Checkout Counter Spiritualism

East West Journal

April. $1

Have you ever wondered why Dave next door swoons with "a tingling quietness" as he sloshes through the mud of his ricepaddy, moved he says, with "warm all-embracing feelings?" Have you ever pondered a solution to the "indifference of the present world culture?" Does the anagram of earth and heart grab you as really deep? And now we're getting into the swing of it don't you admit, after all, that when you've got it, you haven't, and that what this genesplicing, color-telly gaping, declining-church-attending, microwave-warmed McDonald's Mom's apple pie-ing land needs is "common sense for modern times"? Of course you do. Yeah. But how many more times are magazines like East West Journal going to jump on this bandwagon?

East West Journal's chief distinction from the usual self-abnegating counter-cultural junk we are expected to wallow water-hoggishly in is its slick packaging. Nothing kills one of those infamous Cambridge cocktail parties faster than a too-complete fatalism. But this magazine starting with a litany of all the terrible things wrong with the world quickly moves on to ice-breaking tidbits like the sayings of a Japanese zen master or a Bucky-Fuller-talking -blues-in-gobbledlygook or the parallels between our war on cancer and Vietnam, "our nation's last great effort in futility."

East West Journal is, in short, a periodical re-vamped in this month's issue into averitable treasure chest of Handy Hints for the modern world-caretaker. All in all, this creation is somewhat akin to the union of People magazine and a macrobiotic mystic's handbook--a sort of Zen and the art of togetherness manual. The sort of reading-matter you pick up to read as they're charging up the groceries. Check-out-counter spiritualism.

But wait, maybe I'm being a little harsh. Journal proclaims:

"Our philosophy stems from unifying principle, or yin and yang which sees reality as the play of opposite...life shouldn't be compartmentalized, theory and practice are tied, one can't live dishonestly while preaching honestly."

Okay, and I admit I'm hard put to tell one Hare Krishna zomboid apart from one another. Okay, and what Journal says sounds sorta wilted flower-powered nice. But in "Perspective" Journal editor Sherman Goldman proceeds to use rhetoric like a travelling politician who's eaten too much fruit in a strange constituency. He uses all the fine-sounding analogies and metaphors but there's a queasiness beneath it all.

Editorial content, in Goldman's eyes is yin, the spiritual side of his magazine. Hence, you guessed it, advertising copy is yang or the material side of Journal. A swift Zen incantation, and presto! solvency, self-reliance, "independence from the artificial needs fostered by a consumer society" and a readership of 100,000.

The magazine editors protray themselves as gadflies in a gadflydeficient society. To be sure, we are cynical and lax and brimstone fuel-to-be. But I doubt that Journal is going to sting us out of apathy. It's a gadfly, sure, but one that has tried to digest too rich a diet and wound up too heavy to fly very high.

Journal's world outlook is apocalyptic, revivalist and born-again naive. Thus "the technology designed to provide against scarcity ultimately breeds more scarcity. What begins in fear must end in fear." Indeed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But wait. Journal proclaims itself part of the alternative lifestyles movement, but you wonder whether they're not just copping-out. They look to the future like Tim Leary, more strung out today on pseudo-scientific concepts of change than on chemical psyche-changers, glossing over the uglier and more immediate problems of western life by liberally prophesying that:

"Someday everyone will walk upri the sun, with no aids of any kind, material or spiritual. When that happy day dawns, there will be no need for East-West Journal."

And yet there is a place for this kind of journal. It's a far more entertaining purveyor of little-known facts than the Guinness Book of Records. Its readers' questions and answer section tells you all about building and living in tepees with the notable caution. "The shape of the structure itself may affect your physical and mental condition and your lifestyle in general". Or, extra! Wicked Govt.-Appointed Hopi Tribal Council has Resolved to Turn the Hopi Homeland over to the Peabody Coal Co. for Strip Mining for $5 million and there are endangered butterflies and laetrile-smugglers (laetrile is a banned anti-cancer drug), and the Animal Bill of Rights which has received 2M. signatures in France. We learn the latest gem on ginseng (the FDA calls it an additive so it is being tested for safety).

Perhaps some of you will understand Buckminster Fuller's lead article, "Mistake Mystique," but it mystified me. Phrases like "omni-accommodative generalized principles" or "the progressive complex of cosmic episodes of scenario universe" throw me into the same haze as pretentious science-fiction. When, after the geodesic rhetoric, we're told of synergetics and the positive value of mistakes, you may feel like adding the Robert Louis Stevenson-ism: "the world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we all should be as happy as kings."

Of course we're not. And nowhere are you more painfully aware of the fact than in reading this cover story The Magic of Brazil. Oh yes. Magic country. Beautiful country. And the excerpts printed here from Jim Metsner's Bahia portfolio of photos and recordings of traditional Brazilian culture and music help bring some of this 6,000 miles-away richness to the most insular Cambridge dweller.

But Brazil is not just thythm and poetry and exquisite color prints. You will walk through Rio de Janeiro, city beneath Sugarloaf Mountain, between Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, but also a city where, two blocks behind a luxury hotel begins a shanty town of 'favelas'" crowded on sewerless hillsides where plague lingers in the streets. Favelas that disgorge beggars who make rich tourists shiver and toss coins. Magic? Hardly.

You will leave this magazine with answers to all sorts of things you never asked questions about, but also with the feeling that your questions have been left largely unanswered. Journal's introductory editorial, "lead Off", should have warned you:

"In reality every place is west of another location and east of still another...The sun does not actually traverse the horizons; our vision does. The earth does not change; only our hearts." Such facile philosophy leads you, not East, not West, but nowhere.