SDSU Student’s Magazine a Thought-Promoting Idea

David Alden Mills spent the first 21 years of his comfortable life just “screwing around.” Then he began to think.

Inspired by a couple of stellar college professors, Mills thought about philosophy, he thought about political theory, he thought about what he saw as the lack of breadth in political magazines.

And then one day: “I was driving to a bookstore where I worked near UCSD, and I said, ‘Hey, a publication--Critique of America.’ I was driving, I was almost there, and I said, ‘Critique of America.’ ”

That was in February, 1986.

A few months later, A Critique of America was born. Mills sunk $2,800 into the first issue, doing the paste-up work himself with a glue stick. He gave away 2,000 issues in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sent a few to New York.

Given Away in U.S.

About 60,000 copies of the next issue, due out Sept. 15, will be printed, and they will be given away all over the country: in record stores, bookstores, art galleries and hair salons in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, St. Louis, Houston, Seattle and Chicago--and San Diego, of course.

The September issue will be the first to carry advertisements--about 15 of them--and the issue after that, due out Nov. 15, will be sold on newsstands for a dollar instead of given away.

Despite the growth in the magazine, Mills faces a daunting battle to gain a toehold on the tight market for opinion magazines. He says he hopes to break even within a year, but other industry experts are skeptical about the magazine even surviving.

For one thing, they note, history says it is practically impossible for a politically oriented magazine--regardless of its persuasion--to recoup its costs. National magazines such as Mother Jones, the National Review, Commentary and The New Republic virtually never make a profit, and they count on benefactors to survive.

And even though Mills plans to diversify the magazine by including arts and entertainment stories, the odds are still against any new publication surviving.

Mixed Reactions

Representatives of so-called “thought-leader” magazines had mixed reactions to Critique’s basic philosophy: to promote thought, not to take sides. Mills says his magazine is neither liberal nor conservative, and in fact, the political positions of two articles in the same issue can be polar opposites.

The concept behind A Critique of America is “interesting,” said Richard Reynolds, the publicist for the San Francisco-based Mother Jones magazine. The left-of-center magazine, with a circulation hovering around 200,000, has survived for 11 years with the help of one main benefactor and numerous smaller contributors.

“I think there are a lot of people out there who like to see their ideas challenged, whatever they may be. I’m often surprised that there are conservatives who read Mother Jones,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds said Critique will either “offend no one or would offend everyone equally,” so it’s hard to tell what advertisers’ reactions may be.

Hunter Millington, advertising director for Columbia Journalism Review, said “(Mills’) success will depend on a number of things: if he can get some kind of syndicated research about his readers . . . the only way he can begin to expand and be successful is by doing that. He’s got to find that market.”

Mills freely admits that he doesn’t know exactly what his readership is, just as he acknowledges that the staff of Critique (average age: 24) is inexperienced and has a lot to learn. “I have very little in managerial background. I would say . . .” he pauses. “Hmm. None, actually. None at all.”

Paying Advertisers

But he also points to the improvement in the magazine and the fact that about 15 advertisers are paying to appear in September’s issue (“practically a miracle,” as he puts it) as evidence that the magazine will survive.

Mills seems confident, idealistic and extremely sincere about the concept of the magazine and he thinks thoughtful readers will see it as an alternative to opinion magazines that espouse a particular point of view.

“Say you’re a liberal (as Mills is) and by promoting thought conservative ideas spring up. You may not agree with the ideas, but you really cannot knock the thought. If people think more, then their ideas are--I wouldn’t say profound, but at least moving in the right direction,” Mills said.

“I have no intention of convincing people of the ideas of the right or the ideas of the left. I want them to think.”

One skeptic, the editor of the weekly San Diego Reader, said: “All it takes (to achieve Mills’ goal) is to buy two different magazines, or three different magazines. I don’t find (Critique) so special, or (the opinions they express) even so unobtainable even in the present market.”

Reader Editor Jim Holman, who said he has only glanced at Critique and was not particularly impressed by it, pointed to such magazines as Harper’s, the Atlantic and The New Yorker as examples of magazines that don’t take a particular point of view.

Rebelled Early

The reason Mills says he supports “thinking” in general more than ideas in particular is that all his life he was encouraged to swallow what others told him, and then spit it back out on demand.

He rebelled early, by barely thinking at all. That’s how he sees it now, at least.

Born in 1962 in Pasadena into a wealthy family, Mills spent the first years of his education going to private school, “not necessarily an outcast, but very much to myself in many ways.”

He never excelled. Teachers thought him an idiot. “From 5th to 12th grade,” he says, “the amount of work I did could probably be included in one bluebook, a test bluebook.”

So what did he do? “Nothing. Think of rotten things to do. I was in trouble constantly, everything ranging from being reprimanded by teachers to having minor brushes with the police--I say minor brushes because I never got caught.”

Plenty of Money

Always into mischief (“people call it stealing, but I call it reallocation,” he jokes), Mills’ family did not expect him to do great things. Fortunately, he had money--plenty of it--and was able to go to college.

His transformation into conscious thought occurred one summer when he took a philosophy class at Occidental College in Eagle Rock. He was the only student, the two others having dropped out, but the professor stuck with him.

“It was the first time I really ever had a taste of thinking and really loved it, because I said: ‘This is not some arbitrary requirement that I’m filling. This is education.’ After that I just took off.”

Mills eventually transferred to San Diego State University, where he took only the courses he wanted to take. He now has 140 units and still needs a French class to graduate.

But he did get good grades, and that helped give him the confidence to launch a brand new magazine by himself, armed only with plenty of financial wherewithal and an idealistic vision of eclecticism.

The most recent issue, 28 tabloid pages, is filled with eye-catching graphics and thought-provoking ideas that border on artsy, or perhaps pretentiousness.

Broad Spectrum

A brief review of a few of the articles shows how broad the spectrum is:

There is a long, satirical piece titled “A Brief History of the Search for the Origins of Water.” The author is anti-philosophy and anti-pretentiousness, and he makes fun of such fictional schools of thought as “the Tenuously Empirical Positivists, who reasoned that if the source of water is knowable a priori, then the process of its own previously structured necessity must manifest an essentially conditional-eternal thinghood-ness.”

Another article accuses Bob Geldof, the architect of the Live Aid concert who was nominated for the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, of being a “Nobel imposter” for glossing over the human rights abuses of Ethiopia’s Marxist government.

Another, written by Mills, offers a “Marxist Critique of Pluralism” (though he says he isn’t a Marxist). Another says that “freedom of the press” is out of control, having become a “para-government bureaucracy,” and urges that a citizens’ review panel be established and given power to control the media.

Mills, who seems at once humble and extremely proud, says he doesn’t think that the issue is diverse enough. It should be broader, the writing should be better, the ideas more thought-provoking. Compared to the first Critique, he says, they’ve come a long way, from “what a year ago was a very abstract, almost offensive, small-time publication, to what now will be a nationwide publication that will demand respect, just because of the quality of presentation, of any reader.”

Quiet on Previous Issues

Mills is reticent to talk about previous issues, and the only copies of old issues at the office hang framed on the wall. He is always looking forward: The next issue, due out Sept. 15 and the first in the switch to bimonthly from quarterly, will have more than 70 pages, and, for the first time, advertising.

The first issue, which came out more than a year ago, was small, and Mills did nearly all the work on it himself. “It was rough, sloppy, but it was a start,” he says.

“The next one came out, and we were very far to the left, very extreme. I didn’t like it.” The cover featured a graphic of a businessman sitting on a vise crushing the skulls of some workers, with the weight of the businessman’s vomit and excrement pressing the vise.

“We printed up 6,000 copies and most people looked at it and were turned off . . . Instead of promoting thought, I was just appealing to the far left pseudo-intellectuals who love to think of the United States as an evil empire,” Mills says.

Indeed, the magazine continues to have some trouble attracting writers from the right, in part because of the name of the publication. “They said, ‘A Critique of America. Oh, so you’re knocking America. Obviously you’re out to attack the United States. If you don’t like the United States, move to Russia.’ ”

But Mills insists that the publication is not anti-American; quite the opposite, in fact. “A Critique of America means yes, we love the United States, but as with everything, it needs to be closely examined. By critiquing we don’t mean to be bleeding-heart crybabies, we mean let’s examine, let’s improve.”

Until now Mills has been paying production costs and salaries out of his own pocket. The September issue will cost him some $40,000, and only a small portion of that will be recouped in advertising revenue. And because most copies are distributed free, the amount of money raised through subscriptions is minuscule.

But Mills can afford it, at least for now. His family, mostly a conservative bunch, is astounded at his actions. His younger brother, 18, subscribes; his older sister, 28, does not.

“I talk to some of my friends who haven’t seen me in a while, and they don’t take me seriously at all. Not at all. I was regarded as being very stupid--not by my family . . . but teachers for the most part were not overwhelmed by my intelligence, or what they perceived to be my intelligence,” Mills says.

“I have a definite appreciation for the non-thinking mind,” he says. “I lived it for more years than I haven’t.”