Category: default || By jt3y

Some years ago, convinced that the quality of international reporting in much of the American media was, to put it mildly, krep, I started reading a number of foreign publications, including the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans, which carried some excellent reporting from inside Afghanistan and Iraq during 2000, 2001 and 2002. (Lately, with a new editor in charge and a new focus on "lifestyle" stories, the magazine has been woefully uneven. Macleans seems to be turning into a Canuck version of Newsweek, which is not what I subscribed for, and that may lead me to drop it.)

Of course, a side benefit of reading Macleans is that I know more about Canadian politics than anyone, including a Canadian, would care to. That Stephen Harper is quite a guy, let me tell you! (Or maybe not.)

I also subscribed to Private Eye, the British political and satire magazine, mostly because I was already reading a lot of their cartoons and features online, and wanted to be able to read the rest of the articles. It's fairly expensive for an overseas subscription to the Eye; at £38 (pounds sterling), my last renewal worked out to ... um, let me see ... carry the 1 ... well, it was expensive. And a fair number of jokes go over my head in each issue, or at least send me scurrying to the Internet to look up the reference, but that's to be expected, since the Eye is meant for a strictly domestic audience.

Nevertheless, the magazine never fails to give me at least one belly laugh in every issue (under the headline "Pope Condemns Harry Potter for Corrupting Children," we see a photo of Pope Benedict captioned, "That's traditionally the job of the Catholic church"), and even the inside tales of malfeasance in Parliament, on Fleet Street, or out in the suburbs of London (the "rotten boroughs," in Eye parlance) are well-written enough to be entertaining. You don't necessarily need to know the characters, in other words, to find the stories good reading.

How to describe the Eye? I'd describe it as a blend of The Onion with the late, almost-forgotten Spy; but unlike the former, the Eye carries a fair amount of serious investigative reporting, and unlike the latter, the Eye cares more about lampooning politicians and journalists than celebrity gossip. In each issue of the Eye, for instance, Tony Blair is lampooned as the pious, pompous, self-aggrandizing vicar of "St. Albion's Parish" on a page laid out in the style of a church newsletter. The "parish news" usually includes a message from Rev. Blair's American counterpart, the Rev. Dubya of the Church of the Latter-Day Morons. (Um, ouch.)

There's also literary, TV and architectural criticism that wouldn't be out of place in The New Yorker, except that the Eye's critics are considerably more vicious. (Most of the pieces in the Eye are written either anonymously or under pseudonyms. Even the ownership is something of a mystery.)

When Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide a few months ago, the Eye savaged both his later, pedestrian work and the American and British journalists who produced long, overwrought, fawning obituaries. It's a pity that the Eye puts almost nothing online, because I no longer have the epitaph, but it was accompanied by a sketch of Thompson (done in the style of his longtime collaborator, Ralph Steadman), blowing his brains out. The following issue carried several letters commenting on the column and illustration; one writer said, "If you keep printing offensive material like that, I shall have no choice but to continue my subscription."

Needless to say, I was anxious to see how the Eye would handle the terrorist bombings in London. They wouldn't wimp out, would they?

The new issue arrived today, and I wasn't disappointed. Bombing spoofs and critiques of media coverage take up several pages. (A BBC executive is savaged for sending out a memo to staff praising its "highlights" and "briiliant performances." "Yes, 24-hour news channels actually covered a news story --- amazing!" says the Eye.) Inside, a double-page spread laid out in tabloid newspaper fashion is a riot of bold headlines and stories like:

LONDON CAN TAKE IT! SPIRIT OF BLITZ LIVES AGAIN

By Phil Space

We can survive! That was the gutsy response of millions of Londoners when they woke up to the shocking news that their city was to be subjected to the Olympic Games.

Said one cab driver, 76-year-old Monty Snozzer, "We lived through the Second World War --- they're not going to frighten us with a few velodromes and indoor volleyball parks."

Below that was another article from "Phil," headlined "SUICIDE BOMBERS 'NORMAL PEOPLE,'" written in pitch-perfect parody of the typical day-after news "analysis" story:

It's astonishing to discover that the four suicide bombers who attacked London were, according to reports, 'normal people.' One liked sport. Another owned a car. One had a house, with doors ... and windows. Another had parents. All of them had heads.

Perhaps all we can really conclude is that their normalness was so normal that their normalness was abnormal in its normality.

On a less humorous note (the Eye would put an aside here: "Surely 'humourous'? -Ed."), the current issue also has a column from Washington that says the London bombings "rescued" the Bush administration from "air-conditioned torpor." "You could almost hear the collective sigh of Republican relief wafting across the Potomac," writes the Eye's anonymous correspondent, who calls American reporters "slavishly supine":

In normal circumstances, the London bombings would provide yet more proof that the Bush strategy is flawed and dangerous. Yet so debased has the debate on terrorism and the Middle East become here that the administration can brazenly claim that the London attacks justify its misguided policies. As the commander-in-chief put it: "The war on terror goes on."

The populist/fundamentalist/plutocratic coalition which has captured power in Washington learned long ago that the (global war on terror) is a wonderful way to distract attention from the administration's failures, lies and misdemeanours, of stifling serious political debate, of curtailing civil liberties, of whipping up vote-winning patriotism, of making billions more from military/oil/security contracts, and of hastening the Second Coming of the Lord. It's a no-brainer.

That's strong stuff, and unlikely to appear in any mainstream American publication, but commentary like that is another reason why I enjoy getting a different perspective on events, and why I find the Eye valuable.

If nothing else, once the seditious rabble-rousers in this country are finally rounded up and sent to the camps, I may wind up as the best-read inmate at Gitmo.