MEDIA CIRCUS
With the Small Ls
One thing about the libertarians, they'll let anyone in. Or so it seems at the libertarian magazine Reason, which celebrates its 35th anniversary with the December issue. I began writing for it occasionally a couple of years ago, after I'd realized that a run-in with my daughter's old elementary school principal about her asthma medicine - he'd claimed keeping an inhaler in her backpack rather than in his office was breaking "zero-tolerance" rules about drugs - would make a perfect Reason piece, combining as it did two of the magazine's favorite targets: officious government bureaucrats and anti-drug hysteria.
Unfettered access to drugs is kind of a line-in-the-sand for this crowd; Reason senior editor Jacob Sullum's Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use was published, to much libertarian ballyhoo, this spring. But although I believe in the Reason motto of free minds and free markets, and certainly share its aversion to the politics of victimization, I can't really get excited about drug decriminalization (unless its over-the-counter Vicodin just for me personally). Still, as I say, they don't mind if your beliefs aren't orthodox. So Reason editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie invited me and a bunch of other L.A. journos, none of us true believers, to be his guests at the Reason Foundation's anniversary dinner a couple of weeks ago at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
Blogger Matt Welch, who voted against Ward Connerly's failed "color-blind" initiative Proposition 54 (proper libertarians agreed with its curbs on government questioning about race), is a Reason associate editor; his wife, French journalist Emmanuelle Richard, misses her homeland's system of government-subsidized healthcare; Slate's Mickey Kaus is constantly described as a neoliberal, whatever that means; and I've actually heard Salon TV critic Heather Havrilesky, who wrote a humor column for the old online magazine Suck that Gillespie liked, announce in polite company that she's a liberal feminist. But for all of us that night, it was free minds, free markets, and free dinner.
"I've got my own views - I'm a pretty strict anarcho-capitalist," Gillespie shrugged when I asked him about this later. "But that isn't the whole ball of wax. For the magazine we're always desperate for stories that illustrate things. You don't have to be a card-carrying libertarian."
At traditionally liberal magazines, on the other hand, anyone who strays from the party line can get exiled to the gulag. Christopher Hitchens remains a man of the left but last year quit his Nation column because of his support for the war on terror. The American Prospect hired Matt Welch, who considers himself a liberal, as its media critic several months ago. But it reneged on the offer - and killed his first column - citing Welch's association with Republican Richard Riordan (who at the time was talking to Welch about starting a new L.A. paper) and the libertarians at Reason.
That's the sort of rigid thinking that drove Reason founder Lanny Friedlander, then a Boston University student equally repelled by the left and the right, crazy when he founded the magazine in 1968. "We are trapped in the middle of a street war between two breeds of pigs, the police and the New Left," he wrote in an essay called "Animal Farm 1970." A few years later, Friedlander sold the magazine to three contributors; one of them, an M.I.T.-trained engineer named Robert W. Poole Jr., also began the Reason Foundation, which funds the magazine as well as the Reason Public Policy Institute, a think tank. Reason was published out of Poole's Santa Barbara garage for a few years but since 1986 has been officially based on South Sepulveda Boulevard in West L.A.
The location here, rather than near its Boston roots, is fitting - free-thinkers have a natural tendency to light out for the territories - but, actually, as Gillespie points out, "we now reside in cyberspace as much as anywhere." He lived in L.A. for a few years in the mid-'90s when he was a Reason sub-editor but now edits the magazine from the college town of Oxford, Ohio, where his wife has a job in academia. Most of the staff lives in or near Washington, D.C., the publisher's in Connecticut, the art director's in Arizona, the web editor (Tim Cavanaugh, of the late Suck) remains in San Francisco, and Welch, who lives in Silver Lake, works mostly out of his home rather than the magazine's offices across town.
Reason and its fellow travelers are libertarians with a small "l," by the way. Neither the magazine nor the Reason Foundation has any connection with the Libertarian Party. I once confused them in print and am still mortified to remember the gently patronizing five-word correction I got from Forbes executive editor Tim Ferguson: "We're small 'l' libertarians, dear."
Virgina Postrel, who edited Reason for a decade before leaving three years ago to concentrate on writing books (such as The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture and Consciousness, just published this fall), has in particular been the target of wrath from Libertarianism Writ Large. Antiwar apologist Justin Raimondo, who in a Libertarian Party speech he gave this spring recalled working on the first issue of Reason as a teenager, once wrote a furious online rant against Postrel and her hawkish views, accusing her of changing "ideologies as easily as she changes hair color."
An odd jibe, as she's always been blonde. "But then my political views haven't changed that much either," Postrel told me. "It's just that Justin likes to constantly reclassify them to suit his own demented view of the universe."
But the parameters of even small-"l" libertarianism aren't always clear. I remember being struck by a Reason story about problems encountered by a website called The Dysfunctional Family Circus, in which visitors were invited to submit their own rude captions to Bil Keane's cartoons. (Sample: "Oh SHIT...the ghost of Barfy is coming out of Dolly's ear!") Keane complained, and the pictures were removed, an example of what Reason called "America's increasingly restrictive copyright laws."
The libertarian position here puzzled me. Isn't the right to control your own intellectual property a free-market fundamental? "Intellectual property rights are enshrined in the Constitution," Gillespie agreed, "but it's there to give people incentive to produce things. The world is a little bit poorer if you can't do that kind of [satiric] activity, while Bil Keane is no richer." Plus, The Dysfunctional Family Circus was a good example of how, as Gillespie put it, "the audience is constantly reappropriating the creator's intent. I'm interested in how systems leak, how they never work out the way they're supposed to. I'm a big believer that messages get subverted."
Gillespie added that the audience is - and should be - always the ultimate definer. Media may convey the message but has no lasting control over it. Take, for instance, that McDonald's slogan "Did somebody say McDonald's?" A fine moment for Gillespie happened a while ago when he was in a 7-Eleven standing near two kids, one of whom passed wind. "And," Gillespie said, "the other one said, 'Did somebody say McDonald's?'"Published: 11/20/2003
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