Rolling Stone Magazine on the Gun Industry’s Deadly Addiction

I’m studying the psychology of the gun from an archetypal perspective.  That is, I’m looking for the idea or ideas behind the American fascination with guns.  Does the fascination come from a perverted frontier myth or an absolutist view of the Second Amendment?  Does it represent an offshoot of the post-Cold War American military expansion, a muscular expression of the “Stand My Ground” laws, or is it a reason for the growing number of so-called Patriot groups?  What about the post-9/11 militarization of US police forces, with their SWAT teams and tanks?  No one should be particularly surprised that we are currently discussing whether the US government can legally use drone strikes against American citizens on American soil.  We might just as well be talking about video games.

The above list of developments or aberrations—depending on your view of guns—can also be seen as narratives or psychologically-rich story lines that might explain our fascination with guns.  What we are seeing now between and among the National Rifle Association, political leaders of every stripe and a range of third-party stake-holders are really public narratives fighting for supremacy.  If the US didn’t have so much psychological gun baggage, the story-line after the murders of 26 children and teachers in Newtown, as well as in other recent tragedies, would be short and sweet:  federal legislation to enforce universal background checks and limit automatic weapons and the size of magazines would become law.  That’s exactly what happened in the UK in 1996 when sixteen children and one adult were murdered in a Dunblane, Scotland, elementary school.   Under strong public pressure, the UK government quickly passed a comprehensive gun control law.  We saw similar actions in Australia.  In the US, after a two-week post-Newtown quiet period, we get inflammatory rhetoric from the gun lobby preaching Armageddon, with federal agents disguised as storm troopers populating this phony dead-end fiction.  I know of no country in the world where this widely reported, intemperate bombast would not be universally shunned.  Instead, it occupies an honored place in the news cycle. 

So the gun has a hold on us psychologically, as well as culturally and historically.  And the gun lobby has been very successful in appropriating variations of the American frontier myth with images of the lone rifleman as the last defense against the marauders who will invade our homes, especially after natural disasters.  

“The Gun Industry’s Deadly Addiction,” published in the March 14, 2013, issue of Rolling Stone magazine described just how far the business has moved away from our lone frontier rifleman.  According to writer Tim Dickinson, “The once-dependable market for traditional hunting guns has fallen off a cliff.”  Dickinson notes that “As recently as 2008, shotguns, rifles and other traditional hunting weapons made up half of all new civilian gun sales in America,” a billion dollar business.  “Today, hunting guns account for less than a quarter of the market, and the hunting industry is forecasting a 24% drop in revenue by 2025.”

According to Dickinson, one reason for this is that “Gunmakers are on the wrong side of the same demographic curves that haunt the modern Republican Party.  Its customer base is too old, too white, too male and too Southern.  According to Gallop, 61% of white males in the South own guns today. Nationwide, just 18% of Latinos do.” 

Dickinson reports that the gunmakers’ response to declining sales and a dying demographic is to militarize the marketplace by flooding it with battle-ready guns.  And the strategy seems to be working.  “Handgun sales have jumped 70 percent since 2008, racking up an estimated $1.5 billion in sales in 2012.   Revenue from assault rifles has doubled to $489 million.  

According to the author, gun proponents joked that in 2009 Obama’s election was a stimulus plan for the gun industry.  Fear of a black president drove sales.  Fear of a clampdown after the Newtown massacre drove sales.  But overall gun ownership in America is declining.  Fewer than 20% of Americans born after 1980 have a gun in the home.  The gun industry faces the same issues as big tobacco: find replacements.   

Dickinson writes that the firearms industry is planning to break into unconventional demographics and hook the kids, seduce the ladies, turn shooting ranges into live-action video games, arm those preparing for a civil war, and supply cartels and criminals.  He describes the archetypal gun ad for women: “The police are nowhere to be found; it’s up to a woman alone to ward of the sexually threatening ‘predators’ of the city.”

The Rolling Stone piece is a sober account of how the gun industry plans to further militarize America.  It is clear that the myth of the lone rifleman, virtuous and restrained, has given way to a deadly cartoon, dressed in bullet-proof garb and packing an AK-47, wandering the byways of America.  The gun lobby doesn’t have to understand psychology to realize that their marketing plans exploit the shadow side of America.  Thus the fear of a black president, sexual predators, looters, absent police, and a breakdown in civil order.   YouTube is full of this madness with dead-enders engaged in battle-readiness training, anxious for Armageddon that is just around the corner.

The late James Hillman, an archetypal psychologist, in his A Terrible Love of War, has staked out the psychological ground of our gun worship.  “The fond belief (verging on paranoia) that is solely responsible for one’s own salvation and that preservation is the first law of nature (Protestant Darwinism) in a mobile, anomic, class-ridden society may provide grounds for American volatility and insecurity, but not enough ground to account for the American idealization of the gun.  There must be a myth at work.  It is as if the gods have combined to manufacturer the gun, are in the guns, as if the guns have become gods themselves.”

The ground of our discussions about guns in America, largely based on fictions and invented history, might be helped by having an archetypal psychologist and a Rolling Stone journalist at the table.  Hillman writes about what some historians considered the “invented history” of Lexington Green in 1775, spark for the gun lobby and July 4^th, during which only seven Minutemen fired their muskets and only one Red Coat was hit.  For the first two hundred years of our history, the gun was rarely fired.  It was not the Revolutionary War that put the gun in the hands of the people, but the Civil War and millions of armed combatants.

But this observation might not please the National Rifle Association, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and all those who make money on Fourth of July parades.  What if our heralded and highly profitable gun culture was really born on the bloody fields of our Civil War?

That is why gun control is so hard.

Time Inc. and the Disruption of Archetypal Brands

I’ve almost finished a novel about the media industry and the rise and fall of an aging publishing executive who sees the Internet in particular and digital in general as a many-headed hydra that has to be struck down on every occasion.   My White Knight carries a real sword, taken from a German officer in World War II in hand-to-hand combat by his late father, and for a while was a hit on the media circuit because his keynote usually consisted of taking a whack at a rather impressive hydra built for the occasion.  My hero, always true to his own mythology, fills his head with pyrric victories and other wooly notions.   We will forgive him if he thinks that a mobile strategy means moving around a lot and margin is what resides on the edge of a page.  I’m holding out hope that this righteous but incompetent executive might still decide to fall on his luscious sword.

The real sword he takes up is in defense of the brand, because he knows, like many of his fictional friends, that once the brand is diluted, drifting in and out of social media like a lost child, appearing on undifferentiated publishing platforms, its imprimatur, authority and commercial value is reduced.   So our Mr. White might go down in a blaze of glory, a leap from the Eiffel Tower, or in an act of self-immolation during Fashion Week, his inevitable home.   But our man, a raging Lothario with a deep Mother Complex, will die with print magazines in his hands and a song in his heart.

Perhaps the pressure brands face today from the many-headed digital hydra invites a discussion of whether magazines, in this age of digital disruption, social media and the atomization of content, have the same endurance, staying power, and connection to the individual or psyche as they had a generation ago.  After all, magazines are ideas.  They are brands.  They are archetypes.  Certainly the many titles devoted to self-help, self-improvement and DIY in the broadest sense, are based on a kind of psychological positivism.  George Green, the former President of International at Hearst International, said that the most important American export of his generation was the “can-do” attitude embodied in US magazines.  Green is spot on.  I have launched magazines and digital businesses in twenty countries and found that the optimism, audacity, and sense of empowerment found in US titles are considered real draws.

Do we overstate the value of magazine brands?  A magazine can be looked at as an archetype, that is, a big and recognizable idea that informs our modern narrative and instructs our behavior, but digital, demographic, and psychographic realities will eventually have their say and their way.   After all, movies and video games aside, the Wise Old Man is not what he used to be.  He’s on Medicare, walks with a cane and is pretty much ignored by his children and grandchildren.

Given the somewhat apocalyptic reporting on the likely sale of Time Inc.’s big moneymakers (People, InStyle, Real Simple, etc.) to Meredith, I walked by the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle in Manhattan to make sure the company logo was intact and the sky hadn’t fallen yet.  I’ve been hearing about “disruption” in the magazine business for almost twenty years , but there seems something very different and sobering about this story; something very final.

For Jeff Bercovici at Forbes.com, this potential sale is another item in an already calamitous 2013 calendar: Reader’s Digest has filed for bankruptcy and Rolling Stone barely escaped the same fate.  Earlier, Newsweek ceased print publication.   Playboy went to a private equity firm.  In 2009, Businessweek sold for $6 million and TV Guide for a buck.  For Bercovici, the icons are crumbling.  He has a point.  It is reasonable to conclude that the disruption that comes from technology, social media, and programmatic ad buying can be particularly harmful to magazines that no longer resonate substantially within a culture or psychographic set.  So this is not just about content platforms, devices and delivery.  It is also about whether brands continue to touch the collective psyche during these tumultuous times.  Private equity firms can delay a reckoning, but evidence suggests that the magazine brand lifecycle might be shorter than we think.

The New York Times’ David Carr suggests Time Warner management wanted to cash out on its most profitable magazines while they were still throwing off a lot of money.  He writes: “Disruption in various economic sectors takes place over years as insurgents rise and former titans crumble, but its effects often become clear in a signature moment.  The specter of Time Inc., which lent its name to one of the largest media companies in the world, being pushed out the door like a party guest who overstayed his welcome is a stark reminder of how the game had changed.”

Perhaps the most acerbic and chilling account of this story is by Michael Wolff in the Guardian newspaper (www.guardian.co.uk), who makes clear in the article’s title that “The fall of Time Inc. is more about bad leadership than a dying industry.”  Wolff suggests—and many would agree—that the signature moment for Time Warner was when the chairman Gerard Levine “engineered a deal, possibly the most infamous ever engineered in corporate America, in which AOL bought Time Warner, destroying billions of dollars in value, breaking the spirits of tens of thousands of employees, and ending the growth as well as the dominance of the company.”

Wolff writes that, by 2008, Time Inc. was a lost ship and points a finger at the eight-year reign of CEO Ann Moore.  He observes that during this period vast resources and considerable brain power were devoted to digital adaption.  “I’m not sure there is any company that has spent so much time talking about its digital future to such little effect.  This was farce on quite an amazing scale.”

Exaggeration and animus aside, there are compelling ironies here.  Even if Time Inc. did not have its C-level house in order, I know of no publishing company that has given so much back to the business in terms of developing industry standards, specifications, and best business practices shared broadly with other magazines at home and abroad.  I saw much of this first-hand while at MPA, the magazine association.  For a generation, Time Inc. was the first citizen of magazine publishing and its executives were tireless and unselfish in their contributions to the common good.

Michael Wolff has been called the “bitchiest media big foot” around, and he doesn’t hold back here in an account that sometimes reads like fiction.  But he gets some credit for saying things that have been whispered for too long in the corridors of power.  He might be right that Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Fortune,  apparently not included in any prospective deal, will have new life when unencumbered by a large bureaucracy, editorial overhang, and unfocused corporate leadership.  In a new place far from the corner office, these magazines could represent a “fine opportunity.”  These titles represent big ideas, have close ties to our history and culture, and resonate as archetypes.  Perhaps they just need room to breathe.

It is no small irony that Time magazine, during a period that the parent was downsizing staff by 6% and the news about a pending sale was trickling out,  published a 20,000-word cover article entitled “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us” by Steven Brill. It’s an amazing piece and gives lie to the current political discussion about medical care and Medicare.  Everyone should read it.

This represents long-form journalism and a magazine brand at its best. 

Wine Spectator: A Particular Bouquet

I’ll start with a public thank-you to Marvin R. Shanken, Editor and Publisher of Wine Spectator for sending me copies of the January/February and March 2013 issues of this over-sized and luscious magazine.  I knew Mr. Shanken through my work at MPA, the magazine association, but I am nonetheless flattered he would have read my mind and sent me absolutely free-of-charge this gorgeous title, at least until August 31, 2013, because that’s what the mailing label indicates.  But I will play my part and, prompted by an article in the Jan-Feb. issue on the New York Finger Lakes, I promise to drive to the region and fill my SUV with crates of Riesling, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, not because I particularly like these wines, but as a reader I feel a certain responsibility to the advertisers who pick up most of the costs of producing such a fine magazine and are likely paying for me to thumb through Wine Spectator between keystrokes.

The mailing label also tells me this welcome and useful gift is courtesy of my business with Wine.com. This is standard magazine circulation practice called “controlled circulation.”  That is, magazines are sent to a “controlled” group of people who have expressed a deep interest in a subject.  For example, I sent scuba diving magazines to registered divers, bicycling magazines to those who cycling more than 5,000 miles a year, and running magazines to those who participate in more than a dozen organized running events annually.  And this is very good business because such readers are often more valuable to a publisher and advertiser than those who purchase a discounted subscription, get it as a gift, or from an online magazine agent.  It is not unusual for publishers to raise a toast to this important readership.  We are money in the bank and when spoken about in business meetings we are saluted when the executives talk about the “lifetime value of the customer.”  That’s us.

In its heft, size and capacity there is something very comforting about Wine Spectator.  Sorry, I am now talking about the business model and not the wine.  I have no specific knowledge of this title’s P/L, but I must make note of its high and consistent pricing strategies across print, digital and back issues.  Other magazine would kill for a metric that says a lot about reader engagement and where she might reside in terms of purchase intent, another phrase beloved by the audience development folk. 

I do recall in those early, heady days of digital disruption that this magazine was not eager to jump feet-first aboard the digital bandwagon and romance every e-reader that came down the pike or lust after a presence on every platform.  Good move.  

Over the years, various media wags have suggested that the print magazine business in time will bifurcate with the high-touch, high-end glossies such as Wine Spectator and Vogue at one end and highly-focused special interest magazines, such as Snail Watching and Attic Vases at the other end.  These categories will survive and prosper.   Those left in the middle, such as a Newsweek will be sold for a buck and go digital only.  The publishing spectrum has become more complicated than that, but Wine Spectator is assured a place at the head-of-the-table.

The magazine is aging well.     

Future-Proofing Content with PRISM Source Vocabulary

By 2005-2006, most publishers knew at least intuitively that they had lost the browser wars.  This lament was nicely framed in 2008 by an NBC television executive during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, hammering home the obvious.  Publishers were exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes. 

Coincidentally or not, the drum-beat at this time from the magazine executive suites became louder and very public:  they vowed to get more revenue from content on whatever the emerging digital channels might look like.  The introduction of the iPad raised the stakes around this collective vow and publishers responded with alacrity and no little success in adapting to the new tablet and mobile universe.  Magazines scrambled to produce content for the voracious app stores and become players in the emerging and constantly changing “device and content eco-systems.”

Though much credit should go to magazine publishers for their response to this latest digital tsunami, the fact of the matter is that magazine weren’t ready for this onslaught in some very fundamental ways, including organization and workflow.  The tablet gloriously entered a print-centric, serial workflow that simply doesn’t scale.  Using today’s workflows, tools and technologies, producing multiple tablet editions results in escalating staff costs, redundancies, and lost time.  The existing print-based workflow is unsustainable and increasingly unprofitable.  To create highly interactive digital publications for devices, most publishers were forced to compromise on design and user experience using a variety of tablet workflow tools.  These tools tend to produce flat content with active elements stacked on top, with the result more like a print magazine than an interactive media package.  The need for flexible, sustainable, and fungible solutions is not only a good idea; in a publishing environment faced with extraordinary pressures on costs and digital revenues, this need is also a business imperative.  Thank goodness there is a solution.

NextPub, the industry’s technical incubator, was launched in 2010 by IDEAlliance with widespread support.  An immediate goal was to address the above workflow issues to help make multi-channel publishing simple and efficient.  The nextPub Working Group (WG) envisioned ways to monetize content beyond today’s publishing channels by utilizing a “Dynamic Content Architecture” from which additional publishing channels can emerge when new content collections or “chunks” are demanded by consumers, as foreshadowed by Flipboard, Pulse or Zite.  The central idea is to future-proof content no matter what the future brings.

The nextPub Publishing Model is based on digital capture and management of all content and associated rich media.  Source content must be semantically rich enough to enable the publisher to select content and automate layout and delivery to a wide variety of publishing platforms.  To this end, the WG developed the PRISM Source Vocabulary Specification (PSV), designed to support issue-based publications as well as to enable publishers to aggregate content in new digital content channels.  The tagline, The Source is the Solution, gets to the heart of the matter.

According to Dianne Kennedy, VP, Emerging Technologies, IDEAlliance, PSV defines a framework of robust metadata elements that can be used to configure federated source content and rich media repositories.  Simply put, the more structurally rich content is, the more useful it will be and the more adaptive it will become as we continue to re-imagine and re-vision business opportunities presented by a Dynamic Content Architecture.  As Karen McGrane, content evangelist and Managing Director at Bond Art +Science observes, “Publishers don’t get to decide which device their customers use to read their content—readers do.  Getting content out onto all these different new devices and platforms requires a dynamic and flexible content architecture, which PSV provides.”

PSV, based on PRISM, is a way to describe content, via XML, in consistent and predictable ways using a common vocabulary.  This technology facilitates the repurposing and delivery of structured, format-neutral content.  Introduced more than a decade ago, PRISM was instrumental in delivering print-based content to the aggregators.  PSV, offering a more robust metadata set, is designed to deliver rich media to a range of digital platforms, channels and devices.  In short, PSV takes PRISM beyond print.  And here the need is great.

 As noted above, today’s adapted workflows that design for print, then remake for tablets are inefficient, redundant and slow.  An adapted product has limitations.  For example, most tablet versions are two dimensional like print and require huge downloads.  Conversely, a digital first or digital-early workflow first captures text as PSV in a central repository, transforms the content via templates and scripts, links ads and multimedia, and publishes to print, web, ePub3, HTML5, etc.  PSV is really about capturing semantically-rich, platform-agnostic content early and then selecting, transforming, packaging and delivering that content.

A primary attribute of PSV is its flexibility.  NextPub recognizes that each publisher has her own business models and strategies.  PSV is a framework that can be tailored to the needs of individual publishers.  For example, a publisher might need no more than a simple content repository from which content can be assembled into print and into a digital edition on a monthly basis.  Another publisher might want a content repository to assemble print and digital editions.  Also, it might want to assemble year-end, best-of, special editions for print and tablets.  It might also want to track usage history and usage rights for content, plus the relationship to other content.  And so on.  A framework for robust metadata not only allows such flexibility, it will also invite business opportunities.  As Ann Rockley, another content evangelist, notes in this context, “adaptive content lets you automatically provide your content, anytime, anywhere, and on any device.  Adaptive content is limited only by your design decisions, the functionality of the device being used and the intelligence of your content.”

An additional advantage to PSV is that it adds dimension to digital-first content creation by way of its very rich metadata vocabulary.  PSV can provide deep content to enable sophisticated designs and implementations using more descriptive metadata that informs Java Script and CSS.  Design-based publications have to date employed only minimal automation based on the belief that design comes first and you can’t automate design!  PSV rich metadata offer compelling ways to automate layout and design.

Sarah Wachter-Boettcher, a content specialist at Rosenfield Media, reminds us that metadata is not an end in itself.  “It’s about seeing structures through the lens of meaning and storytelling, and building relationships across disciplines so that our databases reflect this richness and complexity.”  Editors have an important role in this narrative of the metadata.

PSV is royalty-free, open source, and facilitates a design-neutral approach to content creation.  PSV can be used as a source for direct transformation to packaging formats, such as ePub 3.0, or to the web, mobile and tablet apps.  And PSV can serve as a core metadata model in a DAM or CMS to manage assets or deliver them to multiple platforms.  And it is important to note that nextPub will serve as an incubator for tools to enhance tomorrow’s productivity and has invited technology companies to participate in the development of such tools.

Bill Kasdorf, Vice President, Apex Content Solutions, captures the spirit and the promise of PSV.  “PRISM Source Vocabulary promises to become the Rosetta Stone of the magazine publishing world.  It will enable all the players in the complex space—publishers, advertisers, editorial and production staff, system developers, and service providers—to speak a common language.  PSV is a fundamental enabling technology for our brave new multichannel, multiplatform world, encompassing print while efficiently extending publishers’ content to the online, tablet, eReader and mobile environments.”

PSV has already been adopted by the Japanese Magazine Publishing Association and supported by a broad community of publishers who seek fuller content monetization.  Full PSV Specifications, a video technical overview, and details about the nextPub Working Group can be found at www.nextpub.org or www.idealliance.org.

The Archetype of the Gun

I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I am surrounded by guns, starting with my URL.  I thought I was clever coming up with www.magtech.org because everyone would know the site referred to magazine technology.  Except for those looking for www.magtech.com or www.magtechammunition.com to make their next assault weapon or ammunition purchase.

A few weeks ago, The Journal News, a local newspaper, posted a map on its web site that showed with digital teardrops the actual locations and addresses of homes of those who had a permit to carry a handgun.  This act was in response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting and, however well-intentioned, had a blowback effect because some permit holders had moved, given up their guns, or died.  And it didn’t include rifles.  So the newspaper squandered an opportunity.  Nonetheless, it had a sobering effect on the community.  Has the guy down the block who might have a gun been acting weird lately?

I’ve lived in the north Bronx and Brooklyn, New York, and assumed that most people had a gun or a knife and acted according.  I’ve had guns pulled on me while on business travel to Mexico and Romania.  But I’ve had good gun instructors from an early age.  As a detective, my father carried a gun and taught his three sons gun safety.   My brother-in-law, a US Army veteran who saw vicious fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and earned a Purple Heart, taught me to shoot skeet along the Ohio River.  I purchased my first gun, a 12-gauge shotgun from Sears, for small game hunting.   While in the Navy, I fired everything I could get my hands on, including deck guns.  My father-in-law taught me how to hunt deer using a 12-gauge shotgun and “pumpkin balls” or lead slugs good within a hundred yards.  I will always remember him for emphasizing the “sport” in sportsman.  In this spirit, I took up hunting with bow and arrow.

I gave up my last gun, used to keep down the groundhog population, when I moved off a farm in Pennsylvania more than a decade ago.  So I’m quite comfortable, digital gun mapping aside, around guns.   But why are we Americans so uncomfortable talking about guns and about placing certain restrictions on assault weapons and size of magazines?  The murders of the children and teachers in Newtown, Conn., have become an all-too-familiar narrative, bookmarked by the media.   Sadness, horror and outrage are followed by political vows that this time things will be different and something will be done.  In the meantime, the NRA vows that nothing will change and waits for the Connecticut effect to “blow over.”  The organization knows that it has time and much of the Congress on its side.     

I was working in England at the time of the Dunblane, Scotland, massacre, in which 16 children and a teacher were murdered by a man carrying four handguns and 743 cartridges.  It was widely reported that the shooter was a pedophile and deeply troubled by being booted out of the Boy Scouts.  The outrage in the UK lasted more than a few news cycles.  The outrage lasted.  Period.  I recall the punk rock band UK Subs, releasing their “Dunblane” single with the lyrics: “After Dunblane, how can you hold a gun and say you’re innocent.”   This guilt-by-association and similar effects worked.  By 1997, the UK had outlawed all handguns, with some exceptions.

Of course, the US is not the UK.  We have a Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment that gives the people the right to keep and bear arms.  A common sense approach to gun restriction would be to state the obvious.  No right is absolute.  We can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater.  Why the absolutism when it comes to gun control?  The answer to this question won’t come from the hacks, pundits or the fringe.  The answer must come from psychology and the gods of mythology, all of whom are well-armed.

As a veteran, a media crank, and a student of psychology I keep the book, A Terrible Love of War by psychologist James Hillman close at hand because the author utters the unthinkable and rarely stated thesis: that America and most of the world loves war; that war is constant throughout history and ubiquitous around the globe; and war is considered normal and acceptable.  Hillman reminds us of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words:  “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today … is my own Nation.”

To make his point, Hillman notes there have been 16,000 wars of consequence during the last 5,000 years, more or less.  The author would ask us to re-read The Iliad and get to know the Greek God of war, Ares, and his more familiar Roman cousin, Mars, and the myths and legends around these gods to better understand that “the spirit of war and the rage of battle are archetypal, forced upon all animal life, all gender and all societies.” War is indeed inhuman, but it is also sublime.  In the film Patton, the general tells a soldier how much he loves war, more than life itself.  The myths tell us that Mars, no matter how much of a bastard he was, was never far from Venus.

Hillman walks among the mythical figures as if they were next-door neighbors.  But his interest is in psychology, not story-telling.  He reminds us, often, that “Myths provide archetypal ways of insighting the human condition; they present psychological truth such as we discover when turning to war with Mars/Ares in the background of our minds.”  Myths “ask the psyche to invent and speculate; to listen and be amused; religion, first of all, calls for belief.”

So what about guns in this psychological tableau?  The author takes us on an excursion to Japan which had gun control from 1543 to 1879.  The Portuguese introduced guns to Japan and that nation, already skilled at metallurgy, quickly became expert gunsmiths, improving the products in fundamental ways.  Then the country turned away from guns until Commodore Perry arrived in 1853.  Hillman suggests a number of reasons for this.  The skill of engagement moved from soldier to manufacturer; the warrior class didn’t want peasants getting the gun; Japan had no external gun enemies.  The gun was an “outside” idea.  For the author, more to the point is that “The cult of the sword was ancestral, symbolic, and religious—and also aesthetic.”  The sword was associated with elegant movement. The gun required award kneeling positions.

Hillman sees aesthetics as one possible solution or way out; the more beauty, the less violence.  He writes that, during the European Age of Enlightenment, there was a dis-taste for bloodshed and a reluctance to kill fellow Europeans.  Serious thinkers, including Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Swift, Samuel Johnson and many more advanced “a kind of guerrilla warfare against the cant and hypocrisy that form the fabric of nationalistic patriotism, sentimental personalism, and light-hearted religiosity so signal to our times.”

He adds that the idea that “culture restrains war is being proven in reverse.  Along with the American state’s promotion of bellicose militarism, it withdraws from the arts.  The impoverishment is furthered by debasing the language, neglecting education beyond occupational training, and narrowing the rich complexity of religious studies to one’s own favorite brand.”

At a recent NRA convention of Wausau, Wisconsin, The Reality News, not specifically tied to the gun lobby, published an article, “What Would Davy Crockett Say?”  The newspaper calls for Secession and a Combo Civil/Re-Revolutionary War and pushed this cant to the extreme.

This kind of rhetoric makes Hillman’s point.  In A Terrible Love of War, he argues that we need new myths and a heightened sense of aesthetics to explain our love of war and guns.  America’s love of guns is certainly tied to the frontier myth and the fantasy we have about taking things into our own hands.  American literature has a long tradition of the male antagonist as outsider, on-the-run, or in combat, anything to avoid “civilization” and the embrace of the feminine.  It is this simple archetype of nostalgia, co-opted by politicians and cause marketers, that asks “What would Davy Crockett Say?,” sounding very much like the Disney version but deadly as gunfire in its primitive, inelegant, and dime novel chant.

Hillman is too complicated and rich for summary.  He’s best read in the original.  He acknowledges that the pen is not mightier than the sword, that the expression is a writer’s delusion.  But he continues, in this book and others, to take us back to the eighteenth century and the Age of Enlightenment “when orthodox faith was giving way to freethinking,” suggesting aesthetic passions restrain war.  He writes that “all the arts and sciences, and the intimacies of talk, letters and diaries, are lived on slowness and its pleasures.”  By this, Hillman means the “slow aesthetics of workshop, studio, husbandry, garden, and laboratory, taming haste but not its passion.  Venus ‘victrix’ still wants to win and conquer the task at hand.  Aesthetic intensity draws Mars onto a parallel path.”

Less than one percent of Americans serve in the military.  A handful in government set military policy and send us to war.  Most of this is done in secret.  Organized religion, especially Christianity, offers no real counter.  Mars is well represented.  We need more of Venus in the dialogue; more of the feminine. Today, the conversation about guns is narrow and metallic, made intentionally circular and hollow by the convening parties.  We need more artists, poets, scientists, philosophers in this circle of fire.  Hillman asks us to imagine a “nation whose first line of defense is each citizen’s aesthetic investment in some cultural form.”  Might war lose some of its magic?  The author suggests that “aesthetic passion provides multiple fields for engagements with the inhuman and sublime certainly less catastrophic than the fields of battle.”

Until we get our heads around the notion that the gun, and the way it is worshiped in America, is an archetype and therefore a god, gun control, however useful, is a legalistic enterprise.  We should be far more interested in what Venus or Aphrodite has to say on this matter than the “king of the wild frontier” musing about the Alamo. 

What Media Companies Can Learn from Crowd-Funding Kickstarter

I frequently mention Kickstarter, the crowd-sourced funding platform, to my publishing associates, not because it represents a formula easily embraced by traditional media companies, but because the platform reaffirms a deep current of creativity in the country and in the world, with much of this energy exploring opportunities in print, digital, and multi-media magazines.  In other words, this is familiar territory for magazine publishers.  The range of activities funded is really quite remarkable.  With Kickstarter, we have a curious and to-date successful market-driven, community-shaped and governed funding formula that provides a collective nose for quality while putting its money, so to speak, where its mouth is.

I have been a fan of Kickstarter for some time but had not fully understood the scale of projects involved, the impressive success rate or the amount of money pledged.  The numbers are impressive.  The platform, launched in April 2009, has recorded over $350 million in pledged funding by more than 2.5 million people who underwrote in excess of 30,000 projects.  Kickstarter reports that 44% of projects have reached their funding goal.  Please consult www.kickstarter,com for specific project-by-project and category stats.

Each project at Kickstarter is independently created and the filmmakers, poets, artists, musicians and authors on the site have complete control and responsibility for their projects.  They share the project with the community, usually through a short video, and discuss funding goals and related details.  The community decides what gets funded and at what level.  An actual, visible clock is ticking during the funding cycle (but there are no barkers in the background).  Backers only pay if the funding goal is met.  Kickstarter draws the line at charity per se, causes or opportunities “to fund my life.”  The project requires a tangible goal, such as publishing a book, magazine, or a multi-media version.  And the site takes 5% of what is collected.

As of this date, there were 392 publishing projects either funded or looking for funding.  I make this point because this is a dynamic site populated with dynamic projects that come and go, depending on crowd-sourced funding.   In terms of successfully funded projects and interest levels, publishing comes in behind music, film and video, and art.  While most efforts raise under $10,000, an increasing number are raising tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.  “To Be or Not to Be,” a choosable path version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with jokes, ghosts and a never seen pirate scene, has raised $580,905 from 15,352 backers and is currently the most funded projects on the site.   A plan to collect and publish thirty-five years of retrospective KAL “Economist” cartoons had, to date, raised $76,655.  The cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher explains that he was an independent contractor with the magazine, thus the crowd-sourcing.  At the end of the day, the community decides.  People who might think entrepreneurs might be too well-heeled for such a fund raising effort don’t have to contribute.

And community tastes are eclectic.  A book featuring the work of Brom, the dark fantasy artist, has so-far raised $235,319;  “Howler,” a magazine about soccer: $69,000;  “Invisible,” an award-winning radio show, more than $170,000;  and a book about the connection economy, $287,000.  These projects have all surpassed desired funding levels.  The artists decide what incentives they will provide for individuals willing to fund their projects.  It could be a signed book, a special collection, a signed cartoon print, or an actual party.  It is very clear that the potential reward is not driving this support of creativity.

The preceding examples are exceptions.  As noted, most successful efforts raise less than $10,000.  And there are lots of entreaties that get little or no response.  The numbers might change, but publishing proposals, including “Car Living,” “Making Compost and Compost Tea,” and “The Unemployment Cookbook” have attracted only a few pledges.  A Charles Bronson biography has gained no traction.  “How to Survive in the Navy,” written by a twenty-year veteran, has raised $50.00.   

Have a look.  There’s an abundance of serious and playful energy on the platform, from videos that dramatize the intersection of Christianity and anarchy to a proposal for Ply, a magazine for handspinners that is already fully-funded at more than $30,000.  The video business pitches from by these entrepreneurs would be very familiar to traditional publishers.

At the very least, Kickstarter is telling us what is hot from a crowd-funding point-of-view and provides riveting examples of artists who have the will, passion and daring to bring dreams to fruition.  Up to now, these creatives have lacked a reliable source of funding.  Now they have a crack at it.

Small, independent, special-interest magazines might be on the lookout for competitors coming from this sector.  From Ziff, to Rodale, to Weider, the passion of the founders came before the money.  Nothing here would be surprising to those trailblazers.  And Kickstarter now brings the two together in a public, transparent way.

Also, given the attention to guidebooks, mountain bike trails, and local beers and wines, regional publishers might take notice.  And media companies interested in long-form journalism might consider the generous funding of Project M (Matter) that focuses on the future of science and technology journalism.  It has received more than $140,000 in pledges and is fully funded.

At Kickstarter, there is something for everyone.

Armstrong on Oprah’s Couch & Others in the Wings

Prior to Lance Armstrong’s “mea culpa” I was almost relieved to learn that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had for months milked a relationship with his non-existent, fantasy girlfriend, who enjoyed a timely death.  With this jewel from Deadspin.com, I knew that all was right with the world and we should be perfectly content in the digital zone of shifting personas, fictions, and occasional lies, all in service to our desperate need to be amused and at the same time pay homage to Emily Dickinson, the poet who advised us more than a century ago “To tell all the truth but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.”

I prepared for the interviews, now called the Great Redemption or the Stale Invention by those looking for the CliffsNotes version of psyche, by reviewing the history of doping in professional cycling and reflecting on the general indifference over time to this infraction on the part of cycling associations, sponsors and the media.  All of this hardboiled information is only a Wikepedia page away.  

And the historical chatter plays nicely into Armstrong’s narrative.  I was editor and publisher of Bicycling magazine for a decade prior to Armstrong’s mountainous lies.   The magazine’s focus was on fitness and recreational riding, but we were certainly aware of instances of professional doping.  When we learned that a number of American cyclists had engaged in blood-doping during the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, we were late to the fray.  Blood-doping was not illegal at this time, but the episode did not mark the magazine’s finest hour.  Certainly advertisers and sponsors are not interested in this seamy side.  This is not what 7-Eleven, then owned by the Southland Corp., signed on for when it sponsored cycling in the LA Olympics.

I halfway expected Armstrong to tell Oprah that the first confirmed case of doping was by a Welsh cyclist in 1886 who might have died from a cocktail of cocaine, caffeine, and strychnine.  There’s a good chance that the story is apocryphal, but it would have added another dead persona to an all-too-familiar refrain.  The devil and the weight of history made me do it.  I’ve been told that in 1930 the Tour de France organizers informed riders that they would not be providing drugs anymore.  This is much too precious to be untrue.  In any event, doping went underground.  Just barely.

The history of the Tour is a history of riders trying to beat the rules.  The entire Belgium team had to drop out of the race in 1956, collectively complaining that they had eaten bad fish the night before at a hotel that didn’t serve the flesh.  The fish story seemed to have currency at least until the 1970s.  Renowned French rider Jacques Anquetil is quoted as saying to the press that “only a fool would ride the Bordeaux-Paris race on just water.”  Apparently, President Charles de Gaul praised the racer for his forthrightness.  I would have been more taken in by Armstrong if he dropped a little French into his cold-as-ice, fishy recantation.

In 1965, performance -enhancing drugs were declared illegal.  Riders protested but found ways around the tests, such as carrying someone else’s urine in a condom or other vessels handed out along the way by the little lame balloon man.  Over time, cyclists got smarter, such as using masking agents to hide steroids.  In the late-1980’s, EPO, which boosted red cell production, entered the mix.  In 1991, the entire Dutch team, suspected of EPO use, withdrew from the race due to food poisoning.  And so it went. 

The storyline is sadly familiar.  Doping has been endemic in professional cycling for a century-and-a-half.  Racers took a wide array of cocktails to get the advantage.  The various cycling governing bodies have been slow to respond to changes in technology and rider ingenuity.  Given the establishment of the World Anti-Doping Association (WADA) and its US counterpart (USADA), professional cycling is now much cleaner.  But the record shows that as recently as 2011 and 2012 cyclists were caught using illegal drugs in the Tour de France and other major races.  

Historically, the International Cycling Association (the UCI), which governs the sport, appears not to have gotten in front of this enormous problem in a timely manner and by some accounts looked the other way, though the “biological passport” introduced a few years ago has certainly helped.  Still, the International Olympic Committee has informally suggested that it might be in cycling’s best interest to take time off from the Olympics to get its house in order.  

Understandably, professional cycling is keen to put the Lance Armstrong era behind it.  Phil Liggett, a longtime television commentator for the Tour and until recently an Armstrong supporter, wants the sport to move past “that era” to a new day with new blood, so to speak.  Fair enough, but those of us in the media who have been beating the drums might also be held to an accounting.

Professional cycling is a business and therefore is about the money.  Armstrong said during the interview that he had lost $75 million in one day when all his sponsors left him.  This is when the world really started to take notice.   I heard nothing particularly new in the Armstrong interviews.  His rationale—everybody dopes and he was just leveling the playing field—while unacceptable, nonetheless holds at least  a grain of truth.  

While there were a number of gutsy journalists and authors, especially David Walsh, who exposed the facts early on, it took the USADA , called earlier a “nefarious drug agency” by Liggett, to roll out 1,000 pages of under-oath testimony from Armstrong’s team members and associates to bring an abundance of toxic truth to the proceedings.  In the long run, this will prove to be the real story, not the Oprah soap.  

If as reported Paramount plans to release a movie about the Lance Armstrong affair, it might want to devote at least a few scenes to the legal dance about doping jurisdiction between and among the USADA, the UCI, and USA Cycling, its American arm.  You can read the documents at www.usada.org.  I have read them all and don’t get the sense that the UCI’s first consideration was as a seeker of truth.  But the film maker should move past that and get to the Floyd Landis affidavit under oath, which has provided the basis for a whistle blower’s suit enjoined by the  federal government against Armstrong and his business associates.

Landis, an Armstrong teammate and a Tour de France winner who lost his crown due to doping, seemed to be this unconvincing guy originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  On camera, he had neither the charm nor the Armstrong charisma and few appeared to believe him.  That has changed.  As it stands, the affidavit claims that Armstrong and his associates, with big team sponsorship money from the US Postal Service in their back pocket, schemed from the very beginning  to employ systematic doping to win at least six Tour medals, thus owning the record.

The affidavit also states that Armstrong donated $100,000 to the UCI for its anti-doping work in 2001.  UCI acknowledges this, but denies nefarious intent.  Landis claims that Armstrong’s business partner Thomas Weisel funneled through a foundation “approximately $500,000 to $725,000 each year” (2000 through 2003) to USA Cycling, the US governing body.  Landis states under oath that this was an effort to control the official US race sanctioning body.  The document reads that Mr.  Landis “believes that these conflicts of interest and overlapping relationships between USA Cycling, the USA Cycling Foundation, and Thomas Weisel helped make it possible for the USPS Team to carry on an extensive program of systematic doping team athletes during the period relevant to this complaint.”  And it has been widely reported that an Armstrong representative offered between $200,000 and $250,000 in 2004 to USADA for anti-doping activities and it was immediately rejected.  Armstrong has denied this.

As someone who spent more than a decade in the cycling media business, I am less interested in Armstrong’s deceit, which has been whispered about for years at trade shows and bike events, than in whether the various governing bodies and their agents enabled his behavior and received financial consideration in return.  Racers, casual riders, sponsors and advertisers will likely want these questions answered too.

Armstrong has cast a huge, damaging and suffocating shadow over professional cycling for almost two decades, steamrolling his opposition and obscuring fine accomplishments by other American riders, especially Greg LeMond, now the only American winner of the Tour (three times; in 1986,’89 and ’90).  LeMond suffered Armstrong’s wrath and the business consequences for raising doping issues, including the loss of his bike business.

The Washington Post quotes a LeMond post-interview Facebook note in which the Tour winner calls for UCI officials to resign:  “You know damn well what has been going on in cycling ….The problem for sport is not drugs but corruption.  You are the epitome of the word corruption.”

The UCI has announced an Independent Commission to investigate doping issues but without a limited Truth and Reconciliation and Amnesty program.  USADA CEO Travis Tygart responded that the “UCI’s refusal to agree to allow a limited opportunity for riders to come forward and be truthful without fear of retribution or retaliation from the UCI” suggests that the “UCI has blindfolded and handcuffed the Independent Commission to ensure a pre-determined outcome (www.usada.org).”

One can understand LeMond’s anger after what can be called a long and painful “shunning” by the cycling powers.  But questions remain:  how could Armstrong dope for so long, involve so many people and often in plain view without the governing bodies and other officials and stake-holders being aware of it?

Time is not on the side of the crusaders.  German anti-doping specialist Mario Thevis noted last year that “100 variants of EPO may exist without a test (www.velonation.com).”  Professional bike racing may soon face a time when drug doping becomes too sophisticated for the national and international governing bodies to monitor.  

And that would not be good for business.