We always suspected that former Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher and Jim Schutze were the same person. For proof, we look no further than the Crunchy Con's freshly minted post on The American Conservative's website, in which he explains his pending move to the country (he's still at the John Templeton Foundation in Pennsylvania) and why he's ditching The Big City for suburbia:
... we are planning to move to the suburbs as renters for non-class-related reasons: because we need more space, and because its more affordable.Zat you, Jim? Fess up.
I am wondering, though, if I am being defeatist about city life, or in some way betraying my principles. Here's what I mean. Readers of "Crunchy Cons" will remember a chapter about why we chose to buy an old house in a gentrifying neighborhood of Dallas. I need to re-read that, especially as we're on the verge of moving not only to the suburbs, but actually way out to the country, where Julie can have chickens again, and a big garden. Mind you, our lot size and city regulations were such that we had that at our old Dallas place. Yet I wrote to a friend in Dallas the other day and told him how surprised I am to have come to the conclusion that if I were to move back to Dallas, I'd almost certainly settle in the suburbs. It all has to do with the increasingly dysfunctional city government in Dallas, which I follow from afar. Dallas readers may wish to correct me, but it has seemed to me that the kind of good government and stability that the middle classes need is subverted by a de facto alliance between minority machine politicians and wealthy whites. To choose to live in the City of Dallas today is to choose to put up with the risk of more dysfunctional city government policies, and higher taxes. That might make sense to some, but it doesn't make sense to me anymore.
