Kill, Allah, Kill!

How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy
There is no monopoly in common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too

--Sting, from the song Russians

(Pictured this week’s Newsweek and a 1960s era cover from True Detective)

Ok, this is a bit of a cheap shot. I could have gone with A-Bomb covers from Life or Time, too. Since I mostly talk about pulp magazines, I thought I would include a cover from that venerable old pulper cum sweat True Detective. Actually, I found this issue to be quite enjoyable. The Teaser Pulp route really seems to be working for Newsweek this week. So far, they haven't always been this compelling.

As long as Newsweek remains pulp, I am going to cover them. For those of you out of the loop, Newsweek's basic problem is that it doesn't have any money. It can't do actual news reporting, so now it has cast itself as an upscale Thriller Tabloid, somewhat similar to what Argosy and some of the Men's Adventure sweats* were once like. Every week without actual news, Newsweek will endeavor to dredge up a nightmare from the public psyche to exploit and then comment about. For a pulp formula, it's not bad. And they are getting better at it.

I am not here to slam Newsweek just to slam Newsweek. And let me make this quite clear: I love pulp magazines. I welcome Newsweek to pulpland. Now that I am over the shock that it is here.

Not that Newsweek thinks that it's actually pulp yet. The editor assures us that "I am not being hyperbolic or grandiose" in this issue's scare offerings. Yeah, sure. This time. Kiss the pulp, baby. It will make you feel good.

As far as pulp lay-out goes, they played it exactly right. The cover feature was worth about six pages and that's pretty much what it got. They broke it into two parts and they didn't inflict the theme on their other departments.

That said, the cover theme wasn't misleading, just wrong. The basic gist of this think piece for beer swillers is that we lived with a nuclear Russia for decades and were able to thwart it through containment and thus we should be able to counter a nuclear Iran via the same means. Supporting this was the additive premise that a military attack on Iran would just cause the Arab street to hate us more than they do (even Newsweek confesses that Arab street opinion either way is of little real meaning) and force the moderate Iranian leaders and people to back the regime. This is wrong on two obvious counts.

First, the Iranians are not the Russians. Our editor states "An interesting point, for if nuclear proliferation is, as Oppenheimer believed, an inevitability of the postwar** world, so is the spread of liberty." This buttresses the overall 'wait them out' argument--which is a very hopeful tact. But, as our editor also states, "The success of deterrence is dependent on rationality" which is where the whole containment theory seems to fall down.

Unlike the Russians Sting sang of, the Iranians do not love their children. At least their leaders do not. Young people of all types they merely dislike. It's women they have a flat out hate on for. The battle between conservative Islam and the west has really nothing to do with 'modernity' in any materialistic sense. Muslim mullahs love their Air Conditioning Units and Mercedes Benz and Tang just as much as us cowboys. What really ticks them is all these ideas that we have given their womenfolk. Women are to be bagged, silenced, impregnated and, if need be, have all sexual satisfaction surgically removed from them. And if you do not think their way then you are part of the problem and need to be dealt with. There is nothing else to understand and there is no real wiggle room here. And just to prove their conviction, they are willing to blow up their own children and any other innocent handy. Because they are real tough men of god with special knowledge unlike us western twits.***

There's no compare/contrast with Russians here, except for the one Newsweek takes great pains to construct. As with being a high member of the Russian Communist Elite back in the day, being a high Mullah in the Iranian regime is a sweet gig. Unlike your average Mullah anywhere else, you don't have to bug people about the building fund, or remind them that Holy Men have to eat too or in any way have to fund your operations. You get everything off the top. Moreover, you get the best of everything, provided that you are a good and senior yes man. The state sells oil and then you go buy as many toys as you want. You spend your day in the big room, thinking the big thoughts: meditating and pontificating about whatever slice of life your betters have given you boss-dom over. And when you are not doing that, you are playing video games (THE number one pasttime of Shiite Clerics, as it turns out), deflowering young folks, buying stuff, torturing people or giving 'advice'. It would be a damn shame to blow up such a sweet arrangement.

That the Iranian Mullahs wouldn't want to queer their deal by doing something stupid like starting the end of the world is Newsweek's entire argument. This would make sense if the Iranian regime were run by the Chicago Outfit crime family (or any crime family, really). But it isn't. History has shown that when you have nut jobs out front saying nutty things, as the Iranians do and the Nazis did, the people standing behind them are just as nutty but nowhere near as talented. Although there were plenty of folks in the Nazi regime who were quite rational and willing to live off the fat of the land, when the rubber hit the road it's the loons that were calling the shots.

And loons don't have a very good track record when it comes to thinking ahead. Loons decide to invade Russia when they already have France and Poland. Loons side with other loons, not for reasonable reasons, but rather out of knee-jerk loon solidarity. Loons rant against Jews. And loons won't stop picking fights until they are stomped flat. There is no reason to think that a loon who has developed an atomic weapon is going to stop there and admire the achievement. If history is any judge, it is more likely that the loon will look at it as a sign from God that they should up and nuke someone.****

A more reasonable and yet still fantastic fear cover story might have been "When Israel Bombs Iran Flat" which has considerably better odds than Iran getting the bomb. But that's not as flashy. And it might require more than six pages to explain.

The second place when the Newsweek theory falls down deals with the aftermath of a military attack against Iran. Pulled out of utterly thin air is the idea that the hardliners will become stronger as a result of their nuclear arsenal being turned into a pile of smoking GDP. History seems to say exactly otherwise. When you have only a tenuous grip on power to begin with, losing a fight to an outside party is usually your last act. Think the junta in Argentina after the Falklands, the Czar after WWI, the Ottoman Turks and most governments which have fallen, when you come to think of it. You blow up their erector set, you put them out of business. Not that I am in any way rooting an attack on.

(Hil-Gle.com is anti-death.)

The rest of Newsweek was pretty good pulp stuff, too. They even had an historical adventure story, ala the old Weider magazines. This one was on the Mad Mullah and featured illustrations that seem to have been culled from Appleton's Magazine. Page 46 has an example of the old montage composition form used by magazines at the turn of the century. Freed from the cover theme, Newsweek's commentators were able to speak whatever came to their minds, on a more or less hit or miss basis. Most of it was a miss. Business writer Robert Samuelson, normally a fave of mine, might as well have written "I am drawing a blank here" fifty-five times and included a doodle. Tech writer Daniel Lyons needs to get on crack. Only Sharon Begley used her perhaps temporary liberty to shine a light on the fact that the majority of psychologists ignore empirical scientific findings and essentially fly by the seats of their pants. That subject, in and of itself, could use a little more room in a scare pulp. Perhaps next issue.

Magazines have to change with the times or they will die. Sometimes this means ignoring your title, if need be. In a world dominated by instant 24/7 access to news, a magazine which sums up the News of a Week isn't going to have much of a place. So evolve or die is just the way it is going to go. Even True Detective abandoned its focus--and rather early on. As opposed to being about factual crime procedural, True Detective was a fiction magazine at one time featuring the likes of Dashiell Hammett. It wasn't so much that they were trying to be NOT TRUE, bur rather MORE INTERESTING. They found that they attracted better material when they just let the writers make things up. When pulps began contracting in the 1940s, True Detective dropped its word rates and began marketing itself primarily by sticking pretty girls on the cover. The cover that I am showing is one of their occasional dips into the scare pulp genre, which was popular at the time. If Newsweek's experiment in Scare Pulp works, expect to see a few other magazines start to follow suit. Top candidates for a scare pulp makeover include lesser People clones like the Star and US Weekly and the fading Lad Mags. Historically you might also see Hustler and Penthouse follow the trend, however their conversion to XXX may have made salvaging them as advertising vehicles impossible.

Not that advertising vehicle is exactly the best place to be in this downturn. Just this week saw Conde Nast play cash for clunkers with four such vehicles. Gone are Gourmet Magazine, Modern Bride, Elegant Bride and Cookie. Gourmet Magazine was started in 1940 as a generally targeted at the well to do thing and has of late glommed onto the 'foodie' trend. That Conde Nast was willing to can Gourmet, despite a reported 978,000 monthly circulation demonstrates how dependent this slick house is on advertising as its sole source of revenue. Cookie was just more 'foodie' like Gourmet, so it seems the high end housewares types are husbanding their promotion dollars for trade shows, their traditional venues, and are bypassing slick buys. A similar dynamic seems to be in play when it comes to the demise of niche leader Modern Bride and her even tonier clone Elegant Bride. There really are no national bridal shop chains to begin with, so the life of this genre of girl's slick was always somewhat suspect. The idea was to drive demand for designer created gowns down to the local shop level. Dress makers make dresses as a part of their normal course of business. They are much more likely to simply copy a name brand designer's works than they are to attempt an upsell. I think the designers have caught wind of this and Conde Nast is just trying to be first man out of the trend. Still, the idea behind Modern Bride is a good one. I suspect that of the four titles whacked, this is the one that has the best chance of a revival, perhaps by a more rational publisher.

* A 'sweat' is a pulp magazine which is printed on slick paper. Pulp is a time-tested and generally middlebrow state of mind, a sensation for the masses approach. Sweats started showing up when the disparity in price between pulp paper stock and slick stock began to evaporate.

**When is the use by date on 'Postwar' set to expire? Most people don't even know what it means anymore. WWII was indeed the EVENT of the last century, but so much has gone on since then that it hardly seems descriptive of anything. Nothing really is postwar, except the now over Cold War. We are now Post 9/11, Post Modern, Post USSR and most firmly post postwar.

***I am sure that the parties involved can INSERT HERE numerous bitch points against the west or specific western countries, starting with the Crusades and ending with the U.N.'s creation of Israel.

****Waiting the Middle Eastern world out is, in general, a good idea. Once electric cars become the norm in about four years, all of these OPEC types can go back to flipping camel chips at each other and no one will care. Half of them will become instantly insolvent and the other half won't have money for such fun hobbies as military jet fighters, terrorism and becoming self-sufficient in food, much less atom bombs.

Becoming agriculturally self-sufficient, by the way, is the biggest ticket item and a positive obsession for many a Gulf state. Although a laudable goal on the face of it, the prospects are absolutely daunting when you live in a sand box. Even flush and developed countries such as Japan haven't been able to pull this off. Someday the desalinization plants dotting the Arab world will stand like the pyramids; useless and mysterious, their functions a matter of speculation for future archeologists.