GUN RACK AND RUIN

I had no idea that a magazine called Garden and Gun actually existed until I un-lucked across a copy on Friday.

And then I vomited at little bit.

The subtitle - Soul of the New South - did not help in the least. The name brought to mind all the worst stereotypes of Southern living to me, without all the charm of Southern Living, if you know what I mean. I was imagining ignorant, inbred yokels, parents drinking Milwaukees Beast on the porch of a dilapidated house while their kids scramble barefoot across the red sand of their front yards, playing tag around the car up on blocks under the cedar tree until one of 'em steps on a bottle cap and cuts their foot open.

But the actual contents weren't like this. They were worse. It was Town and Country south of the Mason-Dixon line. It was page after page of the landed gentry indulging in ostentatious displays of consumption and reminding the proles just how much better they were than the rest of us. It was pompous, arrogant, and aristocratic in the ante-bellum sense. It was Ralph Nickleby, Gordon Gecko, and William F. Buckley, Jr. It was downright un-American.

And, lamentably, it probably is the Soul of the New South. Still on Earth but sold to the Devil.