Also, this gem: ““The business side is run like it’s Esquire in 1968, and the edit side is run like it’s Amnesty International in 1987,” said one editorial staff member. “That’s a very difficult environment for cross-pollination to take place in.””

Speaks very much to your points about the subservient stewardesses.

In all seriousness, though, it’s fascinating to me that MacArthur as a young kid was able to buy his way into intellectual relevance (or at least proximity to it.)

Rather than having much of an effect on our elitist institutions or on the fate of those deliberately excluded from the Harper’s market, I think this branding is more a liability for the actual Harper’s reader who buys into it without being able to afford it (good marketing) because it closes their door on a lot of other, equally worthwhile sources that may not have the same cachet.

Marketing is a really democratic process, to the degree that we have any Democracy at all anymore. Politicians set policy in Our Interest, and the philosophers of marketing define our metaphysical Needs. But the Politician needs our vote and the Marketing Wiz needs our willing, word-of-mouth promulgation. We are all willing participants in marketing, otherwise it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. The Ideal Harper’s Reader, the one who is the likely Shell Oil investor being wooed by those sponsored 10 page pseudo-academic, pseudo-conscientious “round-table” discussion inserts or Singapore Air ads with the demure subservient stewardess bowing with a moist hand towel, will not survive the Revolution. But many of the actual readers will. The irony is that from the perspective of the Business Department, the Singapore Air handjobs are the readers who count, but from the perspective of the Editorial Department, they are not the ones who give the magazine it’s clout. Poor people who can read do. Look at me and you. It’s kind of like the way mediocre rich kids get clout from going to ivy league universities even while those universities can only maintain their own reputation in the long term by admitting people, on scholarship, who are actually smart. What’s troubling is that anyone who sets a copy of Harper’s in their lap on an international flight becomes “a cool smart person who understands special things that the rabble don’t,” regardless of whether they are among the smart rabble in the Virgin economy class or the dumb smart-set in the first class sleeper suite of a Singapore Air 747.

Also liked this: “a style that the editor thinks is probably inaccessible to non-college educated people. The editor’s wrong, but I blame the exclusivity of the audience more on the magazine’s marketing, and the self-identification of it’s readers than on the editorial choices per se.” This gets into some major branding issues. (Branding is the major philosophical question of our time, which is really sad.) Without going all Marshall McLuhan 101, I’m not sure how you separate Harper’s editorial policies (i.e., choices about content and tone,) from its marketing, at least in the sense of identity it creates in its readers. For better or for worse, being a Harper’s reader Means Something, and what that means is an aggregate of how it represents itself in the marketplace, as well as the actual nature of its product. I don’t like how Harper’s represents what being a Harper’s Reader means, because that brand can be summarized as “a cool smart person who understands special things that the rabble don’t.”

Roger Hodge wrote an interesting essay that touches upon this very topic, called “The Noughts”: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/0082151. I was going to discuss this essay in the above screed, but was already worried about length (as well as losing coherency–I’m not necessarily as clear as I like to think I am.) Anyway, “The Noughts” is a long polemic against a lot of things, among them the government, social systems, and media. I found it pretty hard to parse–I think he’s trying to talk about how the Left and Right no longer share an objective reality that they can agree on, but there’s a lot of cream of mushroom soup in this particular casserole. The essay comes into more focus when he starts complaining about the media. To wit, Hodge complains that:

“Aggressive, ill-informed, irrational, and largely unsupported opinion predominates in our age of infectious autosatire (on millions of blogs, yes, but also on television and radio talk shows, in op-ed columns, news analysis, and “expert” commentary) and threatens, in a corollary of Gresham’s law, to drive out all other modes of articulate human expression.”

This raises the question of who, exactly, is qualified to express their opinions. Hodge goes on clarify who the holders of these unqualified opinions are:

“The television host convinced that Iran will somehow succeed in launching World War III, the Christian firm in his belief that Jesus wants him to be rich, the president who sees into the soul of a Russian dictator, the public-radio essayist who just loves ketchup, the vice president who argues that his dear leader possesses the inherent authority to suspend laws at will—all of these individuals, we say, have a right to their opinions, no matter how meaningless or delusional or divorced from traditional canons of American governance. Apparently it’s bad taste to point out that a prominent public figure is either lying or insane. And given the right publicity campaign, with a consistent message from the White House staffers and congressional aides who feed the news cycle, any narrative, no matter how fraudulent, can begin to command the front pages. (“Just look at the improved situation in Iraq!”)”

Some of these things are not like the others. If some NPR person wants to do a story about ketchup or Rexella Van Impe wants to rant about World War III and the Second Coming, I don’t see how that it equivalent to Cheney violating the Constitution. One of these things is an epic crime; the other is just entertainment. And if the media fails to investigate and report on the truth about the Iraq war, instead parroting the White House party line, that’s not Rachael Maddow’s or some blogger’s fault. The ability of more people than ever before to express their opinions is not destroying journalism. What’s destroying journalism is the fact that analysis pieces are cheaper to do than investigative pieces, since those require actual reporting. That’s a money issue, not a post-modern Information Age one.

Hodge then says the solution to this situation is either to retire to a bunker (seriously) or:

“What we need is an experimental subject, an “I” sufficiently armed with narrative powers both literary and historical, gifts of irony and indirection, and the soothing balms of description and implication, to go forth and find stories that might counteract the unhappy effects of our disorder. What distinguishes such dispatches is what might be called the radical first person: the individual consciousness of the writer becomes paramount. The reader is thereby privy to the writer’s experience and receives direct confirmation of its truth value. What results is not mere consumable opinion, the mystical commodity of mediated capitalism, but the raw material of a considered judgment, whether aesthetic, political, or ethical. In that judgment lies the cure for our affliction.”

I hope this doesn’t mean what I think it means. What I think it means is that we need Super Smart Special People to explain life to us all the time. This isn’t very far off from all that Philosopher-King bullshit that made Ezra Pound into a Nazi. If I were to propose a solution to our Krazy Information Age, I’d say that teaching courses in critical thinking and media in public schools would be a good start. I don’t think we need Special People to tell us how to evaluate information; instead, we need to learn how to evaluate information for ourselves. In other words, we need to learn how to think. And in a weird way, this gigantic glut of opinion that Hodge is complaining about is, to a certain extent, a healthy sign–among other things, it means that the Internet has made it possible for anybody to get a blog (or comment on one.) It’s noisy and messy, but it also means that people are interacting with the media more than ever before, which is actually a good thing–it can help us get closer to becoming our own Magical Dads.

My beef against Harper’s comes from this concept of the Mighty Philosopher King Dad handing down knowledge to the lucky masses from the Mount. To be fair, this is mostly a Roger Hodge and Lewis Lapham thing, i/r/t Harper’s content. I’m excited to see where the mag goes, now that Hodge has been fired.