Message From the Lower Regions   

An alert reader found this under a pile of brimstone.

In a literary coup long to be remembered, AJR herewith brings to its readers a previously unknown portion of The Screwtape Letters, the great classic by C.S. Lewis, which appeared half a century ago. We will not reveal the source of the manuscript except to say that it was discovered by a loyal reader under some smoldering brimstone. Herein the Devil, in yet another variation of his many disguises, again speaks to one of his chief agents.

My dear Wormwood,

Excellent. You are doing things just right. Keep confusing their little minds in every way you can.

Whenever these abominable bipeds up there on your wretched spinning orb are terribly discouraged, we have the upper hand, and with a hot pitchfork in it. Or, as they say in the earthly business schools (whatever they are), we maximize our options.

Keep the main objective always in mind, ignoring all distractions: Kill news and news creatures. Every plan should flow from that. Once we have succeeded, newsless bipeds will be our slaves.

When I sent you up there I told you to start by scaring the heaven out of the top corporate bipeds. Make them scratch around in a frenzy, pulling up all their roots.

You got off to a great start, thanks to me, of course. When I got my minions in the securities houses to push them on the quarterly earnings reports, you popped them with that newsprint thing and made them think their margins had caught fire. Now most of them are so preoccupied with quarterly reports that they've forgotten all about their eternal reports. Not to mention running out of readers and other raw materials.

Another trick I like a lot is what you've been doing with the new media stuff. Already in some places you've got the news creatures thinking they're has-beens and don't-know-hows.

You were the best student in the class when I taught my latest agents The Old Shadow-Knows Trick: how to cloud men's minds (updated to include women's minds). You made the news creatures think they would all be displaced because the reader and listener creatures would soon be mixing all their own news stews, and the naive little miscreants never once thought about where the newsbeans and other newsstuff would come from.

That'll discourage them for years.

It did us almost as much good as when you made most newspapers and TV news shows look and sound alike. Especially authoritative? Reliable when you need it? How could anybody guess which one?

You pretty much got them to throw out beats, too, I mean shoe-leather beats that were places with sources you could get to know instead of nice little Gucci "beats" covered by guys who've never talked to the same pseudo-source twice.

Even I don't know how you pulled that one off. I'll have to ask you about it when you're here to get new mind mist and wombat juice.

All in all, Nephew, a great report. You keep it up, and we'll keep the home fires burning.

Your affectionate uncle, Screwnews