“Our cover this week is of course hyperbolic, but the issues surrounding end-of-life care are so uncomfortable that if our overstatement can prompt some conversations about this touchiest of subjects, then we will have done our job.” John Meacham, editor of Newsweek, America’s Favorite Pulp Magazine.
When you do three issues in a genre, you are officially in the genre. Newsweek has now officially slipped into the category once occupied by Argosy in its death throws: its sales strategy is in the peddling of manufactured sensation.
I was going to give them a pass, but then I actually read the issue. If you toss in a few nudie pictures, the thing could have rolled out of Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management. The treatment of its subject was that light and that misleading. They also get pulp bonus points for lending credence to the completely astroturfed “Deathers” issue. In fact, there was so very little covered in any sort of depth or with any sort of depth of thought in the entire issue, that I am starting to have some concerns about the magazine’s continued survival. Truthfully, if Newsweek and the Washington Post weren’t a part of Kaplan, they would have both dried up and died by now. Having gone pulp, it is unfortunate that Newsweek is still not very good at it.
And the half-hearted apology for doing what you are obviously doing with your covers and features scores you no points. Claiming to be hyperbolic as a public service is a new twist, however. The Enquirer might want to give that a try.
Of course the entire “Case For Killing Granny” is nonsense. It does work on the time-tested notion of exploiting a “fact” in the public eye and then twisting it completely beyond recognition. We last saw this with the White Slavery trend of the 1940s. Just as there was no real “White Slavery” epidemic in the 40s, there are no government “Death Panels” now, nor are they being proposed. As opposed to providing us evidence of “Death Panels”, Newsweek has resorted to the old pulp saw of recreating the justification for them, if they were proposed. We call this type of analysis ‘fiction’. Specifically it is a brand of speculative Big Lie Newsfiction, the type that spends three or four pages explaining what alien invaders might want on Earth, should they ever invade.
As opposed to a fuzzy photograph as its running off at the mouth point, Newsweek has an idiot statistic, specifically “Almost a third of the money spent on Medicare—about 66.8 billion a year—goes to chronically ill patients in the last two years of life.” And “Americans do spend an inordinate amount of money (30 percent of Medicare, for instance) on care in the last six months of life.” This and other statements are then meant to support the dire conclusion: “The need to spend less money on the elderly at the end of life is the elephant in the room.” Hence the whole whack grandma euthanasia bleating.
Before I go on: Is any of this true? No. Not even on the face of it. (Newsweek does sniff at the idea they are being ‘hyperbolic’ at least once.) The core fact is that you will rack up a massive spike in your medical expenses during the last two years of your life. That is a universal, whether you are old, young, thin, fat, chronically ill or fit. Both a twenty year old who face plants off his motorcycle and dies two days later and an elderly woman who dies after a long fight with liver cancer are going to have a two year spike in their medical expenditures. Regardless of age or previous health status--all causes of death being medical and all methods of preventing such costing money--it only makes sense that you start to double down in outlays right before you succumb. The expenses for treating either our cancer victim or our motorcyclist are going to be derived the same way. The majority of the expense for treating both comes from the fixed costs of treatment: maintaining a cancer care clinic, a trauma center, lead expenses of drug research and providing training and staffing to treat both. What either the cancer victim or the motorcyclists are actually consuming—drugs, time, bed space—costs very little. Unless we want to leave both on the side of the road or simply wish their problems didn’t happen, there is no cost savings in failing to treat either. Moreover, the concept that creating a rationing system would result in any cost savings is not only not proven but probably not true.
Newsweek has it entirely ass backward. (And pretty much knows that it does, too.) What we have exposed here is an anomaly in our accounting system. The elderly, chronically ill are charged the most for their services primarily because they have the greatest ability to pay. Their services are simply the most marked up. Certainly there are treatments created simply to meet this high profit market, but it does not follow that legitimate needs are in anyway scarce. What we have instead is an inflated economy. This is no proof for the cause of rationing. Or that hospice treatment—giving up—would result in any cost savings at all. All of this is defeatist, goofy and not at all supported by the evidence.
Similarly, the White Slave trade theme started as an adjunct to reporting on prostitution. Then as now, brothel owners trafficked in women from overseas. Many of the white women employed in brothels did not speak English, were here in the country illegally and quite a few of them were literally being held captive. As Newsweek has focused on the inflated costs of expenses directed at the elderly being a cause for rationing*, reports of the white slavery epidemic focused on the tactics used by brothel owners to keep their charges in captivity. Extrapolated out of whole cloth was the sub-theme of brothel owners roving the countryside in search of white women to abduct. Similarly Newsweek has taken its thimble of paint to construct the need for government mandated efficacy panels charged with the task of unplugging grannies. Simply because Granny’s care is inflated in price, does not make it scarce and does not mandate its rationing as a solution. Ditto the absence of a cause for rampaging kidnap pimps: the fact that white women fetched a higher price did not prompt more abductions, but rather more women volunteering into the trade. But to hell with the truth. (In both cases, the logic was undercut by the laws of economics.) We want to sell magazines.
Our next entrant into the resurgent Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults trend is Maxim. I finally did breach the mylar shield of last month’s issue of Maxim, featuring the utterly enticing Milla Jovovich.
How I have missed the entirety of Milla Jovovich’s existence heretofore is beyond me. Maybe it’s because I don’t watch TV or got to the movies or ever escape my confines during day-time? (I assure you I am every bit as attractive as that makes me sound.) At any rate, per the internet thingy, she’s quite accomplished at whatever it is she does besides pose semi-nude in magazines.
As for Maxim itself, it was an immediate transportation to 1958, complete with Ms. Jovovich’s poses. This very well could have rolled off of Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management line and fit right in. That there apparently is a very broad space in the market for a magazine which is slightly less smutty than Playboy says something, especially in a day and age dominated by DVDs full of harder stuff. With a little work, Maxim would be True magazine.
It even had an adventure story, of sorts. I don’t think we will ever see a return to the completely made up true tale of being eaten alive by crabs again, but there does seem to be a niche for slightly off the beaten trail reporting. Soldier of Fortune and High Times used to dabble in this and, in this issue, we see Maxim taking a stab. Our offering was a completely nonsensical piece on how David Caradine in all likelihood accidentally killed himself whacking off in a Bangkok hotel room.
It’s sort of a non-story, but it did have all of the pulp sleaze elements that one could ask for. It has a ‘mystery’**, a strange local, some sex, some fame. Good try. If they keep this up, they will be firmly pulp. The good kind. The kind Martin Goodman would have been proud of.
Speaking of Martin Goodman, he also got a mention in this issue of Maxim. He was highlighted quite prominently in Sean Collins’ feature on the Oral History of Marvel Comics. To the author’s credit, he just turned a mike on his sources and let them talk. Most of the best tid bits were spat out by Stan Lee and Joe Simon. Unlike Marvel’s official history (pictured post before last), this work was candid about how slapdash an affair Marvel really was through most of its history. It also didn’t flinch from drawing attention to problems in Marvel’s recent operations.
Per the article, Marvel was valued at close to a billion dollars. Given that Marvel sold for three times that amount just this month, it seems it might have been worth more than that specifically to Disney. In fact, Stan Lee’s last quotation of the piece is “I was always saying ‘We should be another Disney!’ And now we’re getting close.”
Ask and you shall receive, Stan.
Finally I would like to nominate one other magazine into the hall of the Real Nazi Sex UFO Man-Eater Cults, but in a good way. Mother Jones Magazine is now and has for some time been America’s Best True Crime magazine. Every time I shrug my shoulders over the fates of Newsweek and Time, I turn to Mother Jones for an example of a news magazine that truthfully does fulfill its niche: exposing hidden truths in depth. Although it does have a political agenda that I may not care for, it is far and away the best in breed. If only it had the funding that is wasted on Newsweek.
*Speaking of agendas I don’t care for, at least Mother Jones wears theirs on their sleeve. Newsweek, by contrast, just seems to be in need of Prozac. Newsweek has manifested an editorial policy that is not merely liberal, but defeatist. They seem to live in a universe wherein nothing is ever created and everything is destroyed. In the latest issue on killing granny they took several opportunities to push hospice care as an alternative for treating the elderly. When coupled with their previous stand against the use of toilet paper, quite a world view is starting to emerge. One wonders what is in the water over there at Kaplan?
**It wasn’t much of a mystery. Caradine’s two ex wives make it pretty clear that the guy was a sex freak. Sans any hoped for motive to the contrary, it appears that the 72 year old B Movie actor basically strangled himself while attempting to masturbate. That said, it is my hope that Maxim continues with the adventure reporting. Surely there are many strange things going on in exotic locales not involving septuagenarian stroke victims.
Our next update for HIL-GLE will be an expose on the End of The World.
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