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.

Veja Magazine

I have read Veja, Brazil’s principal weekly magazine, religiously for the almost 15 years of my residence here in Brazil. I find the tone of the journalists horribly condescending, ideologically predictable and in coverage of foreign news, suspiciously similar to what came out in The Economist the week before. But I read on.

One becomes accustomed to format in things we read and perhaps this is the magazine’s great strength.

They always have an interview and this week is was with an Israeli mathematician and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for economics. He has a very long beard, which makes anybody look strange.

He is an expert on something called Game Theory, which apparently is a good base from which to conduct negotiation. He uses the example of Mutually Assured Destruction to portray how peace was kept between the US and USSR during the cold war, and Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich to show how placating or trying to hard to assuage your adversary can be extremely dangerous.

All good stuff, until he talks about how Israel has been too weak with the Palestinians, citing the settlement pullout from the Gaza Strip as proof of a pattern of craven concessions to the Arabs. There is a tendency among many, though by no means all, Israelis to ignore the fact that 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the creation of Israel. This delegitimized his argument slightly.

The ‘Panorama Page’ features a picture of the carnage wrought by a recent suicide bomb in a market in Pakistan that went off just when mothers were picking up their kids from school. Most of the victims, therefore, were women and children. Yet the non-existent outcry, Veja disdainfully declared, from those who decry the FMI, World Bank and other pillars of global capitalism, was significant for its absence. Pakistan seems like a complete basket case.

A few statistics are interwoven to articles, of interest this time was the fact that Brazil’s carbon emissions increased 25% between 1990 and 2005; 15% of the Brazilian population is Evangelical and the economy is running a 7.6 billion real deficit. The governor of Paraná State also declared that the recent cases of breast cancer among men have been caused by all these gay parades.

An article on the crack epidemic, exemplified by a nice middle class boy who strangled his girlfriend under the influence, points out that 16,000 psychiatric beds have been removed from hospitals in the past few years. The ‘generous’ health insurance companies, maintained by those few who can afford them, agree to pay for 15 days of counseling for drug addicts and no more, hardly sufficient time for chronic cases. Whoever invented crack is in the same league as hackers, destroying society for kicks.

A disheartening article on the principals of public schools in Brazil, 80% of who are women, stated that while 98% don’t think it’s their fault that their students perform so horrendously, 64% judge themselves unprepared for their responsibilities. Contradictions are many in this country and galling when the middle class pays 37% of its income to the government for universal health and education that is so bad they have to use the private sector.

The international feature story was about Venezuela. This is like asking a victim of crime to say something positive about their attacker. Chavez is the devil incarnate for Veja, his Bolivaran revolution close to as dangerous as the Ebola virus. Endless evils are cited, including those attesting to plummeting industrial and agricultural production. Not to defend Chavez, a pretty rancid guy, but if Venezuela was so great before, why in this country full of oil, land and a small population were most people poor? And why is it different when the president of Colombia, Alvoro Uribe, amends his country’s constitution to perpetuate his rule, as opposed to Chavez and his other leftist clones in Latin America?

Despite its obvious bias, Veja is not without a sense of humor. In the section entitled People, devoted mostly to celebrities, it reported on the rapper Diddy’s latest song on Brazil. It goes something like this, translated by the author:

Booties, booties, booties.
First class booties, round booties, everywhere
It’s a Tsunami of booties.

And remember, Diddy went out with Jenifer Lopez so knows a thing or two about “booties.’

Salvador, Bahia, 03/11/09