The Downfall of Western Civilization

The other day I was standing in the checkout line at Safeway waiting to buy my usual weekly groceries.  I like to peruse the magazines, though mostly I am not that familiar with people who merit the cover of OK or Us Weekly.  I happened to glimpse a gray forehead with a bunch of white hair shoved into the very back of the magazine rack.  Lo and behold, Einstein was on the cover of Time magazine.  My line was moving without me, so I didn’t pull out the magazine.  But it got me thinking.

At first I was really annoyed.  What did Einstein do to merit being shoved behind Jen and Demi bonding over their tragic love lives and someone whose name started with a K having another baby?  Einstein was even partially covered by a copy of the National Examiner featuring Alex Hofstadter caught with prostitutes or something crazy like that.

I once read a book where several characters randomly offered their reasons for the downfall of western civilization.  The possible reasons included ball point pens and the inability to write a B and B letter among others, just in case you wanted to know.  But I have decided that the magazine racks at the grocery store, if not the cause of it, are definitely a symptom of the downfall of western civilization.  Seriously, does anyone actually care that Kate Middleton has a tattoo or that Oprah gained ten more pounds?  Okay, apparently I remember way too much from just glancing at the magazine racks every week while grocery shopping.  I am now worried that all of my knowledge of pop culture comes from the covers of magazines.  No wonder I’m so bad at pop culture trivia.

But then I started thinking that at least Einstein was in the magazine rack at all.  He may have been put behind all the other junk, but he was there.  The magazines featured a bunch of stars—using the term loosely—and one physicist.  He is the most famous physicist of all, though Newton, Galileo, and Feynman might be close.  I suppose physicists aren’t on the covers of the magazines, because they aren’t the right kind of famous and they aren’t doing crazy enough things in order to get on the cover of the magazines.

What would it be like if all the magazine covers were filled with scientists and politicians and world leaders and people who actually do real things with their lives?  And I don’t mean when the politicians end up in magazines because they were caught making hand gestures under bathroom stalls.  Could you imagine the headlines: Richard Dawkins To Write Another Book, Leonard Susskind Fails to Solve Equation, Water Found on Moon, Senator Smith Seconds Bill to Balance Budget (that one will never happen), or Obama’s Favorite Recipes (okay, this one might already exist),

Okay, so maybe Safeway is right: scientists don’t belong on the covers of magazines.  We are just not interesting enough.  On second thought, I would rather be boring.

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