2001-06-22 - 11:56 p.m.

Cheer Up, Rich People!

The other day I was sitting in the waiting room of my dentist's office. I usually bring a book with me to help pass the time, but today I forgot. So I decided to check out the magazine selection. You can actually find out a lot about your dentist by seeing what's in his waiting room because generally the magazines there are issues that he got himself, and put in the waiting room when he was done with them.

Let's see... lots of golf magazines, lots of running magazines. Well, he's a young guy in good shape and I know that he's run in the New York marathon a couple of times.

Lots and lots of copies of New York magazine. Not surprisingly, he seems to be a guy whose cultural center is not here, but in New York City. I used to be that way myself in the early 1980's, driving down to the city a couple weekends nearly every month.

And then I see a copy of a magazine called Atlantic Monthly. Probably most of you haven't heard of it, but it's a magazine that's been around for a LONG time. In a collection that I picked up some years ago I got some Atlantic magazines going back into the 1920s and 1910s. Back then it was mainly a literary magazine, what is it now?

A quick look revealed that it read like a somewhat more news-oriented New Yorker. It's obvious that the focus of the magazine is wealthy, liberal people who live in New York City, or who wish they did.

The political leaning of the magazine is pretty smug, but I don't really mind too much because I pretty much agree with them.

My father for years and years subscribed to National Review, William F. Buckley's conservative monthly, the polar opposite of the Atlantic Monthly. They were just as smug, just as sure they had all the answers, just as sure that the "other guys" were totally wrong, too. How could and REASONABLE person disagree with us? They must be s-t-u-p-i-d.

I found the intended audience of the National Review kind of scary. The fact that my father was letting these guys do his political thinking for him kind of disturbed me, but I took comfort in the fact that my when you got right down to it my father was about as political as a grapefruit. He wasn't politically active at all - in fact he probably wasn't voting, but he was sending money to the Republican Party. That stopped when I took over his finances. It wasn't a matter of politics - it was a matter of austerity. Dad was broke. Besides, it seemed absurd. Why send money to the Republicans? They seem to have most of it already. Coals to Newcastle and all that.

But I've gone off on a tangent again, haven't I?

Anyway, I was kind of amused by the Atlantic Monthly. The main point of the magazine seemed to be to make tender-hearted liberals not feel bad about all the money they had. On ad in particular made me laugh out loud.

It showed a handsome, bespectacled young guy with his hands on his hips, looking confidently into the distance. He was dressed casually, but you could tell his clothes were expensive.

The caption: "Don't feel guilty because you're rich! You deserve it!"

The page folded out into an ad for BMW cars.

But it made me giggle. Don’t feel bad, rich people!

"I been rich and I been poor and believe me folks, rich is better." - Joe Louis