Magazine upon Magazine.

Shitty Still, so I'm posting.

So during a week when I was home this summer, my mother gave me a little piece of paper from her airline telling her that she had a few thousand miles left that were on the verge of expiration. On the other side of the paper were all those lovely magazines you can subscribe to, which, to be honest, is kinda exciting...

First thing I noticed? Wall Street Journal? Every Day? For a YEAR?!
....No. I was 300 miles short.

The Economist?
...Not availabe.

How about Penthouse then?
...Right.

That left me with a smorgasbord of supercrap: Maxim, FHM, Blender, Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, People, National Enquirer, Men's Health, GQ, Cosmo, Vogue, Mademoiselle, etc.

So given that she had tons of miles and nowhere to put them, I just did some math and got a bunch of subscriptions, which I subsequently forgot about.
...Until recently.

An avalanche of crappy embarrassing magazines has arrived at my doorstep. In isolation, I think any of these magazines might be acceptable, but coming in bundles of 3, all together, seems excessive, desperate, and lame. For example, upon arriving home from school at 11pm one day (yes, life rules), I noticed a huge wad of magazines stuffed into, and falling out of my mailbox. Men's Health, GQ, and something called Best Life? (There's no WAY I signed up for Best Life, fuckin Bon Jovi is on the cover of this months, although I'm still wondering if I in fact subscribed to GQ.) To add to the loveliness of it, it turns out they were also shipping back issues. So I had TWO Men's Health magazines, and TWO Best Lifes.

So there were 5 magazines overflowing my tiny little mailbox happily signaling to the world that I 1) am fat and out of shape, 2) am not successful with women, 3) cannot manage my finances in order to have my "best life" (shakes head), 4) need fashion help, 5) like reading about male role models for 20-somethings, and 6) might just have a gay hankering for pretty men with Rock Hard Abs!, and 7) that I subscribed to SEVERAL magazines to fix all of these problems. Because I'm a fucking moron.

The next question is what to do with all of them. I am simply not comfortable having a 3 foot stack of "how to be man" magazines sitting on my coffee table next to my two video game consoles and just a few feet away from my ever present display of alcoholism perched atop my kitchen cabinets.

Anyway got a shitty life and need a magazine's assistance?

More importantly, this is not why I posted this time. It turns out I did subscribe to one fairly respectable magazine, The Atlantic, which featured a story by Andrew Sullivan about Barack Obama. For those of you who've known me for at least a few months, you know both that I read and (generally) respect Andrew Sullivan, and that I (though increasingly lukewarm) support Obama's candidacy. If you want to read it, it's here. It's not spectacular, but it envisions American politics as a remnant of the Baby Boomer generation and their half-century of culture wars and fucked-up mentalities...and the argues that Obama is the necessary break. I just thought I'd drop a few bits from the article, in case your classes are boring you to death:

On Hillary:

As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove her deeper into her political bunker. Her liberalism is warped by what you might call a Political Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Reagan spooked people on the left, especially those, like Clinton, who were interested primarily in winning power. She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives. And so the less-adept ones seem deceptive, and the more-practiced ones, like Clinton, exhibit the plastic-ness and inauthenticity that still plague her candidacy. She’s hiding her true feelings. We know it, she knows we know it, and there is no way out of it.

On Obama v. Clinton

The paradox is that Hillary makes far more sense if you believe that times are actually pretty good. If you believe that America’s current crisis is not a deep one, if you think that pragmatism alone will be enough to navigate a world on the verge of even more religious warfare, if you believe that today’s ideological polarization is not dangerous, and that what appears dark today is an illusion fostered by the lingering trauma of the Bush presidency, then the argument for Obama is not that strong. Clinton will do...

But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.

On Religion (and Bush.)

This struggle to embrace modernity without abandoning faith falls on one of the fault lines in the modern world. It is arguably the critical fault line, the tectonic rift that is advancing the bloody borders of Islam and the increasingly sectarian boundaries of American politics...

You cannot confront the complex challenges of domestic or foreign policy today unless you understand this gulf and its seriousness. You cannot lead the United States without having a foot in both the religious and secular camps. This, surely, is where Bush has failed most profoundly. By aligning himself with the most extreme and basic of religious orientations, he has lost many moderate believers and alienated the secular and agnostic in the West. If you cannot bring the agnostics along in a campaign against religious terrorism, you have a problem.

That last section was meaningless, except the last sentence, which is AWESOME.

Anyhow, I certainly doubt this was informative for any of you. Reading what I just posted, I think none of it was particularly interesting, and I apologize.

...But not really.