June 5, 2006
TAE
I'm going to shill for a magazine, The American Enterprise.
Yesterday was a great Sunday, I did a few indoor chores and had some time to read magazines. The porn of punditry that pours into my house. I have a problem, yes, and all my nieces and nephews are enablers -- selling magazines for school fund-raisers "Uncle John, we're building a memorial to John Dewey and Karl Mark in the new diversity center, will you buy some magazines to support it?"
Anyway, I had time to read Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and The American Enterprise back to back. Reason is really growing on me. I thought I wouldn't renew but when my youngest nephew at Ernesto Guevara Middle School raises money for the Ward Churchill Defense Fund, I'll probably re-up.
TAE just comes out a few times each year, so it is a very inexpensive subscription. I'd really recommend this current issue, "Attack of the Snobs." It is worth it for the cover illustration alone.
TAE focuses an issue around a theme, so the cover story is really the whole book. They get great writers in rather than having a stable. This issue contemplates adversity to the preferences of most Americans. One hundred forty million shop at Wal*Mart, but a coterie of, well, snobs who don't need the employment or cheaper goods try to block them at every turn.
Wal*Mart, cars vs. light-rail, horizontal sprawl vs. vertical urban living: people vote with their feet and wallets. For better or worse, they buy SUVs, shop at big box stores, seek larger homes in the exurbs, and do all the things that the caricatures on the cover hate.
Buy this one or come borrow mine if you live in Colorado. This is a great and important issue. I've concluded that elitism is a larger driver of the red-blue split than most on either side acknowledge.