272. The Lying, Cheating London Economist

I refer to The Economist the old way because I'm thinking of integrity.   It was the soul of it.  Now I have received in the mail from that newsmagazine an offer for subscribers to the New York Times which tells me, in big type, in a box, that instead of the regular price of The Economist for twelve weeks, $334.97, I can pay $15.00.  This, with the goodies broken down and individually priced, is repeated in a column below, with an adjacent column showing that all come to me with my one payment of $15.00, the number now displayed in a red box.

Then on the detachable Preferred Discount Order Form, following the biggest YOU PAY ONLY, is the $15.00 again, in the biggest box.  Only when I look at the fine print above where I give my credit card number and sign up do I get the operating words: "You will be billed $15 on your credit card immediately and then $15 every month thereafter."

This didn't really harm me because I am onto what the Economist is up to — sort of the way a Muscovite was onto what Pravda was up to.  You don't expect straight shooting.  The only problem is that this is coming from people I thought were straight shooters.

"No, it's coming from crooked shooters they hired, experts in the subscription scam."

Makes no difference.  Hire a crook, become a crook.  You cause the harm.  If one of our low-mentation, bad eyesight residents here falls for this scam she is harmed.  The Economist did it to her.

Luckily my mentation is still high enough for me to avoid this harm, bank account harm, but still, even if no bank account in the whole place is harmed, something is harmed.  I think it's the culture.  No, not the American culture (though that may be harmed too) but one of those sub-categories we now freely call "cultures" — the culture of Wall Street, the culture of book collectors, the culture of pool players.  Here it's the culture of liberal letters, the culture of, as I see them, readers of the New York Times and The Economist. 

We went so long thinking, as John Stuart Mill did, of harm as individual harm that we still have a hard time getting our minds around social harm, which is only vaguely felt anyway.  We cry out much more readily over the first.  It's the clarity of a bank account against the obscurity of an unsatisfying tennis afternoon.  It's your score on the wire against your knowledge that you played dirty pool.

You have to be there and feel it.  I feel it when Jimmy Connors comes over and rubs out the ball-mark his opponent has asked the judge to inspect.  The culture of tennis is harmed.  As the culture of baseball is harmed when our high school's hero, impersonating a fielder's teammate, yells "I got it" near a descending fly ball.  The culture of all athletes is harmed when Mohammed Ali says "I am the greatest."  When these actions are admired (as Howard Cosell admired Mohammed Ali, and led the nation's admiration) the culture is changed for the worse.  (I reveal a culture that scorns cultural relativism.)

The harm deepens when you become complicit.  I play dirty pool because everybody around me is playing dirty pool, and no longer calls it that.  I yell "I got it" close to the fielder because that's the way to win, however many painful collisions follow from my poisoning of their system.  The harm radiates because now the language is harmed, the trust of words within a culture. 

Trust in words.  Oh how our culture, editors of The Economist, depends on it.  How it distinguishes us from salesmen at the door, from hucksters on television, from voices on the phone trying to suck you into a "survey."  That culture.

I'm not laying the Decline of the West on you, editors.  All print people have to make their buck too, especially now.  I know that there's a price to pay for free-enterprise capitalism, my country's system, the system I have accepted as the best.  I know that the Invisible Hand gets dirty sometimes.  But geez.  You were my hero.  You should be the last to play dirty pool.