John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 13 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
The second thing I learned is that, just as we're all junkies, we're also all pushers. One of the reasons it's so easy to sell me the junk dealt by Detroit and the local supermarket and the TV station in my town is because I'm so busy pushing the junk — whatever it is — that I'm dealing.
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Salesmen, you know, are notoriously easy to sell to. They're always so anxious to make a deal that they're pushovers to make a deal with. And we're all salesmen now. We measure the "success" of our society in terms of Gross National Product. It doesn't matter what we sell each other — in fact, it's better for business if our products have little real value and fall apart quickly — so long as we make those deals faster and bigger during this 12-month period than we did last year.
And the third thing I learned is that few people living in our thundering juggernaut of a society — few of even the most fortunate individuals comfortably holed up in the very heart of the monster — really and truly like the way they live.
The ad executives I met on Madison Avenue — those terribly calculating manipulators of the public taste — weren't so terrible or so calculating at all once I got to know them. They were mostly scared former farm boys from Montana or Georgia who did what they thought the client wanted while they secretly dreamed of being a poet or the skipper of a charter boat or a house painter.
And the smartly turned-out wives of those "successful" executives? The ones supposedly living the Good Life in Darien, Conn.? They mostly had long, sad tales about their children shooting up in school, or the envy they felt over their husbands' "exciting" careers, or the 4,000th afternoon bridge game they had recently endured. Just like their menfolk down at the office, they all seemed to be — in the words of Randy Brook — "waitin' for better times."
So. To recap: I learned, during my years on the road, that [1] we all want an easy, worry-free "fix" that will make our lives easier, [2] we're most receptive to such a fix when it's presented to us in business and economic terms that we, in turn, can sell to someone else and [3] while we're all soberly dressed up in our little civilized suits and playing the game outlined in [1] and [2], most of us would secretly like to kick off our shoes, tell the captains of industry to go to hell, and run off to a South Sea Island.
PLOWBOY: So what else is new?
SHUTTLEWORTH: Exactly! That's just the point! Everyone wants to know how I could start Mother Earth News on the barest of shoestrings and build it into a force to be reckoned with while so many other environmental publications and magazines of alternatives were going under. Well, I've just turned my hole card face up on the table for all to see, and I'll bet that not one in a thousand who reads this interview will understand how to play it.
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