In the Penny Press: Geographica!

I turned to the latest National Geographic, I freely admit, for some relief. My Facebook page and Twitter feed are full of misery and impending doom; the news feed on my iPad features daily – sometimes hourly – updates on the ways the President of the United States is disgracing the country; and the actual real world in my immediate vicinity is an unending cataclysm of dump trucks, jackhammers, back hoes, cement mixers, police sirens, and low-flying Air Force jets, a black, stiff-walled whirlwind of noise so constant that I no longer remember what peace and quiet on my own reading couch was like, so constant that I know the names of all the workers, so constant that for years, when friends visit from out of town, I tell them, “just turn right when you exit the train station and then walk up the street until you get to the biggest, loudest construction zone you’ve ever seen in your life.” “Oh no,” they commiserate. “You live near a construction zone?” “No,” I tell them. “I live in it – the construction zone is your destination.”

And in addition to all this, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve recently abandoned most of the magazine subscriptions that once brought me so much enjoyment, as one by one they referred to easily-verifiable conscious lies as “eccentric claims” or called the racist, sexist, fascist, lying moron in the Oval Office “unconventional” in the hopes of not alienating a stupid, aggressive monster known as “The Base.” One by one, each magazine that sold its integrity in order to appease The Base got dropped from my monthly reading, despite the fact that this has also deprived me of some of the most interesting books-coverage currently being published.

But not all periodicals fell away – a hardy few remained, either because they were almost entirely non-political or because, politics or no politics, I simply can’t do without them. And foremost in this latter category is National Geographic, which I’ve been reading and absorbing for a long, long time. So I turned to the latest issue both out of an old familiarity and also for some relief from the raging apocalypse that’s engulfing every inch of the rest of the world.

Alas, however, not all refuges are perfect. The latest issue of National Geographic was tremendous, yes – intelligent, thought-provoking, visually beautiful as always – but in accordance with the magazine’s century-old mandate, the issue looked with unblinking clarity on both the world’s wonders and its iniquities. National Geographic doesn’t care that one of their subscribers might want a whole lot less iniquity these days, and the magazine wouldn’t care if all their readers felt that way, nor should they care: the merciless, gorgeous balance of their world-portrait is the reason they’re the National Geographic in the first place.

So, in this issue, I read about the heart-racing valor of the 21^st century’s space race, yes, and this was uplifting, yes – but running through the article was the thread of privatization, and expropriation, and since I’m old enough to think of solar system exploration (and particularly, Gawd help us, actual peopled landings), such a thread was somber. And I read an article about the prevalence of humans in “developing” countries open-air defecating, and it, too, had a somber thread – in earlier Geographic versions of such an article, there would have been a near-obligatory mention of how sanitation is making progress, even in the most primitive settings. Not so now: the article makes clear that al fresco crapping is on the rise in many places in the world, with all the host of microbial horrors that accompany it. And I read a short, heartwarming article about an African sanctuary for orphaned young elephants that naturally brought a smile to my face – until I encountered its own somber thread, which is that the flow of such orphans, created by the hunger for poaching elephants, certainly shows no sign of slowing.

Still, the issue nevertheless provided some of the sought-for relief. After all, there’s a boost to the simple fact that those elephant orphans are being lovingly cared for, right? And then there’s the highlight of the issue, a snappy (hee) article by Glenn Hodges about shortfin mako sharks – their physical beauty, their ceaseless vitality, and, as an unlooked-for bonus, their relatively healthy world-wide distribution. The piece also has stunning photography by Brian Skerry and a typically magnificent illustration by the great Fernando Baptista. Hodges even throws in Mark Twain’s still-funny quip about seasickness: “At first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won’t.”

So I limped out of the issue at least happy that some orphan elephants are being encouraged to cuddle and play, and that plenty of shortfin mako sharks are still swimming around in the ocean. It’s not much, admittedly, but in 2017 I’ll take it.