Seeds, Cell Phones, and Extremes
Everybody notes that our country has lurched to extremes. There is a time-table to that lurching. I put the crucial watershed date at about 1954. For the extreme left, everything before then and any retro appearance of it is highly suspect. We aren’t a great country yet, and we certainly weren’t then.
For the extreme right, nothing good has happened since then. Because things aren’t like they were on “Father Knows Best,” they aren’t good at all, never mind what a narrow perspective it takes to be nostalgic for those days.
Oddly, that means both the extreme left and right have one thing in common: neither likes America very much. And both seem to use America as an ethnocentric way of speaking of the USA!
Those who think America is Exceptional with a capital E actually only mean that the immediate post-WWII America was exceptional. After that, we “gave away” our power over the world (supposedly a good thing) through liberal schemes. Conversely, those who think there is nothing exceptional about America mean we have shown a few glimmers of progress but mostly we remain just the same capital-driven, overly religious joint we’ve always been.
You don’t have to go far to see how our electoral politics has only allowed the extremes to win nominations (and then lose elections or be unable to govern), and you don’t have to select any special day to see another instance in majoring in minor concerns that plays well to the base while ignoring real problems that might yield in some measure to concerted efforts, even if that “concert” demanded, as concerts do, a blending (read compromise) of views rather than grandstanding.
There’s a great line in the opening episode of the new season of “Downton Abbey.” There’s been a row at the dinner table, and someone defends a young woman participating in the row because she is standing on principle. The best line is given to Maggie Smith (not uncommon in these episodes) when she says, “Principles are like prayers, very noble I’m sure, but awkward at a party!” (Forgive me if the quote is not exact—the gist is there.)
I do not of course argue for an unprincipled politics—we have plenty of that today thanks to giving big money the same rights of free speech as citizens and thanks to encouraging a kind of amoral relativism at large. But, as Conrad well portrayed, principles are of limited use not only at parties but whenever concerted and compassionate effort are the first order of the day and combatting real evils tests the human heart.
A short anecdote told by Roger Thurow in his moving book The Last Hunger Season tells how the ringing of a cell phone interrupted the discussions of subsistence farmers, gathered for the first time to discuss farming methods that promised better crops. The scene is rural Kenya, the Lutacho area, at an Assemblies of God church—just a shack in the wilderness. Locals and visitors are gathered to give and hear educational and motivational talks about farming when a cell phone’s ring tone set to “Jingle Bells” goes off.
Thurow makes the point:
“And so it was that the Lutacho farmers . . . wielded the latest in twenty-first century cell phone technology . . . but didn’t have access to farming technology, such as hybrid seeds, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century” (5).
In other words, the world-wide farm industry had never thought it worthwhile to penetrate the Kenyan back-water, despite the looming population/food crisis the world faces, but cell phone companies, among the most venal of our commercial interests, had managed to bring starving people ring tones!
Was anyone else raised with the phrase “fiddling while Rome burned” instilled in their thinking?
Here, then, are thoughts for contemplation—maybe bickering and hype and grandstanding and playing to the base have become, in this complex world in which we are all related, outworn modes of conduct, modes that need to be seen for what they are—threats to the future well-being of the republic, of the Americas, of the world.
Can our elected representatives (and, folks, we elected them!) really expect influential segments in life in the United States, say banking and credit industries or the 24/7 so-called news enterprise, to behave as good citizens of a global world while government itself deadlocks over trivial matters for political advantage?
Isn’t there too much at stake for the electorate to tolerate, even support such shenanigans?
Incidentally, the “new” agricultural methods—adequately spaced seeding, proper use of fertilizer, good seeds, methods every U.S. extension agent has known for a century—are called in Kenya “the Obama method.” Apparently, if you are starving and have the chance not to starve any more, your perspective on the world changes a bit from that of the professional carping critics who thrive on the world’s despair.
Likewise, perhaps substantive talks between China and the USA, despite our differences, should get more press than whether one of the world leaders is chewing gum…but that would be a lesson for journalists, and it is hard to expect journalists to be serious when the politics they cover are not.
More later. Thanks for reading. Reply if you like.
Chuck Peek
capeek 