Because I spent more than half my working life in magazine publishing, I still pay attention to magazine racks. If you haven’t tried it, try looking at a magazine rack as a mirror of our society.
Sometimes, while I wait for a prescription, I spend 20 minutes considering the magazines at our drug store.
On the lower right, magazines about cars, motorcycles, and other things that burn gasoline. On the upper right, a small selection of magazines about knowledge, in general – psychology, astronomy, physics, geography….
Over to the left—I don’t think this has anything to do with politics —a mass of magazines deal with home and garden. Mostly they’re about what you would like your home or garden to look like, if you had the money, staff, or time. I suspect they rely on envy for their sales.
With their gorgeous pictures of Caribbean isles or Asian temples, travel magazines splash across the front of the rack at eye level.
But the vast bulk of the magazines deal with human bodies. Perhaps about building a better body through exercise. Or through diet. Or about clothing that body with the latest fashions. Or disguising that body with makeup techniques that will hide wrinkles, pimples, and sags, and will make you look younger.
The magazines on the highest level, often with part of their covers shielded from prurient eyes, portray the human body as a plaything. Most often, the female body, as a sex toy for the male libido.
Omissions are significant too. I’m surprised—this being a rural community—at the lack of magazines about guns and horses. Perhaps people with those interests go to some other drug store.
Because no one stocks a magazine rack with publications they think people ought to buy. They put out magazines on subjects the community cares enough about to spend money on.
In that sense, a magazine rack is a printout of the community’s interests.
Obviously, a hole-in-the-wall cigar store in Brooklyn, a roadside café in Kentucky, a military base in Texas, won’t offer the same selection as my drug store.
Very few magazine racks have anything at all about contentment. Who’s going to spend money on a publication that asks, “Do you really need this?”
Despite the range of subject matter, magazines today all seem to share a common theme – more! More possessions, more horsepower, more excitement, more sex…. more of more…
Don’t be too critical of secular society. But even churches fall into this trap. They may not endorse consumerism, but they certainly encourage more commitment, more involvement in programs, more generous giving….
It seems to be a universal flaw in human wiring. If two pills are good, four must be better. If keeping busy is good, keeping busier must be better. If one beer helps you relax, a dozen must…
And why limit yourself to 13 cable channels, when you can have 500?
We don’t seem to know when to say “Enough.”
On a finite planet, learning to say “Enough” may be a fundamental survival skill. For individuals, for our species, for the world.
