One of the things I love about it is that it’s like a cranky and stubborn old man. It rejects any and all of the trimmings of money-making fads dressed up as “innovation.” The magazine raised its middle finger at the marketing team when it outlawed use of the word “content” on its pages. That, to me, is an editorial orgasm. The magazine is cranky. The magazine dedicates its first two pages, always and without fail, to bashing conservatives and those who adore them, not with the clever, well-tested rhetoric that passes for liberal commentary thanks to the good folks at MSNBC, but with something far more powerful, in my opinion, something a few of my elders used to call “piss and vinegar.”
What I really love about Harper’s Magazine, though, is this: the writing. I read it from cover to cover every month. I don’t skip the articles that cover topics in which I have no interest because the writing itself, the bare-bones mechanics of it, is beautiful.
So here’s a little passage I came across one morning this week in an article entitled “Like Butterflies in the Jungle: The quest for the new El Dorado” by Damon Tabor. The subject is the gold market – legal and otherwise – in French Guiana, “ … a spleen-shaped patch of sovereign French territory on the right shoulder of South America.” I couldn’t be less interested in the actual topic, but I read on, and it wasn’t long before I was picturing Don Gouran, a 52 year-old who has been mining for gold in the Amazon for two decades. And then, this:
… there was a darkly elegant symmetry to Don Gouran’s dream: Greed and imprudence had caused America’s housing bubble, which had burst, which had roiled financial markets, which had caused fearful investors and greedy speculators to plow money into gold, which had driven up gold prices, which had fueled an Amazon gold rush, which would now – perhaps – help a poor, illiterate, middle-aged man buy his first house.
Since Harper’s Magazine – unlike MSNBC, Slate and others – is not a whore for the stock market, and since there is a narrative thread to the article that does not depend on graphics and scary soundtracks and relentlessly dumbed down chatter, the paragraph about the ‘darkly elegant symmetry’ picked up on a mention earlier in the article about the role mercury plays in today’s mining practices:
Meanwhile, Don Gouran would likely release mercury into the water and air, some of which would later travel thousands of miles and conceivably poison the same people who had set these events in motion. His gold could also end up on the world market and once there be traded by an American homeowner who, seeking redemption from past economic sins, noted that gold exchange-traded funds had been performing quite well lately – a long, golden chain of cause and effect.
While I complain too much about how what passes as ‘the news’ is not only uninformative but is more often than not crudely misleading, it makes my gratitude for Harper’s Magazine all the more profound.
