Real American Friends
By Blake Hurst

[Editor's note: Apologies, dear readers, for one last gush. Another TAE cornerstone used a wonderfully cajoling phone message and the following note to pressure me into running this one--"I've attached my piece, and beg that you use it. It was a joy for me to write. And you should accept every pat on the back that comes your way. There may not be too many once you cross the Beltway." He's certainly right about that last part.]

TARKIO, MISSOURI--Several years ago, I found myself in a maximum-security women's prison interviewing a convicted murderer, and the discussion turned to her lesbian lover. At about that point, I asked myself the existential question shared by philosophers and people of a certain age: Uh, why am I here? It was, of course, Karl Zinsmeister's fault. He'd organized a coterie of TAE writers to descend on southern Florida, and invited me to write about its prisons, because, as he said: "You are the only person I can think of who would know how to talk to the prisoners." Years later, I still wonder exactly what he meant by that.

I first met Karl when he was doing a series of articles for Reason magazine, arguing that farm subsidies are a bad idea. He visited our farm along with many others and wrote what is still a definitive criticism of farm subsidies. Later, he organized a hearing on farm policy in the Capitol, featuring several of us farmers willing to betray our class, and headlined by the political odd couple of Barney Frank and Dick Armey.

When the hearing was scheduled, my wife and I happened to be in Washington with the Missouri Farm Bureau on their annual lobbying trip to ask for more farm subsidies. (Yes, there was a slight friction between Karl's farmers and my FB friends.) We were staying in a hotel that had central air, which was fortunate, because the rest of Karl's farmers were staying in a hotel that Karl had picked out, and were sweating out an early heat wave without air conditioning. Karl picked us up in a beater of an automobile, older than we were at the time, and escorted us to the hearing. He was then rehabbing houses while launching his writing career, and was obviously, well, careful with a dollar.

Ending farm subsidies may well be his only professional failure. But there is still time, and in his new job, he will have input into farm policy. And Barney Frank is still around.

When he became the editor of The American Enterprise, Karl wrote me a letter asking me to write once in a while for the magazine. That letter hung on our refrigerator for nearly a decade, until it finally crumbled to dust. He's probably often rued that impulse, as I belong in a magazine like The American Enterprise in the same way that the Kansas City Royals belong in the major leagues. But I've held him to that promise more times than I can count, and it truly has been one of the best experiences of my life.

Karl is the consummate editor, and he has never failed to improve the work that I've done. He is loyal to a fault. Even when a mayor wrote his boss and threatened a lawsuit over something I'd written, Karl calmed everyone down. When I've failed to deliver, he's been patient, and when my articles were criticized, he's always defended me with more passion and fire than I deserved.

From his prescient writing about Japan 20 years ago to the latest edition of The American Enterprise, Karl anticipates trends, writes movingly and superbly about the issues that engage him (and almost everything engages him), and treats everyone with respect and kindness. I've had the opportunity to meet many people who would classify themselves as intellectuals. I'm always interested in how they react to a farmer from Missouri. Most dismiss me fairly quickly, assuming that a farmer can't possibly have anything interesting to say. That would include the professor at a seminar I attended who baldly asked "Why are you here?" Some treat me as a curiosity. Only Karl treats me as an equal, however undeserved, and I appreciate that more than he will ever know.

Karl tracks subscribers west of the BosWash corridor, and is proud of the wide interest in The American Enterprise from what he would call "real America." I'm thankful he included this "real American" in the pages of his magazine, and more importantly than that, I'm proud to call him my friend.