Putin’s Trump: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Even in losing, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Fox News seem to be winning.

Is there anything we can do to turn things around, reverse course and stop the destruction of democracy as we know it, the de-evolution of the human brain and the end of human life on planet Earth?

I don’t know.

But at least somebody, somewhere, should be having a conversation about it. If nobody else will, I will keep trying every chance I get. Even if there’s only one person reading, you, and no one in mainstream publishing willing to give us credit. One day some historian will come along and figure out we were right all along.

I’ve scoured the public and private airwaves, all the legacy publishing houses, and all the social media platforms, and can’t find another solitary soul who is talking about this at all.

Oh, there are those who lament our ongoing cultural disintegration, like Christian Lorentzen, who recently wrote about the death of a literary magazine you’ve never heard of, Bookforum, for The Washington Post.

What the death of a literary magazine says about our cultural decay

This is more blathering about the death of print, almost more than I can take. But there is a point here worth considering.

“… the American magazine is in a state of decay,” Lorentzen writes. “Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever-ubiquitous ‘take’,” he says. “Meanwhile, a thousand Substacks bloom, some of them very good, with writers in the emancipated state of being paid directly by their readers. Yet even in this atomized, editorless landscape, perverse incentives apply. Are you thirsty for another post about cancel culture or wokeness? Me neither. Yet culture war still largely rules the day.”

Yep. I can’t take that anymore either.

“American newspapers have long been capitalist enterprises, with potential for enormous profits (for most of their history, at least),” he goes on. “The same can be said of our magazines, although it has never been true of literary and intellectual publications, the so-called little magazines, a genre that came of age in the early 20th century and swiftly became a hothouse for radical thought. For the most part, these institutions have been dependent on wealthy individual backers and hence subject to their whims and/or the limits of their life spans.”

This is true, and we knew it 17 years ago when David Underhill and I embarked on launching a web publication to cater to a small, progressive audience on the web. Profit was never the motive. To make a difference on some important stories was, and it worked. Can it continue to work as Google and Facebook and all the rest continue to bank all the ad money and AI chat farms take over all the writing?

I don’t know.

“America has no state model for the propagation of little magazines,” Lorentzen writes, “unless you count the CIA’s clandestine funding of various journals during the Cold War. That episode is remembered as one of shame, but on the scorecard of the agency’s sins, surely the least of them is that it helped the Paris Review get off the ground, to say nothing of the powerful avant-garde magazines it bankrolled in Asia and Africa, including Black Orpheus, Hiwar and Transition.” (Never heard of those myself).

Who knew the CIA was in the business of saving publications? That might well serve the protection and promotion of democracy. If so, we could use the help — if anyone over in Langley, Virginia is listening.

But will anything save us in the end?

“We live in an era of cultural disintegration,” Lorentzen writes, “beset by cultural artifacts that are bite-size, superficial, even artificial. What we need more than ever are the intelligence, verve and criticality of a well-edited little magazine.”

How about an ambitious little web publication? Does it have to be printed with ink and paper and come off a printing press?

Back to the main point.

What do I mean by Trump, Putin and Fox winning even as they are losing?

As he finally faces at least some criminal charges, Trump’s popularity continues to gradually decline. Most public opinion pundits now say he has no chance of making a political comeback. He can’t win a majority of American voters, even if he manages to claim the Republican nomination for president again in 2024.

But his way of thinking and politicking continues, even in the form of the likes of Ron DeSantis in Florida, who seems to want to turn America into Florida.

Was it not bad enough when — during the Trump years — many news outlets lamented the ‘Alabamafication’ of America? Now we have to deal with its Floridafacation too?

I hightailed it out of Florida after one month when Covid first hit Spring Break. I have no desire to go back, literally or figuratively.

Fox News may well lose the $1.6 billion lawsuit with Dominion (update, they settled the lawsuit for $787.5 million after this story was published on Tuesday). But right-wing, neo-fascist, white nationalist, fake news will live on, on other channels.

Putin is clearly losing his war with Ukraine, on the ground and in the hearts and minds of people everywhere. But his philosophy of disrupting democracies around the world — especially in America — is winning. Every news story about another mass shooting proves it. This is exactly how Pravda and the Tass Report used to describe life in the United States, even back in the 1980s. Violent and in total disarray.

It is a bit obvious that I am a tad older, more educated and wiser than Lorentzen, who laments the loss of magazines and culture. I go back even further, and can remember when magazines talked openly about how the goal of the Soviet Union was to sow disruption and chaos in the United States.

In 1986 I opened a newsstand, bookstore and coffee bar on the Southside of Birmingham, in part to surround myself with all the newspapers and magazines I could get so I could learn the free-lance writing business. The little store called NewsBreak turned into an intellectual hangout in my hometown for awhile, sort of like Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.

Did the Newhouse owned Birmingham News ever acknowledge our existence, then or now? Of course not. So what? Fuck them. We sold T-shirts that called NewsBreak, “An oasis in an information wasteland.” They can’t even afford to print the Sunday paper anymore in Birmingham, Mobile or Huntsville, and they had to sell out in New Orleans and are also nearly out of business in Cleveland, Ohio and Portland, Oregon. Arrogant bastards.

So back in the 1980s, in addition to reading The New York Times daily, I was devouring the likes of Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly, both now mere shadows of their former selves. Harper’s went non-profit and had to be rescued by rich folks in the 1980s, and while The Atlantic was early to take on the web, it is a dumbed down sensational clickbait news site these days.

We did have the Utne Reader back in the day, which would reprint some of the best magazine pieces on a monthly basis. The New Yorker was much better back then, before Newhouse bought it. Now New York Magazine is better, but it’s hard to justify paying for the paywall.

There was also The Nation, back when it was a small paper with smartly written editorials from the left. And The New Republic, back when there were conservative writers worth reading.

These days, for more intellectual yet still popular stories, not academic fare, you may see me share the occasional article from something called AEON magazine.

We are always on the lookout for good stories to republish in the New American Journal, or for new writers to publish with something to say and the guts to go beyond a mere Facebook post. We don’t get many takers. People seem content to post their opinions on Facebook or Twitter, where a few friends might see it, with no hope they will ever get paid or a wider audience.

That is sad.

Facebook sux.

And Google is the enemy.

Are you really ready to have your entire world controlled by speed freak hackers?

Artificial Intelligence is not the problem.

It’s the lack of a liberal arts education by the hacker-programmers who already control your lives that you should be worried about.

Not to mention those talking heads on TeeVee high on happy pills who you wake up to every morning, reluctantly reporting on the next mass shooting in between big grins and uproarious laughter.

How do you like that with your morning coffee? I can’t watch anymore. I’ll still take The New York Times any day, even if I often disagree with some of their analysis.

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