Jamestown: TIME vs National Geographic

I've been getting TIME magazine free for six or seven years now. Addressed to a previous resident - from so long ago no one remembers him - it arrives like an old dog to my doorstep: faithful and unwanted. How I feel about dogs is another matter. Over the years I must owe him a few dollars. Doubled, when you consider that I was also getting Sports Illustrated in his name. Alas, that subscription seems to have wound itself down this year. Too bad, I really like SI.

TIME is reserved for late night reading when I am too tired to soak in any real information. The May 7th cover story was a case in point. A revisiting, on its 400 year anniversary, of the settling of Jamestown, it spun its usual web of truth modified by patriotism.

When I saw National Geographic put Jamestown on its May issue cover, well I knew I had an Apples&Oranges case study. Actually, this was before A&O came into existence. But I would have compared them anyways. Eventually. Okay, I would have thought about it a lot.

Each magazine turns its story around an essential core. For TIME, it is John Smith. As described, he comes off as a crude, conniving and rotten individual. The key word is individual. The stuff that Americans are made of. In spite of being a "bully and a braggart... They never would have made it without him."

It is by the cojones of John Smith that success for the American colonists hangs. Passing more than a few first years on the brink of starvation and succumbing to disease, Smith's brutality and creative ways with treaties repeatedly saves them. By 1619 the colonists are able to establish a council of sorts "and," in typical TIME giddiness, "from this seed would grow... the elective house of Virginia's colonial legislature and the political academy of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson."

TIME's writing moves along in a cha-cha-cha rhythm. Every negative portrait or unflattering behaviour is followed by a flourish like "yet they survived." Or, "but...it made Americans who they are." The intent of the writers is obvious: no matter the mismanagement, no matter the cruelty, no matter the self-serving destruction, everything that happened did so for a purpose. And that purpose is America.

National Geographic is a little more grown up about it. First of all, they do not lose sight that these "early American settlers" were neither settlers nor Americans. They were English outcasts and squatters, gold diggers as per contemporary beliefs, who landed on a track of land that had already been cleared by the natives - and abandoned, as it was marshy, salty and poor in nutrients. It would be many years before "settled" and "Americans" would be personified.

Secondly, they move out from the facile John Smith portraiture to a panoramic landscape shot, taking in the numerous factors that contributed to both success and failure: the boundless greed of the English company that repeatedly sent ships of derelicts to replenish those who had died, the Powhatan tribe's misguided belief that the colony would eventually die out, the aggressive monoculture farming and cattle raising that would in short time destroy much of the land for the Indians. And so on.

In other words, National Geographic gets into the nitty gritty of ecological imperialism, while TIME magazine serves up a few good John Smith YouTube moments. I suggest you buy the May issue of National Geographic. The map is awesome.

TIME vs National Geographic:
Mom's apple pie vs Pemmican made with Apples