The Horror of a World without TAC

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Porch frequenters know well that there are remarkably few places on the World Wide Interweb where one may encounter intelligent, thoughtful, non-ideological conservatism. And in print? You can count ’em on one hand — and you’d probably not need to extend all of your digits in doing so.

All of which is to say: support The American Conservative. TAC’s web-a-thon is in full swing. Their goal, I believe, is to gain enough support to keep the print version of the magazine alive.

Listen: I need that. And you need that. You can’t take your iPad or your Kindle or your laptop everywhere. You don’t want to. Like me, you come down with a case of screen sickness every day about 5 or 6 p.m. On Fridays it becomes a near-crippling disease. Looking at a screen, touching a keyboard, moving a mouse — the very thoughts produce nausea, dizziness, intense ennui. But the thought of picking up a good floppy magazine, lounging on the patio, lighting up a cigar, pouring a whiskey and soda — it immediately enlivens. And to make the thought a reality immediately restores. Birdsong again enters your consciousness. You begin to re-engage physical reality. Man was made for this kind of thing, you think to yourself, and you resolve to one day become a lazy forest ranger. A forest ranger who lazes around reading magazines in a hammock.

Without TAC, none of it can happen. Newsmax is no substitute. You need Bacevich, Kauffman, Larison, McCarthy, Deneen, Gottfried, Antle, Walker, Doherty, and Dougherty — and you need them in print.

Make an investment in your future happiness. In the world’s happiness. In the good America. Support TAC today.

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Jeremy Beer is a philanthropic consultant. He lives with his wife, Kara, in the Willo neighborhood of her hometown: Phoenix, Arizona. Although he likes Arizona and the land west of the one hundredth meridian generally, Jeremy is from Kosciusko County, Indiana, and considers himself a Hoosier patriot. He believes that Booth Tarkington was one of our greatest novelists, that Jean Shepherd was one of our greatest humorists, that Billy Sunday was our one of our greatest (and speediest) orators, and that Larry Bird is without a doubt our greatest living American. Jeremy obtained his doctorate in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2000 to 2008 he worked at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Delaware, serving finally as vice president of publications and editor in chief of ISI Books. He serves on the boards of Front Porch Republic, Inc., Mars Hill Audio, and Catholic Phoenix. A more complete and much more professional bio can be found here. See books written and recommended by Jeremy Beer.

9 COMMENTS

  1. What a coincidence–I paid for a subscription yesterday. I do think the name is a bit of a misnomer, but my household reads leftish to center. And it looks like a good fit to me.

  2. Hmm–I undertand that my second sentence is known as a “Chaitism.” Still, I think the title is a bit confusing for those of us without a political theory background.

  3. Thanks, Jeremy. The American Conservative has some great FPR-related articles coming down the pike: essays by porchers James Mathew Wilson and John Willson, a review the recent Christopher Lasch bio, profiles of Walker Percy and Irving Babbitt, and much more — including monthly doses of Bill Kauffman.

    One doesn’t even have to subscribe to enjoy many of these and other articles from our pages — we’ve been as generous as possible with putting material online for all to partake of. But to offset the hit we take for not keeping everything behind a pay firewall, we need support from online donors. TAC has recently become nonprofit, so contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law, as the guys in shiny suits say.

    If you’ve enjoyed TAC, please donate. And if you’re not familiar with the mag, take a look around our site.

  4. I’ve been a subscriber to this wonderful magazine since 2008. If I were a rich man, I would give them a couple million dollars. Alas, I’m only a lowly college student, barely scraping by from paycheck to paycheck.

    Here’s to hoping TAC doesn’t fold.

  5. Porchers, check out today’s Washington Post arguing that American’s sudden lack of mobility may be harming the economy. Message, leave home America or else:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/29/AR2010072906367.html?wpisrc=nl_headline

    “That has left a large share of the area’s jobless much like Tiffany: with skills that are no longer in demand here but saddled with mortgages that prevent them from leaving. “I’m sort of in a pickle,” Tiffany said with an amused smile before resuming his job search at a computer terminal in the city’s One-Stop Employment Center. “I’m stuck in a home that I can’t get out of if I wanted to.””

    Perhaps there’s a silver lining in America’s lowest mobility rate since WWII.

  6. Also there is an interesting subheading in bold in the article:

    “Mobility a sign of strength”

    This is a bold anti-porcher statement that needs porcher response, hopefully in the Post!!!

  7. TAC reminds me very much of the early days of The National Review, before it became a neocon rag. Even the stuff I don’t agree with is interesting and generally well-written. It does indeed deserve our support.

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