As Time Goes Bye

My subscription to Time magazine ends next month after 37 years. I began my subscription to Time as a Junior in high school in 1973 while attending Maur Hill Preparatory Academy in Atchison, Kansas . It was required reading and used as our text book in my current events class with Father Barnabas. We read it cover to cover and were tested on its contents weekly. The kinds of questions that tripped up Governor George Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign, the ones like can you name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, India and Pakistan, would have been answered readily. So why then will I allow my subscription to run out after being a loyal reader for almost four decades? Because Time magazine and I simply grew apart.

I haven't read Time cover to cover for quite some time now. It began to frustrate and bore me, with its increasingly liberal bent, about 10 years ago. Coincidentally, that was about the same time that AOL merged with Time Warner, in 2000, and George Bush was elected as our 43rd president. During that same time period, in addition to me, the magazine has lost nearly one million readers. Today, I much prefer to read things like The Weekly Standard. In any event, Time had by then become a disparate ghost of its original past and its founder Henry Luce. Like Democrats in the 1960's, before their progressive visage of today, Time used to stand for middle-class values and American leadership. Today, for the most part, Times' writers and stories are 180 degrees from what their managing editor said in 1998 on the occasion of the magazine's 75th anniversary. Walter Isaacson said then, "Although our stories often have a strong point of view, we try to make sure they are informed by open-minded reporting rather than partisan biases."

Just to demonstrate how far off the mark today's Time is from that statement, let me share just a couple of examples from their current issue. Under the guise of Business Books, reporter Andrea Sachs reviews three new books about how "frugality is the new chic, and belt tightening is all the rage." All three books demagogue capitalism as the biggest culprit of global warming and the chief enemy to man's survival on earth. Under Briefing, a section called The Skimmer offers another book review by Gilbert Cruz just in time for holiday gift giving. The book, The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy, by Lisa Dodson, posits that if this book had been written prior to 2007 we could have staved off economic collapse. How? By providing free and humanitarian services such as "the supervisor who tweaks time cards so that employees can take care of their kids, the school nurse who keeps cots in her office so that students in difficult family situations can catch a few hours sleep, and the doctor who flouts insurance regulations in order to prescribe medicine for an entire household." "For Dodson and her subjects," writes Cruz, "American corporations are amoral entities that continue to build their wealth on the backs of the nation's low-income workers. Helping the less fortunate in this context becomes a form of civil and corporate disobedience." Merry Christmas.

Thanks Time, it was a swell ride. Good bye and good riddance.