Who are these so-called “socialists,” anyway?

🍎🍗🥦🍞🌽

 

Or call them “Communists,” as Republican candidates often do. This year’s Republican candidate for the office of President of the United States is fond of throwing around the lie that his opponent is a “Communist,” a lie born early in the last century and has been dragged out over and over again by politicians who seek to win by inducing fear. 

 

There are also idealogues who want either no government at all or government only for military purposes. To them, anything more is socialism. 

 

But enough with the generalizations. Let’s get down to something specific and look at it more closely.

 

Food stamps. No actual “stamps” are involved (there were stamps from 1939 to 1943), but that name for the benefit persists, so I’ll use it. I was curious about the people Reagan years ago called “welfare mothers” and who they are today, so I looked into it. Data found by the Pew Research Center (full article here for you) is eye-opening. Take a look. 

 

The majority of recipients of SNAP benefits are overwhelmingly white (62.7%) and were born in the United States (a whopping 87.8%). There are almost as many two-parent families receiving benefits (43.9%) as single-parent families with only a mother in the household (45.5%). As for the age of primary recipients, 44.5% of recipients fall into the 25 – 64-year-old age range. (Pew gives 25-44 and 45-64 separately. I have collapsed them.) The full history of the government program can be found here. Today over 12% of the American population receives this benefit. 

 

There is no way to determine the political affiliations of recipients, but I vividly recall one of my students years ago at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City, a self-proclaimed libertarian, who “did not believe” in government programs but acknowledged that her family relied on them. I did not then and do not now understand that. To me, what you do shows what you believe. If you believe in voting, for example, you vote. If you don’t vote, you don’t believe in it.

 

An important and often overlooked feature of food assistance in the United States is that it was inaugurated not only to alleviate hunger but also, essentially and perhaps primarily, to help farmers and business owners. Read about that here. The largest-ever expansion of government food assistance programs took place under a Republican administration for the benefit of American business. Communists? I don't think so.

 

Don’t fall for fake stories. And please don’t fall for name-calling and old, tired lies.

 

South to Whitewater

Return to the West, VI: South to Whitewater 

When I consult the United States road atlas and see what a relatively small area, even of Arizona, is occupied by Cochise County, down in the southeast corner of the state, it astounds me to recall how much we found to explore within its boundaries. Our home base territory was basically Sulphur Springs Valley, extending south from the Dos Cabezas range between the Chiricahua Mountains to the east and the Dragoons to the west.

(On the other side of the Dragoons is the San Pedro Valley. Everywhere in Arizona, mountain ranges are the general landmarks by which one orients oneself in space, with specific formations and peaks serving to fine-tune location.)

We had reason early in our three-month stay to explore to the south, because every spring sandhill cranes fly north over the continent to Canada to nest and raise young, and in recent years a few pairs of the stately birds have begun spending their summers in Leelanau County, where we had learned to look for them each year. Now people told us that in Cochise County, Arizona, we might see as many as ten thousand at a time, down in the Whitewater Draw. If a thousand cranes mean good luck, what must ten thousand cranes portend?

“Where would you like to go first?”

“Could we go to Whitewater?”

Our most direct route was to backtrack halfway to Willcox from Dos Cabezas and take the Kansas Settlement Road south to Hwy 191.

Straight as a string, with a kink or a knot here and there, the Kansas Settlement Road drops south through the Sulphur Springs Valley, full of mystery and surprises. For instance, we drove by many times before realizing there was a parking area giving access to the Willcox Playa from the south. More obvious, with its big painted sign out front announcing the business, was the Kansas Settlement Gin Company, but we never saw any sign of activity around the buildings. Bonita Bean was a different story. (A kink in the road goes around the bean company.) Monsieur Jean, our neighbor, was one of many who bought his pinto beans in bulk down on the Kansas Settlement Road.

A recent modern development -- I know it to be recent and modern because an old-timer at the regional museum shook her head over such goings-on -- is an enormous dairy farm on the Kansas Settlement Road. To feed dairy cows and supplement grazing for beef cattle, huge green fields irrigated by irrigation systems line the road, looking almost like urban electric towers and lines. Sun makes rainbows in sprayed water, and wind blows a fine mist through the air, and it is beautiful – but painful, too, to think of sun and wind evaporating so much water, pumped from deep underground, before it does any growing thing any good at all.

While we were in residence in Dos Cabezas, results of a well survey were reported in the weekly newspaper, with figures for present water depth compared to that ten years previously. In Willcox, wells had typically lost less than five feet. Most alarming and dramatic losses were, not surprisingly, along the Kansas Settlement Road, where many wells had lost fifty, some as much as sixty feet, heavy losses attributed to “groundwater overdraft,” i.e., pumping too much water out of the ground. (To the north, between Willcox and Bonita, also heavily irrigated land, losses were reported between 30 and forty feet.) Besides cattle in the one large confinement operation (CFO), plantations of nut trees, also heavy drinkers, may be seen along the Kansas Settlement Road.

Another stretch of road indicated the presence of small residential holdings. Private road signs at regular intervals announced roads with Western names, such as Mule Deer Road, obviously intended to appeal to snowbird winter home-buyers. The name I liked best, though, wasn’t for a road but for geological landmarks named on our map of the valley as the Three Sisters. I always smiled to see the Three Sisters appear along our road south.

Somewhere along the way – was it on the Kansas Settlement Road or beyond it, where we had already joined the highway? – a little gas station and convenience store appeared at the side of the road, announcing

Coffee

food

PASTRIES

out in the very middle of nowhere. I can’t speak for the “pastries” (my skepticism always kicks in when I see that word, which usually indicates the availability of fried donuts), but the store offered plenty of cowboy boots and hats and shirts.

And then we were sailing through empty land again.

To reach the Whitewater Draw, it is necessary to leave the main road and travel by washboard, but the slow-down is well worthwhile. It is also necessary, for the fullest viewing pleasure, to leave the parking lot and walk the path around various ponds. 

Yes, ponds! At least, that’s what they look like. I’m not sure what creates and holds the water in the Draw, but to my lake-starved Michigan eyes it seemed nothing short of a miracle. Beautiful water, the surface stirred by wind, edges soft with plant life and frogs and water birds of various kinds, all of it stretching out deep and wide, a tractor working far in the background and hazy mountains beyond the farmed land. (I tried not to see the irrigation framework.) It was transporting to be near so much water in southeast Arizona. That was the first miracle of the day.

Then came the second miracle. On that first visit we made to the Draw, the January wind was fierce, cutting through clothes and attempting nonstop to tear hats from heads and scarves from throats, and yet everyone in the relatively large crowd of human visitors was smiling as if at a choir of heavenly hosts. People were hunched over against the cold, holding onto their hats, clutching their coats to keep them closed, but beaming beatifically, faces upturned to the sky and glancing now and then at other passing humans to exchange thrilled smiles of amazement. Because there were, literally, thousands of sandhill cranes, soaring and circling and calling, coming gradually lower and lower until, a few at a time, they let themselves join us on earth..

Leaving the draw, dazed with visions, we continued toward Bisbee, a town David remembered from a visit over two decades before. The vegetation changed somewhat that close to la frontera, the border with Mexico. But I will leave memories of Bisbee for another post.

The cranes, the tens and thousands of cranes....

Warning: More Than Nursery School Attention Span Required

What is “scientific”? I wonder if my friends and I see it the same way.

I was delighted by the first two paragraphs of Wendell Berry's letter published in October 22, 2015, issue of New York Review of Books (received in my p.o. box this morning) before I looked down to see his name, upon which my delight increased tenfold. Finishing his letter, I went on to read Edmund Phelps in what was billed as a reply, whereupon my delight vanished.

Berry's points, sufficiently clear that one need not possess a degree in economics to understand them, are that (1) agriculture is a huge part of the American economy and that (2) current industrial and chemical practices visited on the land are toxic and unsustainable. Nowhere in his so-called reply does Phelps address these points. Instead he leaps to a generalized defense of "modernity," as he defines it,dragging a string of red herrings across the path.

Phelps sees threats to free speech, in the university classroom and elsewhere. This is no answer to economists ignoring agriculture or to the current and widespread destructive practices of corporate-scale farming. And where is his evidence for the claim that free speech is "ever more limited"? Who in this country has been jailed recently for speech? What newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses have been shut down? As far as university classes go, administration guidelines to faculty probably have much more to do with the fact that higher education is now run more and more on a modern business model -- mustn't alienate "customers"! -- than with any fears of government censorship.

And does Phelps really find mandatory testing of new products an undesirable curb on ingenuity? Is this a scientific, "modern" view? Would he return us to the days of thalidomide on the market?

The general attitude of Phelps is one I have encountered before, often in individuals with backgrounds such as engineering. They seem to feel that whatever comes out of a laboratory is, by definition, "scientific" and, therefore, to be adopted without question. I find this view unscientific in the extreme. A more enlightened view of modern science is to recognize its necessary reliance on ceaseless experimentation and testing. Independent studies of agricultural practices point in a very different direction from corporate-subsidized studies. I recommend readers to the monthly magazine AcresUSA, "the voice of eco-agriculture," published since 1971.

If I were a cartoonist, I would draw a picture. Wendell Berry and the Acres people, along with all the organic farmers and CSA families I know, would be standing at the edge of a precipice, holding up big detour signs, while a river of lemmings, wearing t-shirts with slogans for GMOs, CAFOs, and agrichemicals would be running at them full-tilt, pushing them aside to leap to their doom. Sadly, if the lemmings succeed, the rest of us will not be left standing on the cliff but will be dragged along to our doom.

Surely, "the West's modern project" – that which Phelps takes himself to be defending against Wendell Berry and imaginary quashers of free speech -- can do better. All that's needed is objective and rigorous scrutiny of the evidence and a willingness to adapt. Is that not modern and scientific?

-- 

I posted the foregoing on Facebook, having modified somewhat a letter sent to NYRB editor. Facebook (for those few unacquainted with that bantering, slogan-ridden, wisecracking social media platform) does not generally offer high-level exchange of thought, but I did receive an insightful comment from one friend, who included this link. The bottom line is that as bad as things were before, they are worse since 1996 with the rollback of the Delaney Clause, a legislative protection in place since 1950 and now removed by Congress, with only one voice raised in protest. Read it and weep. For those who attention span has   already been overtaxed, here are a few highlights: 

"With the Delaney Clause dead on the floor of Congress, some 80 pesticides that were about to be outlawed as carcinogens will now remain in use. Call it the Dow-Monsanto bail-out bill, since these two companies make most of the chemical killers that were on the list to be banned."

“Chemicals go a long way in a small body,” Clinton said. He could have been more specific. The new law now ensures that when children eat strawberries, they will also be ingesting the deadly chemical residue left by benamyl, captan, and methyl bromide. The average apple and peach has eight different pesticides embedded in it. Grapes have six and celery five. Children get as much as 35 percent of their likely lifetime dose of such toxins by the time they are five."

Rumblings Around Leelanau

Thunder rumbling is what we need. Well, rain is what we really need. The rumblings, however, are coming mostly from agricultural machinery. Old orchards are coming out, and land is being cleared for new trees. That’s the noise from the south end of the township.

Up at the north end, a young bear has been sighted several times, in different places. The hairy youth has caused no problems so far, but dog walkers are being careful where they wander.

It’s summer’s end and fall’s begining, and that spells fruit flies Up North. One thing that can be said for fruit flies is that they’re quiet. They arrive, they annoy, they die—and all without a sound!