Sherry Chandler

Speaking of agrarianism, Jackson and Berry argue for A 50-Year Farm Bill

THE extraordinary rainstorms last June caused catastrophic soil erosion in the grain lands of Iowa, where there were gullies 200 feet wide. But even worse damage is done over the long term under normal rainfall — by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland, and by various degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.

Soil that is used and abused in this way is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government.

Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.

. . .

For 50 or 60 years, we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food. That is a mistake. If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.

At YouTube

When I was a girl, I took my 12 years of public education with free textbooks for granted. Though Kentucky’s education system, even then, was from rescued from bottom status only by, I think it was, Alabama, I had no idea how close I was to a time when education for the ordinary dirt farmer’s kids was all but nonexistent. I suppose all children tend to think that the way things are for them is the way things have always been.

My eyes were opened when I read Thomas D. Clark’s Agrarian Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1977). As Dr. Clark explained it, before the Civil War, there just wasn’t much enthusiasm for public education in a state full of yeoman farmers who couldn’t see why their children needed schooling:

Throughout the nineteenth century public apathy to educational progress was a stumbling block. Thousands of rural parents envisioned no real necessity for educating their children. They and their forebears had lived primitive lives closely identified with the soil. Their way of life was physical. Men wrested livelihoods from hills and valleys through backbreaking labor which did not require literacy. Nor were reading and writing necessary adjuncts to herding a drove of stubborn hillside hogs to market, bucking a willful log raft down a swollen stream, building a crude house, or marrying and begetting many children.

This tendency may have been exacerbated by the political history of most of those forebears. Here is Dr. Clark in A History of Kentucky (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988), speaking of the Transylvania Company’s difficulties in establishing a constitution:

Nearly every settler in the western country was there because either he or his father before him had become disgruntled with the semiproprietary form of government and the quitrents of the eastern Atlantic colonies. These settlers had been on the move for a long time and had faced hardships and privations to reach this land of promise. Hand to hand fighting with the Indians would be necessary before the land west of the mountains might be theirs. Because of these conditions, the westerners were reluctant to take orders from a land company, especially when one man’s trigger finger was worth just about as much as another’s to the settlement. [p 44]

Nobody wanted to pay property taxes.

The Civil War destroyed any early tepid efforts to provide everybody with at least a fourth grade education, and it was not until about 1920 that Kentucky finally decided to get its educational act together. (Bob Sexton might argue with that statement.) This was about the time my parents hit the educational system. They received an 8^th grade education in a one-room school. For anything above that, it was necessary to pay tuition, and probably room and board.

My siblings and I got the 12 years, but I, the youngest, am the only one who went all 12 of those years to a graded school.

I read all of Dr. Clark’s chapter on education with some horror, but I was shocked by this passage:

Slavery down to 1860 was a somewhat vague but forceful fact in Kentucky education. Some itinerate Yankee schoolmasters, traveler-visitors, and after 1820, emancipationists and abolitionists were associated with the public school movement. For instance, it was not entirely helpful that the names of Calvin Fairbanks, Delia Anne Webster, John G. Fee, Calvin Stowe, and Horace Mann were both apostles of public education and crusaders for human freedom. While . . . the abolition crusade [was] never directly associated with the public school movement, the slavery question had become so sensitive by 1848, creating such bitter partisanship, that no social question in the state could be entirely disassociated with it. [pp. 101-102]

Though I suppose you could argue that this association isn’t highly significant in a state that just didn’t put much value on public education, it seems important to me as one more way in which slavery was as indirectly destructive to the freedom of poor whites as it was directly destructive to that of African Americans.

And I will extrapolate forward and say that racism continues destructive of our public education system 150 years later. The last 40 years of American politics has been one of racial division and with it has become a tremendous decline in public schools.

Unfortunately, agrarianism, which I value, has long been associated with pernicious ignorance and racism. I wish there were a way to correct this. A good public school system would seem a start, and I’m not talking vouchers and home-schooling here.

Watch at YouTube

Via Charlie Hughes

From Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man (University Press of Kentucky, 1982):

By autumn the turkeys had grown almost to maturity and they filled the lot with their dark, bronze-brown waves of motion. Ellen fattened them with corn which she and Ben shelled by hand, a labor which required half the afternoon. They worked sitting on a rough bench not far from the watering trough where the mules came to drink, a wire fence dividing them from the runway leading down to the trough. Inside the barn a great drove of mules stood all day before the high feeding platforms, and sitting outside on the bench Ellen could hear the grinding of teeth, for the mules could never have done with eating from the tables which were never empty. Mr. Dick scattered more and more fodder before them, working all day, and they daily grew more sleek and round. Later he would take them away to the south and sell them to the sugar plantations. Ellen felt the mild sting of the dry autumn air on her face as she sat with Ben over the shelling of the corn. Not far off was a flaming sugar tree. In a little while the mules would go south to plow the cane lands. She remembered cotton fields where men and women and children were bending over white flowers that puffed out raggedly into down, in a great ragged field of white down. A white field went off a long way over a flat country, and the road went sandy and wet under wheels, all almost forgotten now.

“Them-there mules is a haven a good time if they only knowed it,” Ben said. . . . they’ll never see another such a time, a-eaten their fill and a-doen no one God’s thing all day.” [pp. 104-105]

Everybody knows Kentucky breeds fine horses. Horses brought settlers and their chattels over the Cumberland Gap in the late 18^th century, and horse-racing has been an element of Kentucky culture almost that long. According to Thomas D. Clark in Agrarian Kentucky (University Press of Kentucky, 1977), by the time of the 1840 census, Kentucky’s horse population was 430,527, slighlty more than one for every two people in the state.

Many people know that Kentucky is known for breeding fine cattle. According to Clark, the first breeds of imported English stock were brought into the state by 1787, only 4 years after they were first brought into Virginia. It was Henry Clay who brought the first Herefords into the state. Two bulls, a cow, and a heifer were shipped in specially padded stables built below decks on The Mohawk, landing in Baltimore on May 1, 1817. (Trivia: Clay’s English agent was Peter Irving, brother to Washington Irving.) By 1819, Clay was advertising that his Hereford bull Ambassador was available for service at Ashland, his Kentucky estate.

What I did not know, and what the late revered Dr. Clark taught me in Agrarian Kentucky (among other things), is that Kentucky once enjoyed a reputation for fine mules.

Throughout Kentucky history the horse has been the most popular farm animal, always enjoying a close affinity with its master. The mule was never able to loosen this bond, though it enjoyed its master’s workaday respect for its capabilities at performing arduous tasks. There perhaps are few or no cherished Troye portraits of these animals, yet nothing caused a real Kentucky dirt farmer’s eyes to glisten brighter than a well-matched pair of sharp-eared, fifteen-hand-high, sixteen-hundred-pound mules. Like their masters, mules had a fairly illustrious Virginia background, descending partly at least from offspring of George Washington’s prize jack Royal Gift. [p. 32]

In the breeding of mules, again Henry Clay was in the vanguard. He had a prize jack shipped over from Spain on a vessel belonging to the U.S. Navy. Guess he had a friendly press.

To continue with Dr. Clark:

Before 1840 there had come to exist in Kentucky a rather distinguished ancestry for the Kentucky mule. Such forbears as Pioneer, General Gaines, Nick Biddle, Veto, Warrior [ed. note: Warrior sold for $5,000 in 1837], and Superior attracted admiring attention in livestock shows, along with the jennets Desdamona, Molly Madow, and Adaline. These too were pioneers who produced offspring of distinction. In the spring of 1839 John J. Hinton of Franklin, Tennessee, challenged Kentuckians to exhibit their prize jackasses against his vaunted King Cyrus for a fifty-dollar award, a challenge which went unheeded. Siding with the Tennessee Bluegrass mule breeder, the editor of the local Franklin Review taunted Kentuckians with the statement “We have greater jacks in Tennessee than Old Kentuck, if not so many of them, biped and quadruped.”

A statement that no doubt still holds true.

Unfortunately, as the quote from The Time of Man illustrates, Kentucky had the same unfortunate habit of selling its mules south as it did of selling its slaves.*

__________
*In A History of Kentucky (Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988), Dr. Clark reports that it is difficult to know how widespread the slave trade was in Kentucky. The transactions were considered shameful at the time by the “better elements” and so information has been somewhat suppressed. Glossed over. He casts doubts, however, on the notion that slave owners bred slaves, as they bred their mules, specifically for the southern trade.

George Packer cants (on December 18):

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

. . .

Two poets have been given the honor since Frost. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at Clinton’s first inaugural, was an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded. And I know you can’t name the poet who read at Clinton’s second inaugural (it was Miller Williams).

On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.

. . .

Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

And recants (on December 30):

Here’s my year-end mea culpa, so I can start 2009 with one sin fewer on my head: that post of mine was much too quick and ill-considered for the subject it took up. Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th. (But to say I was dismissing her as “a black woman in America” is unfair. I had unkind things to say about Robert Frost, too. My target was the possibility of a good inaugural poem.)

Coates, in proposing some hip-hop singers as inaugural performers, gets closer to the point I didn’t make very well. There is good poetry being written in America, and bad poetry being written. But little contemporary poetry aspires to speak to, of, and even, in some way, for the country as a whole. In America today, popular music is a likelier vehicle for such things. My post was unnecessarily caustic, but in the argument that poetry has become too marginalized in America to find language for such a historic public occasion, at least one half of my point seems obvious enough, and an obvious shame. We would all be better off if it were otherwise.

Perhaps the grand gesture is not the task of an inaugural poem; perhaps it could achieve its purpose best by aiming for something smaller than a reflection on the occasion and the age. But the poets Alexander told Dwight Garner of the Times that she’s been reading in preparation for her task—Virgil, Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks—suggest that she has certain aspirations in mind: linguistic clarity, moral intensity, historical resonance, intellectual power. If she can even approach this standard, Elizabeth Alexander will prove once again that Obama is smarter than most of his critics, including this one.

Ta-Nehisi Coates rebuts (on December 19) and is worth a read. I like her closing argument:

Look, I’m not sure having Alexander read in front of an audience of millions is the greatest idea. I frankly hate ceremonies. They’re too long and people talk too much. But I’m sure that of the many awful and mind-numbling boring things that will happen on that day, Alexander’s piece–whatever it is–will be a highlight. I’m going out on faith. To paraphrase one of the great poets of our era, I got five on it.

Not fair to post clips. Read the whole of all three arguments.

For me, I’m not sure a poetry is possible that speaks to the country as a whole, we’re so fragmented. The world is fragmented. Balkanization has been the story of the last thirty years.

I’m pretty sure Alexander’s poem will speak to me far better than Rick Warren’s prayer.
__________

Tagged on: Why are we so fragmented. Read Paul Krugman for part of the answer: it’s been Republican strategy to divide and conquer.

61

Papa above!
Regard a Mouse
O’erpowered by the Cat!
Reserve within thy kingdom
A “Mansion” for the Rat!

Snug in seraphic Cupboards
To nibble all the day
While unsuspecting Cycles
Wheel solemnly away!

— Emily Dickinson, from Final Harvest. Emily Dickinson’s Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Little, Brown, 1961)

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Ground hog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day that all of my dreams come true
So happy just to be alive
Underneath the sky of blue
On this new morning, new morning
On this new morning with you.

—Bob Dylan, New Morning

Listen to it here.

And while the season is still upon us, I want you all to go over to Pocahontas County Fare and see Rebecca’s collection of vintage greeting cards.

Orwell was living in Marakesh in 1938 when he wrote this essay:

As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.

The little crowd of mourners-all men and boys, no women–threaded their way across the market-place between the piles of pomegranates and the taxis and the camels, wailing a short chant over and over again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his own relatives are buried.

When you walk through a town like this–two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in–when you see how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon that fact. The people have brown faces–besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects? They rise out of the earth, they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.

And then this:

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths’ booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark holes all ound, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

He goes on to say that, in spite of all this poverty, people persisted in believing that the Jews were all rich money-lenders and the poverty was just a deception.

As Western colonial powers, our history with both Jew and Arab is shameful.

The whole essay is worth a read.

And, then there’s this from World Public Opinion , via Glenn Greenwald:

A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel’s side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.