines otherwise stellar fairness in coverage on the Middle East conflict. It was a great disappointment.

But for me, it was the letters that let me forgive The Economist. Some of those printed dissected, with surgical precision and scathing tone, every argument put forward to justify the war in Iraq. These soothed and appeased and ultimately won me back. And the fact that it’s not afraid to use the word fuck helped.

My family hates the Economist, no luck in making this a multi-generational subscription I’m afraid. My subscription has now been renewed and I’m awash in unread issues. This serves to completely isolate me from the world for hours at a time, like someone who has just smoked opium and wants nothing except to lie there and think.

I have just finished reading an interview with David Cameron and the problems entailed with the slump in champagne prices. My wife and son are calling me for lunch but I pretend not to hear since I have to read about Africa’s burgeoning population and whether that’s a problem. Food can wait.