Time Must Have A Stop

by

R.E. Prindle

 

President Trump is really changing our lives.  I’m doing all kinds of things I haven’t done for years.  I bought a copy of the National Review with a cover story about President Trump and that sour grape Obama.  Now, after forty years on I actually bought a copy of Time Magazine because the cover story promotes a revolution against the President.  ‘The Resistance Rises (in pink, indicating a female resistance).  How  A March Becomes A Movement.  The picture portrays the pink bonnet of the revolting ladies.  A symbol of the vulva makes the front cover of Time.  Pornography in disguise.  The whole issue of only 60 pages drums up a revolution. 

Sixty pages, and Time calls that a magazine.  I remember when they were thick, a hundred twenty pages or more,  maybe two hundred, with a hundred pages of prime advertising.  This pitiful thing has ads from Kelloggs and Chevy and a bunch of medical stuff, White guy with hepatitis.

Time-Life used to be the life blood of intellectual America then they were merged with Warner Bros. of Hollywood and it was all downhill from there.  The mag was founded about 1923  by Henry Luce and others and quickly became a success, then they bought the Life name for mega bucks from its publisher.  The first Life was a humor magazine of the early century that fell on hard times when the country lost its sense of humor, hasn’t found it yet.

Founded in New York City, Time posed as a conservative mag.  But as NYC was 25% Jewish and another 25% Communist or left leaning the staff reflected the demographics of the city which meant it was boring from within staffed mainly with Reds.  Henry Luce married Clare Booth which made her the famous Clare Booth Luce.  She had been an NYC party girl of liberated morals.  At one time the mistress of the notorious Bernard Baruch, the advisor of presidents.  She never lost her attachment after marrying Henry.  She even bought a house next door to Bernie, presumably so she wouldn’t have to walk too far. 

That was in the early forties at the same time Whittaker Chambers began his rise to editorship of the mag.  While hiring a notorious Communist like Chambers may have seemed a folly to more balanced minds, Chambers claimed he had renounced Communism a few months before assuming the job.

Possibly, but isn’t that a Communist ploy to insinuate operatives inside the Capitalist horse so they can bore from within?  Sometime later infamous Red, Max Eastman, who also supposedly saw the light, rose to prominence at Reader’s Digest.  After having thought and lived as Communists for decades did they suddenly learn to think like seasoned Capitalists?  Does anyone believe that?  Send 9.99 and a stamped return envelope  and I’ll return a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.  I said ‘a’ deed not ‘the’ deed.  Read the fine print.

Whittaker Chambers made big money at Time through the forties until he suddenly quit his lucrative job for a non-lucrative job exposing Communists in government.  Exposing Communists is OK but proving it is another thing.  How many dedicated conservatives made themselves look like fools chasing Reds?  Is it possible that Whittaker was maybe a lure to destroy the Right?  If Alger Hiss hadn’t lied Nixon would never have redeemed his name, and to this day there are people to defend Hiss even though subsequent information has proven that he not only lied but was a Communist agent of the deepest dye.  My thought is that while Chambers may have turned in his card did he ever sever his loyalty to the Party?

So, with all of the Time-Life publications there was a Red tinge to them.  Kind of like when you feel like throwing up but never do.

We all read Time, I began shortly after graduation from high school after I joined the Navy.  At home the closest we got to intellectual matters was a subscription to the National Geographic.  I was a fairly avid reader then from 1957 to 1965 when I realized that the mag was not only pink underneath but totally dishonest.  Many of their news stories, maybe all for what anyone knows,  were total fiction.  What spurred me to leave was Time’s reporting of Howard Hughes departure from Las Vegas. The guy, or woman, who wrote the ‘eye witness’ report wasn’t even there and it didn’t happen as it was reported.

During the period I was reading the magazine though, Time-Life was instrumental in creating the culture of the early Sixties.  The two magazines made the art scene of New York.  That’s where they published.  While billed as a national magazine it was essentially New York in its outlook not much different from the New Yorker in that respect.   Andy Warhol might have lived and died a cypher without the fabulous exposure, or advertising if you will, of Time-Life.  Life even put Ed Sanders of the Fugs on their cover.  How’s that for diving deep into the barrel?  Life even gave a photo essay to Edie Sedgwick, one of Warhol’s drama queens.  Unknown beyond the Hudson but making the scene in New York City.

And Now, Vol. 189 #4, 2017 this pitiful relic fighting for its life attempts to make an exhibition of snit a movement.  Given that the mag was fiction in 1965 what is its coverage of the President likely to be?

I’ll let you know as soon as I read a couple articles.  I’ve already looked over the Chevy and Kellogg’s ads.  Never bought either and now I never will. Boycott everything that smells of the other half.  A pity though that after a hundred years it is a small distance from now until Time must have a stop.