I’ve been reading Newsweek regularly for over four decades. Nowadays the magazine is a shadow of its best period, the 60’s and 70’s. In recent years, its editors, when choosing cover subjects, grabbed at any excuse to resurrect halcyon days. Even now I half expect to see in the next few weeks a cover nostalgically featuring Twiggy, somehow linking the 60’s waif to our slim new President. For long-time readers such as myself who prefer a true news weekly, the decline of Newsweek recalls John’s post-breakup put-down of Paul: The only thing you done was yesterday.
Did I mention the magazine is getting slimmer and slimmer? It’s become a combination of poor quality and small portions. This too is an echo of what we first heard decades ago.
Sometimes the editors simply defy the weekly news wrapper and give us alternative fare of high readability. An example is the January 19, 2009 issue, whose otherwise desultory pages contain a small gem of an essay by Christopher Hitchens, entitled, “The Man Who Made Us Whole“. Whether the title was chosen by the author or a Newsweek editor I know not; its rightness suggests it’s Hitchens’ design. The piece is an admiring portrait of Abraham Lincoln, filled with wit, wordplay, and revelatory thinking typical of the author at his best. When Hitchens pops up on television (usually on cable; the old networks are too cowardly) he ofttimes comes across as dyspeptic, prone to mumbling, and of ramshackle demeanor. But the mind, the words: he remains a man who should be listened to.
As his followers know, Hitchens, in the last year or two, has been a pugnacious defender of in-your-face atheism, railing against religious belief of any sort. In all times and places belief in God has worked a baleful effect, and so let’s acknowledge God is Not Great — such has been his non-stop refrain, and the title of a book he’s hawked. So it was a bit of a surprise to encounter the following sentiments flowing from the closing paragraph of his Lincoln essay:
“I would myself love to claim Lincoln as an atheist ancestor, but I must confess myself beaten. He was emphatically not a Christian — the name of Jesus never seems to have escaped his lips in spite of many beseeching requests that he accept the savior — but he referred too often to a supervising and presiding deity for one to be able to allege that he did so only to obtain votes or approval. … [H]e could not imagine that mere mortals were the sole measure of all things. We may chose to think that we know better.”
[We may chose to think we know better??]
Then comes this tender denouement:
“[H]ow impossible it is to forget this craggy and wretched and haunted man, invoking of all things our “better angels.”
Is this just Hitchens being respectful (if not sentimental) in the face of the savior-category accomplishments of a great man? Or is there a shift of perspective, some beginning acceptance on his part that believers may indeed beneficially tread the earth, and do good not in spite of but because of their belief?
[Update: For an analysis of Newsweek and Time‘s current straits, check out this article.]