Still Digesting

In a desperate attempt to increase the readership of my blog I have taken to reading it assiduously myself. Reading my own prose as though it were that of someone else is not entirely a novel experience. The combination of a memory softened by longevity plus the longevity itself—I have been publishing stuff of one kind or another for half a century now—has on occasion led to the following weird experience. I am reading some ancient academic essay, and it begins to seem vaguely familiar. Furthermore I agree with the central idea—pretty rare. Could it be that I have read it before without remembering it? Answer: No. I wrote it before without remembering it.

I could well remember writing “Difficult to Digest”. After all, I wrote it only eight days ago. But I felt suddenly uncertain about one of the claims I had made, concerning Sender Galin’s pamphlet The Truth About Reader’s Digest.

"Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item,” I wrote, “…so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it.” Was that really true? Perhaps the market had changed since I had to shell out big bucks to get a second copy, having mislaid a first copy (still missing in action) somewhere on my desk. I immediately checked with the indispensable abebooks.com. There were, world-wide, three copies of the Garlin pamphlet available. The first was priced as I supposed it would be in the thirty-dollar range. A single bookseller, Juniper Books in Boulder CO, however, had two copies at the incredible low price of $7.50 each! Now I was aware—and indeed I had reported both in The Anti-Communist Manifestos and in “Difficult to Digest”—that Mr. Garlin spent the last years of his life in or around Boulder CO. I immediately speculated that these two copies probably were a part of the nachlass of old Sender Garlin himself, and that Juniper Books was not entirely aware of the value of the treasures for which they had become brokers.

I snapped them up as fast as my large fingers could beat out the appropriate key-strokes, and they have just arrived. My proclivity toward what my wife calls “excess” was richly rewarded. In the first place I discover that there were at least four different printings of the pamphlet in 1943, of which I now own three. (Indeed, I may own the fourth as well, if only I can find it.) Better yet, one of these copies is signed by the author: “To a poetic organizer, Martha Millet [/] Sender Garlin”.

I don’t know, of course, whether he ever actually presented Ms. Millet with the book, or why she returned it to him if he had done so. Martha Millet was a minor Communist poet of the 1930s and 40s. Garlin uses the word "organizer" as a technical term. The job of an "organizer" was to assemble a Party cell or prepare the "masses" for political action. When the Communists disappeared, "Party organizers" were replaced by "community organizers". This is simply an etymological curiosity, not a political statement concerning any particular president of the United States. I presume that the phrase "poetical organizer" is itself somewhat poetical. One of Millet's poems (“Women of Spain”) is still to be found in anthologies of literature dealing with the Spanish Civil War. She was also one of the radical poets anthologized in a once-celebrated book entitled Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. These seven are nowadays pretty obscure. They included Alfred Kreymborg, whose testimony—along with that of other eminent Communists like the artist Rockwell Kent and Congressman Vito Marcantonio-- adorns the back of the other printing of the pamphlet I just bought. Kreymbourg pulls out all the stops in praising The Truth About Reader’s Digest. “One of the most important documents of the age. Every American should read it.” Nobody ever said that about An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages! The name of a third of the seven poets may ring a bell with some of my readers: Joy Davidman. If you don’t recognize the name, think “Mrs. C. S. Lewis”. Yes, Lewis's second Joy, supplementing the more spiritual version of of his pre-marital autobiography, Surprised by Joy! Scholarly investigations, like other mysteries of life, have the fascinating habit of turning back upon themselves. If you want to see what I mean, check out the “Recent Writing” section on the web-site.

Difficult to Digest

My number one son Richard, the formidable blogmeister of “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” drew my attention to what he thought may be a blogable item for a geezer like me in the form of an AP story headed “Chapter 11 Plan Cedes Reader’s Digest to Lenders”. From his point of view the story has to do with the preposterous nonchalance with which American corporations now file for bankruptcy. The very word “bankruptcy” used to reverberate with the terrors of the charnel house. American captains of industry now declare bankruptcy with about as much drama as they down an aspirin tablet. But Rich also knew that I had some interest in Reader’s Digest as an index of popular American culture and especially in the magazine’s role in the formation of the anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s. I touch on this subject in several places in The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It’s a little hard to believe that a journal with five and a half million readers is going under. Why, that’s even more readers than "A Brooklynite on the Ice" commands! But it’s certainly a falling away from the glory days of post-War, when it had a paid circulation of more than seventeen million monthly copies. Reader’s Digest was launched in 1922 by a husband-and-wife genius team, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. This pair was sufficiently famous to have commanded a Time magazine cover at one point.

It was the admirable Robert Hutchins who made the memorable quip about popular journalism in America. We have two great magazines, he said: Time, for people who can’t think, and Life [the great precursor of modern photo-journalism], for people who can’t read. He might have added, “and Reader’s Digest, for people in between, those who have trouble with disyllables.”

The basic idea, simple and brilliant, anticipated the Internet in certain ways. Reader’s Digest would gather and “condense” interesting articles from the whole range of American journalism.There are numerous books about the Reader’s Digest, which must be regarded as a phenomenon unique in the annals of publication. Academics love "the masses" in principle; practice proves a little more difficult. Many scholars seem to think that there must be something morally dubious, and certainly politically incorrect, in a journal read by so many millions of their compatriots. The fullest study is probably John Heidenry’s Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest. Full does not, alas, always mean accurate. Unfortunately, on the one point which most interested me (Jan Valtin’s publication of “American Dawn”) this book turned out to be woefully errant. Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity has the virtue of revealing its simple (not to say simple-minded) thesis right up front. The implication here is that the Wallaces were the grandparents of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

From nearly its very inception the Reader’s Digest was the magazine that left-wing intellectuals loved to hate, and they have been constant in their disdain. They couldn't stomach its combination of saccharine patriotism, hick religiosity, and fantastic financial success. As I wrote in my book “As late as 1982, Susan Sontag caused an uproar among progressives by suggesting that 'the émigrés from the communist countries we didn’t listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader’s Digest than in the Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth.'” In the 1950s one recurrent theme was the battle of the FBI against domestic Communism. The magazine's tendencies are memorialized in an imaginary joke title of a typical article of the 1950s: "I Slept with a Bear for the FBI, and Found God."

I first encountered this curious political bias when I was writing about Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had first been introduced to a Communist Party meeting in the 1920s by a strange character named Sender Garlin. This man was a Communist Party apparatchik for many decades. He only recently ended his days as an elder statesman of the progressive community of Boulder, Colorado. In the 1930s , Garlin and Chambers worked together on the Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. In 1943 he published a dime brochure entitled "The Truth about Reader's Digest". What that "truth" was was spelled out in a prefatory letter by the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser. "Just now, from reading your booklet, I gather the publication's true attitude and import. It is all so fascinatingly sly, and to my way of thinking, criminal--since plainly it labors to belittle our chief and most valuable ally, and to forward the desires of the capitalistic group in this country that seeks--and has sought from the very beginning--to establish money-plenty and money-authority for the few as opposed to poverty and slavery for the masses here as elsewhere on earth."

"Sly" is not the first word that comes into my mind with regard to the magazine. Most Digest articles had all the slyness and subtlety of a hydrogen bomb or perhaps the Bubonic Plague. One of my heroes, Max Eastman, who enraged the Left by moving from being editor of the Masses in the 1930s to being a frequent contributor to Reader's Digest in the 1970s, put it thus: “Writing for the Reader’s Digest while not exactly an art, is a highly specialized craft. The magazine is largely concerned with the life of ideas, but as it is addressed to some 50 or 60 million readers—the actual copies printed number over 17 million—the ideas have to be presented with a self-explanatory simplicity. I have learned this craft by thinking of myself as a teacher when writing essays of this kind for the Reader’s Digest.”

Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item, in large part no doubt because it features three line etching caricatures--of Franco, Charles Lindbergh, and Jan Valtin, who happened at that moment to be the CPUSA's fascists du jour--by the brilliant Communist artist William Gropper. Gropper is particularly "collectible" at the moment, so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it. I, alas, have had to chase down two copies. It's a thin little thing, and I lost the first one somewhere among my books. Let me heirs be put on notice. By the time they find it, it's bound to be worth a C-note. This Gropper cartoon called "May Day" gives a good idea of Gropper's power and economy of line.

What had particularly enraged Garlin was the fact that the Reader's Digest was prominent in the promotion of the Communist renegade author Jan Valtin (real name Richard Krebs). The Wallaces had "digested" bits of Valtin's famous anti-Communist "autobiography" Out of the Night, and undoubtedly helped increase its circulation. To make matters worse they then published in the May 1941 number Valtin's essay entitled "American Dawn"--one of the most fantastically successful pieces of American boosterism ever penned. "American Dawn" is the story of a repentant ex-Communist who longs for nothing more than to be allowed to become a good American citizen. It worked wonders in helping Krebs to get around very serious immigration problems. At that point the magazine was being distributed in just over four million copies, but the Wallaces were worried that that might not be enough. So they had 750,000 copies of the article made up as offprints for free distribution. I was able to track down on eBay a copy of the original issue in all its dull typographic respectability.

Gold for Geezers

ABOVE the oracular cave at Delphi, we are told, was inscribed the fundamental atom, or perhaps even quark, of all wisdom: NOSCE TEIPSUM, “Know thyself!” For some reason the Greeks thought it cool to write their mottoes in Latin, just as the Romans often opted for Greek. But whether in Latin or Greek (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, if I am provoked to a display of pedantry) the injunction to self-knowledge has a long and venerable history in the western philosophical tradition.

Self-knowledge is of course the hardest of all knowledge to obtain. “O wad some Power the giftie gie us,” wrote the immortal Robbie Burns, “to see oursels as ithers see us!'” Most of us are pretty good at some things, and not so good at others. But what a rare ability it is to have a clear and accurate view of which is which. In fact the more things we are good at, the more lively is the danger that we will think we are also good at vaguely related things. For example, I am pretty good at eating. Indeed modesty alone keeps me from saying “very good”. Eating is logically connected with cooking, but it would be most rash of me, and even rasher of you, to suppose that my prowess at eating implies an equal prowess at cooking.

National political developments of the last month have encouraged me to think about the Delphic injunction with regard to our much-admired president. Barak Obama is a very able politician. In fact he is a superb politician. But even though he is very good at most things political, he is not, alas, very good at all such things. Contrast, for example, the lavish praise that has greeted the “Cash for Clunkers” program with the controversy and dramatized divisions ignited by his Medical, well, Whatever. I speak thus irreverently only because the Democrats seem to have abandoned what was formerly called their “Health Care Plan” in favor of their “Medical Insurance Reform”. I am not sure I like the switch, because I am a man with a prostate; and if I have to be in the hospital I’d prefer being treated by a doctor rather than an insurance agent. I can hang out with any number of insurance agents at the Rotary Club.

Still, there does still seem to be, camouflaged amidst the Delphic obscurity, an actual medical dimension to Health Care/Insurance Reform. The trick is figuring out what it is. There is light-hearted Saturday program on NPR (“Wait, Wait—Don’t Tell Me!”) in which one of the segments tries a contestant’s ability to pick from three preposterous stories the one that (in addition to being preposterous) is an actual news item. President Obama has assured me of three things: (1) he will give health care insurance to about fifty million currently uninsured people; (2) this change will have no effect on my own personal medical arrangements unless I want it to, and (3) nobody making less than a quarter of a million dollars per annum will be asked to pay a penny more in income taxes to pay for the program.

The problem is to figure out which one of the three highly popular possibilities could conceivably be true. I have no intention of going to a Town Hall Meeting, and I certainly will not foam at the mouth if I stumble into one by accident; but as an Obama voter I do have to inquire whether lobotomy will be a precondition for my support of the president’s good intentions?

The question Mr. Obama should be discussing with Messrs. Rahm and Alexrod, not excluding of course Speaker Pelosi, is how to make the Health Whatever as attractive as “Cash for Clunkers”. The popularity of “Cash for Clunkers” has nothing to do with the free lunch aspect. It is the intellectual elegance of the concept. Toward the beginning of the last century one of the European governments, concerned with the frequency of fatal railway accidents, established a commission to look into the matter. The commissioners soon discovered that by significant proportion most people killed in railway accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train. In a flash the elegant, cost-free solution to the problem flashed through the mind of the chief investigator. The commission would recommend that in future the last car be removed from all trains. Voilà!
A clunker: $4500 max

That’s the kind of thinking that has made “Cash for Clunkers” such a success. The beauty of it is that the model can be applied to the Medical Whatever at the slight cost of a few modest adjustments of vocabulary. Everyone agrees that the killer cost in health care is geriatric medicine. But “geriatric medicine” is merely a euphemism that may disguise rather than identify the problem. Let’s call a spade a spade. The real problem here is geezers. First they get old. Then they get sick. Then they expect to see a doctor. Give them an inch, they take a mile. The suggested plan to create a special group of thanatological shrinks (commonly called the Kevorkian Corps), while undoubtedly well intentioned, is actually an inadequate response. The health care crisis demands something more fundamental. The solution is obvious, though it may at first seem a little startling. Eliminate the last car on the train. Get the geezers off the road in the same way you are getting the clunkers off the road. Give the program a snappy title: “Grants for Gramps,” perhaps, or better yet “Gold for Geezers”.
A geezer: $450 max