North Coast Online

Land Of Plenty

George Will has reviewed Brink Lindsey's book, The Age Of Abundance  in The Times.  I haven't read it yet (the book, that is), but I like Mr. Wills's conclusion.

Lindsey rightly says that “today’s typical red-state conservative is considerably bluer on race relations, the role of women and sexual morality than his predecessor of a generation ago.” And “the typical blue state liberal is considerably redder than his predecessor when it comes to the importance of markets to economic growth, the virtues of the two-parent family and the morality of American geopolitical power.” In “the bell curve of ideological allegiance,” the large bulging center has settled, for now, on an “implicit libertarian synthesis, one which reaffirms the core disciplines that underlie and sustain the modern lifestyle while making much greater allowances for variations within that lifestyle.” If so, material abundance has been, on balance , good for us, and Lindsey’s measured cheerfulness is, like his scintillating book, reasonable.

A point that we who labor on the margins of political opinion would be wise to consider.

It Takes A Presidential Run

Where does the time go?  I mean, can it possibly be 10 years since that little classic It Takes A Village was first published?  Well, yes -- hard to believe -- but it has.  In December, though, just in time for some lucky red diaper baby's Christmas stocking, it's being reprinted. 

Leave The Kids Alone

One more opinion on the new trend of overtly-political children's books.

Two new political books for kiddies try "to root out and crush the last few remaining vestiges of carefree youth," writes Nick Gillespie in a very funny Reason review.

Why Mommy Is a Democrat and Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! are misguided -- and, one hopes, unread -- attempts to politicize and indoctrinate tykes, to force future voters to choose between Red and Blue America.

Why Mommy Is a Democrat, available online at
littledemocrats.net, advertises itself as "a different kind of children's book," and that it is -- a really bad kind that manages to insult the intelligence even of late-term fetuses. It pairs amateurish drawings of what appears to be a single-mother squirrel and her two offspring with mindless platitudes that ascribe all that is good and decent to the party of West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd.

"Democrats make sure we are nice to people who are different, just like Mommy does," explains one lesson. "Democrats make sure sick people are able to see a doctor, just like Mommy does," says another. "Democrats make sure we all share our toys," threatens a third. You don't need to be
Phyllis Schlafly to wonder just where the hell the daddy squirrel has gone to in this scenario, which reads like a Republican parody of Democratic devotion to an oddly feminized nanny state.

In Help! Mom!, two boys who want to start a lemonade stand dream they're transported to Liberaland.

Once the boys' lemonade business is booming, "Mayor Leach" (get it?) comes around and squeezes them with a 50 percent tax. Next up is "Mr. Fussman" of the "Liberaland Civil Liberties Union" (haw haw haw!), who is offended by the picture of Jesus the brothers hang on their stand and demands they replace with it a picture of a big toe. Before you know it, a Hillaryesque "Congresswoman Clunkton" is demanding the boys force broccoli on all customers, and so on, until at last the lemonade stand is seized by the state and run into the ground.

Leave the kids alone, Gillespie writes.

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs.

[UPDATE:] I still think the liberal book's the more egregious of the two.  But the injunction against the entire genre stands. 

Harry Potter Review

Chase Me Ladies, I'm In the Cavalry

So the new Potter book sold 8 billion copies in the first twenty seconds. Big deal. I read the first one, and I didn’t believe a word of it. It’s just one howling whopper after another. A boy wizard goes to a secret Magic School? His mail is delivered by owls? Sorry, but I don’t find that at all plausible. Looking forward, however, to the final instalment- Harry Potter Breaks his Neck.

If your child is serious about comparative mythology, you should be reading them J.G.Frazier’s Golden Bough, not filling their heads with a lot of nonsense about owls.

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