The untold story of this GD economy

The first rough-draft of history can't read the picture of our times.
You didn't have to live through the Great Depression to write a chronicle of repetition.
First there was the financial crisis as President Obama entered office. And by "crisis" I don't mean a market downturn. The system failed. Completely.
As in 1929 we were so-o-o-o close to losing the nation.
The Hoover-like Bush-Cheney administration set us up: Regulation went big bye-bye, tax policy transformed surplus into deficit with the rich getting richer and the rest getting poorer and the oil industry, the most subsidized business in America, received corporate freedom to slash and burn for profit -- greed in the name of capitalism.
Hoover lives!
The new administration strives mightily in the Spirit of FDR. But the White House is up against the same throwback forces that made the GD (Great Depression) economy worse than it had to be.
Republican Party and Libertarian ideology prevail to prevent stimulus spending.
The one time a government should spend money it doesn't have is during an economy as slow to move as a politician in an election year.
But the conservatives who want Obama and Democrats out for partisan reasons are saving our way into deeper financial disaster.
It all happened before. We never learn.
No wonder this emotional nation feels a world class downer of frustration trending to grief -- the blues, a second, essential, psychological part of an economic depression.
Element three is the reflection in nature.
The 1930s had the Dust Bowl.
We have the BP Oil Spill.
Don't you dare dismiss the Gulf crisis as a regional problem. The biblical plague of our times trashes lives, finances and well-being directly or indirectly in a threat to life as we know it from sea to shining.
The impact may be less obvious in circles farther from the epicenter. But energy policy, environmental policy, economic policy, public policy, political palaver will all reflect the humanitarian catastrophe.
Americans who don't have out-of-pocket losses nevertheless will experience a looser grip on nationhood.
Black humor, itself an oil pun, may chortle about high-test seafood but is really a cry from the heart.
That's Great Depression material.
How amazing journalism hasn't pieced the picture together.
Too busy covering press conferences, placing anchors on oily beaches and covering the trivia of a BP executive's yacht race and other PR gaffes.
Charter boat captains, coastal politicians and washaterias for pelicans get some coverage.
Yet no one covering the Fed in Washington, the markets in New York or the boom shortage in Biloxi has taken the holistic view of economic life from shore to board room to living room.
Maybe when the out-migration of Gulfies matches the Grapes of Wrath era of Okies we'll see the Dorothea Lange images and the John Steinbeck narratives and the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.  reminders of the cycles of history in endless repetition.
Artists and historians again will have to compensate for journalism's failure. Another missed opportunity.
And that's too GD bad.

Bitter pills and magazine journalism

Maybe it's not the most popular thing to say. Heck, I'll say it anyway.
I actually like The Economist.
I emerge bleary from its Brit grayness -- or is it greyness?  -- as though from a Treasury, State Department, White House, Downing Street briefing.
Not every college course entertained me. That doesn't mean I didn't learn.
Oh, it's a slog between witticisms that are British journalism.
But The Economist falls into a class of media with PBS's The News Hour, world's most boring broadcast.
Yeah, I'm hopeless. I watch Jim Lehrer and his gang for the same reason I read The Economist. After the superficial news treatment on the commercial networks, I need some depth to balance the froth.
I don't need any more of the News Hour-Economist's sugarless medicine, however.
So when Newsweek went to a quasi-Economist makeover, I missed the fun, the elan, the immediacy of the old book I had read and enjoyed since before Ben Bradlee left it to run The Washington Post.
The magazine reformulation didn't work for me nor apparently for a lot of others.
And more bad luck: The recent remake of Newsweek hit newsstands along with the economic downturn.
I hate that.
Yet I love a national newspaper that comes out once a week -- one description of Newsweek's former personality.
It's a tough formula. Years ago a weekly, newsprint, full-size National Observer went broke trying the prescription.
See here, though: Features editors at lots of daily newspapers reverse the method successfully all the time -- publishing a magazine-style section on a daily basis.
What I'm describing is originality, a good fit with the audience and balance between news as info and news as fun.
Media sort themselves out according to the right set of ingredients all the time.
The apothecaries at Newsweek simply didn't get the mix right. I think it was too imitative of The Economist. One of those is enough.
So now Newsweek's bitter pill to swallow is named Doomsday. The magazine will be sold or closed.
No publication wants a dose of imitating that.