Poetic Waxings On The Joy Of The Monthly

So, in the wake of my acquisition of a fantastically wonderful new laptop (thanks Dad!) I have, finally, canceled my subscription to the Denver paper. I have been realizing more and more often that I have continued to read it, but it's been a more and more joyless experience. Don't know quite why, but I think it's because I'm just at the point where I get most of my news online. I surf the front page of NYTimes.com and CNN.com at least 2 or 3 times a day, and if there's really important news out there, one of the bloggers I read will link to it. So, really, I was paying $6 a month (admittedly, not very much) for the joy of reading the same stories I would be reading otherwise, only on paper and gathered together on the whim of some editor whose priorities I almost certainly don't agree with. And wasting a lot of trees in the process.

Now, with the laptop, I can read the front page of the Times over my eggs if I want.

I have also decided that, sometimes, you just need an actual physical object to read. I've been an on-and-off subscriber to various monthlies over the years. I had a subscription to The New Republic for a while, but they are just too batshit crazy to pay money to. I loved The Economist, but there literally was not enough time in the week to chew through it all, and I'm not a good enough prioritizer to skim something so...interesting. "What's this, an article on the real estate market in Budapest? Fascinating!"

I have settled, for the moment, on The Atlantic. Firstly, they employ Ross and Matt, two bloggers I have much esteem for. Also, the fact that they employ good people from both sides of the spectrum means I should be getting some interesting, equally left- and right-biased pieces, which is all you can ask for. Much more useful than TNR, which gives you either cookie-cutter liberal pieces, or wacky hawkish 'kill-em-all' pieces masquerading as liberal pieces. (Incidentally, for more on this, check out DJ Kathy G's rant over at Ezra's today. Holy cow, remind me never to say anything bad about that woman.)

Anyhow, so far so good. I'm two months in and very much enjoying it. The feature article in this month's was much-linked in the blogosphere, an article about Karl Rove and how he failed in setting off the seismic realignment of the American polity which has been his goal for 20-plus years. It came just before Rove's resignation last week, in a piece of very fortuitous timing.

The Rove piece is very interesting. Mostly, I'm just left agreeing with the author, Joshua Green's, thesis, which is that while Rove was a master political tactician, and quite incredible at winning elections, he was rather terrible at the actual act of enacting policy. For one thing, he had no understanding or respect for the way such things are done in Washington which, for better or worse, is part of the game that you have to play to get things done. For another, his preferred tactics, including labeling your opponents as traitors, don't work as well when your opponents are members of your own party (as in immigration reform.)

Although, one place Green doesn't go that I am incredibly concerned about is what this actually says about our political landscape. It's true that Rove is unique in American political history. In all likelihood, there will never be another adviser with quite as much power and influence, if only because it will be a long time, I hope, before America elects someone with so little interest in the actual workings of the government as W. However, it still remains the case that the skills necessary to get you elected in the modern American political environment are at best orthogonal, at worst diametrically opposed to the skills needed to run the country effectively.

I like to think that it's still possible to have a candidate capable of leading, both in politics and in policy. But I worry that it's becoming less likely every year.

Anyhow, the second article that I found most interesting was about the Air Force's B-2 squadron. Lots of fascinating tidbits, but the one I found most interesting was the fact that the squad's commander is Lt. Colonel Paul 'Nuke' Tibbets IV, grandson of Colonel Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Also, the fact that each of these planes costs upwards of 1 billion dollars, along with a maintenance crew of 155, to keep in the air. It takes one C-17 and four C-5 Galaxies to transport the maintenance crew and equipment around. That's, well, crazy. Cool, but crazy.

If future wars, as the article claims, are going to be fought primarily with forces similar in nature to the B-2's, we are in for a hell of a big defense budget on into the sunset...