"Class Envy" in Montana - The Ameya Preserve Saga

Remember the dust up over Ameya Preserve? Well the controversy keeps escalating. Here is the social entrepreneur, Wade Dokken, lashing back at citizens and bloggers who question his upscale development in Montana.

A letter from the local paper responds.

My original post drew on a press release emailed me by a PR firm working for Dokken. My sense of the project was that it was in the tradition of The Great Gatsby.  I saw it as a wonderful American Fable of wealth, luxury, high society, good taste and bad taste.  Since they are inviting Geniuses to Ameya to sweeten the deal for the Rising Aristocrats,  I offered to come as a resident Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, or at least a World Class Fool, if the money is right, that is.  Offer still stands. It is for lack of a Fool that many wealthy people historically have come a cropper through hubris.  Even in America such things can happen. All the money spent on PR firms in many cases would be better spent on Moral Instructors in Motley. But, then, I have a vested interest in saying so.  It may be that Wade already has all the Fools he needs on retainer.

UPDATE: The writer of the letter to the editor quoted above, Charlotte McGuinn Freeman, has a blog and links back to our post.  Her blog is suitably entitled, Living Small: Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and subversive faith of living small.

Comments

[tom]

A few supplemental links:

"class envy"

"not everybody can be Ted Turner"

Irritating Websites

Class Envy

New Centurion, Nude Eel

Amazon profile

"Party on, Wade"

Dokken spoke of Ameya as an alternative to the classic second home golf community. But from where I sit it looks like something else. It is the ultimate sign that food has truly become a part of America's cultural life. These days when wealthy people go looking for the good life, they want it to be filled with art and nature. They want it to do no harm to the environment. And they want it to taste good. &%&^^

[Phil]

Thanks, Tom, a fine set of links.

[ACS]

did you guys see this?

http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/06/04/news/state/30-land.txt

is the argument against Dokken and Ameya simply just "no development is the only kind of development"? I'm trying to learn here, but the linked article has several experts, albeit on the Ameya payroll, that say this development is better than most.

Is it an outsiders issue? or just unfair, utopian marketing?

[Phil]

I am not an expert on the Ameya Preserve. Seems you have a cultural clash between big money people moving in and the established community and its ecosystem. I am not in a position to sort out the merits of the controversy.

[Erica]

I can only imagine the revised marketing material:

"Come to Montana, Big Sky Country, with its historic tradition of independent, hard-working ranchers. All of whom are actually stupid, lazy, unambitious fools bad at managing money. Oh, and they hate you for some reason. We can't quite figure out why."

[Phil]

Class warfare is so one sided. When the rich lose their temper they can be quite brutal. Dokken should have let his Porter Novelli representative script his rejoinder to the farmers. They could have presented him as a rube himself.