Wonderful magazine! And a new FaM feature

A week or so ago I stumbled upon a copy of a publication I hadn’t seen in quite a while: The Economist. It was hidden among the bundles of tabloids and advertising packages disguised as women’s magazines that abide around Safeway’s cash registers. Picked it up…thought, electrified, hallelujah! The Brits have still got content!

Content? OMG does this thing have content: real, full-length ARTICLES, not blurbs, not squibs. And they’re about issues that matter, not movie stars’ sex lives! The thing contains actual reporting (you remember? facts, and lots of them?). And when commenters editorialize, they have something to say…they don’t blather.

It’s a miracle.

So I grabbed it off the counter, brought it home, have been reading it all week long. Today on the way home from the Mayo* I stopped at a Whole Paycheck to pick up a couple of items that aren’t available in regular supermarkets around here, and what should I find but a new issue of the thing.

It’s always enlightening to listen to what observers in other countries have to say about American doings. This week’s cover story is “Angry America,” the centerpiece of reportage on the elections nationwide. Says an unnamed editorialist:

It takes an effort these days to recall the thrill that surged through the world [the world!] when Barack Obama was elected America’s president. It was not only that he was the first black person to assume the globe’s greatest office. He seemed to be preternaturally thoughtful, dignified and decent; a man who could heal America’s wounds at home and restore its reputation abroad. Though too many were swept away on a collective longing to see hope triumph over experience, none of it seemed wholly unreasonable at the time. Yes, many thought, he can.

Didn’t we, though? What a perfect nutshell summary of the desperate optimism so many of us clung to.

Two years later, the magnitude of the let-down is palpable everywhere; and at home the president is caught in a vice. To many on the left, he is a cowardly compromiser, whose half-baked plans to get America back to work have done little to help those who voted for him, and whose health-care and financial reforms were gutted at the behest of special interests. To many on the right, he seems a doctrinaire spendthrift who has squandered trillions of dollars on wasteful bureaucracy, mortgaging the future while failing to grapple with the present. To centrists who backed him, including this newspaper, he has been a disappointment, his skills as a president falling far short of his genius as a campaigner.

Geez. Two years in four sentences.

And ain’t it the truth? Certainly for those of us whose wing-nuts rotate counterclockwise, it’s disappointing that Obama did not stand firm, that he caved to the right and its industrial controllers. Where healthcare was concerned, his position should have been all or nothing: if he couldn’t get a single-payer system, he should have let the whole mess revert to the status quo and let the voters enjoy another round of higher premiums for less coverage. About Afghanistan, he should have pointed out, firmly and repeatedly, that he is not the man who got us into Afghanistan, nor is he the man who lied to take us into Iraq when we should have been going after bin Laden in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he should have reminded everyone why we invaded Afghanistan and why we cannot just turn around and walk away.

Interestingly, the Brits have a more sanguine view of President Obama and his accomplishments to date. “In our view,” says The Economist, “the rage directed at Mr Obama is overdone.”

Overdone rage seems to be very  much in vogue here, these days. About the main source of that rage, the editor continues,

The slow pace of job re-creation is primarily the result of consumers and companies trying to rebuild their finances. Balance-sheet recessions always take time to recover from. Mr Obama is guilty of promising that the pain would be over sooner than was ever likely. But he did not cause the bust, and he deserves more credit than he is getting for steering America clear of a much worse fate, especially considering the constraints of a political system designed to make big changes difficult. He was right to go for a big, bold and immediate stimulus plan. He has been right to resist, with minor exceptions, calls for a wave of protectionism. He is guilty of having no credible medium-term plan to reduce the deficit. But then nor do the Republicans; and it was they, after all, who oversaw the tax cuts, the entry into two wars and the financial collapse that are the source of most of America’s gigantic deficit.

. . . He was correct to try to deal with a dreadful system that leaves tens of millions of Americans without access to health cover, though he should probably have postponed doing so until the economy had recovered.

Just so. Here, too, Obama or his press secretary and machine should have been blowing his own horn. These facts should have been talked up in the press—at endless length and at the same volume at which the anti’s have been shouting.

The United States, whose concerns grow  more parochial as the country loses economic and political clout, is only one part of the world on which The Economist reports. Each issue is sectioned into departments that cover specific regions: The Americas, Asia, Middle East and Africa, Europe, Britain. Every part of the publication is full of well crafted, solidly reported articles. Since so much of its content informs the sort of thing I write for Funny about Money, I think I’m going to have Funny’s parent entity, The Copyeditor’s Desk, subscribe to it. Just now they have a bargain rate going on.

It’s not cheap, but for something that brings this much high-quality reporting straight to your door once a week, it’s worth it.

And this brings me to…

Something New for Funny about Money

Got a new idea: I thought it would be cool to have a separate page that would list some of the products I’ve found and would like to recommend because they work well, meet a special need, or just are nifty, and also some of the goodies friends have told me about.

After some rumination, during which I tried to figure out if I could make an RSS feed to a single regularly updated page within FaM and learned that nooooo, that won’t work, I decided to recycle the dormant Half-Off Diet site. I don’t happen to feel like buying yet another domain name, so for our purposes I’m just going to keep the URL, but rename the site Funny and Friends’ Picks.

The RSS feed at the upper right will show recent posts. Eventually I’ll try to put together an index in a separate page on Funny about Money, so you can see an alphabetical list of products and services featured there. For the nonce, though, a category list will appear at Picks, so if you’d like to see if we ever talked about, say, immersion blenders, you could click on “small appliances” or “household gadgets” (whenever they come up…I’ll have to enter a post on a given category to make it appear in the list). When there’s an affiliate link for Amazon, I’ll include it, but not all entries lend themselves to that. For example, soon I’ll post a link to La Maya’s paintings, which of course are not available through the Gigantic Virtual Warehouse Store.

I think this could be a fun and maybe even a useful service to FaM readers. I hope you’ll take time occasionally to browse through it, and if you have any ideas for stuff to include, e-mail me at funnyaboutmoney {{at}} gmail.com, or just leave a comment here.

🙂

* So what happened at the Mayo? I showed up there bright and early this morning, half-starved, to be poked and jabbed. A few hours later, the doctor’s nurse called to report on the test results: all completely normal! No H. pylori, no anemia (i.e., no ulcer and probably no cancer), no liver malfunction, no pancreatitis. Someday I may even be able to have a glass of wine again. Meanwhile, as the body winds down from the mighty dose of stress delivered by three months without enough income to cover base expenses followed by Social Security ripping off a whole month’s worth of pay and leaving me a thousand dollars short for a fourth month, I’m beginning to feel a lot better. It looks like I’m gunna live to write another blog post, after all.