Category Archives: politics

Real Economies vs. Fake Economies

Posted on by

There’s a really interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the town of Hardwick, Vermont and the Center for Agricultural Economy. Hardwick was, like many small rural towns, emptying out — main street was full of empty buildings, and there was no way to make a living. Then a group of local agricultural entrepreneurs got together, meeting monthly, loaning one another money, figuring out ways to share skills and resources so that they all prosper. Their website says that their goal is programs that:

…will recognize that the 21st century food system balance be tipped towards localization over globalization, locally sustainable food systems over long trade routes, and broadened agricultural diversity and biodiversity over intensified crop production

Local systems, local sustainability, local community — look — hippie values back in action, but making money, and building a local economy. It sent me off to the basement library to pull out Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Paul Hawken’s books — maybe its time for a refresher course in the economies of sustainability. In the wisdom of old values like thrift, and soil conservation, and organizations based on community.

What I loved about this article was the timing of it. Here we are in a financial crisis caused by a classic crazy bubble — this time it wasn’t tulips, or Web 1.0, but mortgages. If you give people crazy mortgages that they can’t afford, and then you borrow on margins of 60 and 80 times the ostensible worth of those rotten mortgages, well, then I guess you shouldn’t be that surprised when the whole thing blows up. I’ve been just beside myself with anger at all those snotty guys I grew up with who when you asked what they did said “I do money” and then went on to point out that what they did was of course so arcane and complicated that no one but them could understand it. And then they went off and gambled with all of our money and lost it because they decided to pretend that the essential rules had changed when they hadn’t. And now the rest of us will suffer the very real financial consequences.

So in a week when I’ve mostly been livid — it was such a joy to read about the farmers of Hardwick (where my beloved Patrick spent a couple of years when he went to Sterling College in Craftsbury). What I loved about these farmers and ag entrepreneurs in Vermont was that they rebuilt a town by focusing on what is real — real crops, real compost, real products that they can make out of materials they grow themselves. Real cooperation. They banded together. They found ways to buy one another’s surplus and make more products that they could sell. They put money back into the foundation and into one another. They rebuilt a town. The old fashioned way. The way we’ve all been told for the last couple of decades was obsolete in a global economy. They proved that local and sustainable can work.

Ed Abbey called an economy based on the  concept of endless growth “the economy of the cancer cell” — it seems to me that perhaps, although it’s traumatic and is likely to be very painful, maybe we’re seeing the beginning of the end of that way of thinking. The traders who were making millions and millions of dollars by trading pieces of paper that held no real relationship to anything of actual value have seen their entire industry disappear (perhaps now they’ll have a little more sympathy for all those steelworkers and manufacturing workers who have been through the same thing for the past thirty years). Although I haven’t gone to the website and read the details, the fact that Obama is talking at every turn about green technologies being a sustainable growth sector and a way we can earn/innovate our way out of this crisis is very heartening to me. And his message is resonating. It’s making sense to people waking up from a fever dream of consumerism and cheap oil and bad processed food that only makes them obese and sick.

Suddenly, the old values, the ones that Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry and Paul Hawken have been talking about for years are being proven true. I was talking to one of my dog park friends this morning who is opening a store this winter — he’s going to sell canning equipment and water filters and mills to grind one’s own wheat. He wants to start some classes for people who want to learn to do for themselves those skills of basic sustainability that we’ve handed over for too long to big corporations. This is one of the main reasons I moved here — I wanted to be someplace where people still know how to do things. There are still a lot of old chicken coops in back alleys all over town. There are gardens. There are ranchers raising animals. There are elk and deer and antelope filling freezers every fall. There’s an ethic of sustainability and self-reliance and there’s also a real community. So maybe, like the good people of Hardwick, we can keep one another afloat.

share save 171 16 Real Economies vs. Fake Economies

Hail and Voting

Posted on by

So, here we are, the last primary in the nation. Although I’ve been an Obama supporter for months, I’ve been lying to the campaign. They (quite rightly) have been encouraging people to vote early, especially since here in Montana you can register any time, including on election day, and you can vote right when you register. The Bozeman Chronicle had a photo on the front page this morning of a line of early voters snaking out the door of the courthouse over there yesterday. But I’ve written on this blog before about how I love to go to the polls and so, although I told the Obama folks that I voted early (so they could move on and call people who really were undecided) I didn’t. I waited until today so I could go to the polls. And it turns out I’m not the only one who likes to go vote in person. My friend Scott McMillion did a piece on the Lehrer News Hour (which I still think of as McNeil-Lehrer) last Friday about how he loves going to the polls here because he sees all the older ladies who knew him when he was a little kid. It’s a great piece about how the town has changed both for the better and for the not so better. You can watch the streaming video here. So, off I went on my bike a while ago to go vote, and although I don’t know all the older ladies, I saw several of my friends, and it felt like a civic event.

Hail and Voting In garden news, we had a little hail yesterday afternoon, along with several bouts of pelting rain. While the 2 kales (Gallego and Laccinato) seem to be okay, and the chard looks a little battered, and even the broccoli transplants held up fairly well, the Regina di Maggio lettuce didn’t fare so well. I’m giving it a couple of days to see if it will recover, but poor things, they just look beat to death. The spinach is finally coming in, as is the broccoli rabe, and my other oddball favorite from Seeds of Italy, the Rapa da Foglia senza Testa. The description says that this is a turnip green — all I know is that I love it. It’s bitter, without being too bitter, and grows like mad, and is absolutely delicious sauteed with a little olive oil, garlic, and lemon.

share save 171 16 Hail and Voting

How Not to be Useful …

Posted on by

So, it’s snowing again this morning — and although I’m quite tired of snow, it’s a lovely soft morning — bit fat snowflakes, no wind, not too cold. So off for our morning dog walk I went — I’m babysitting the MH’s dog while he’s gone to Arizona for a couple of days and it was good to have 2 dogs with me again.

So we get to the dog park and we’re coming around the edge of the bluff and there’s another couple coming toward us. She’s on the phone, and he barely nods hello. I don’t recognize them, and they have that sheen of self-importance that we can all get. Whatever, we all pass and I can hear her loudly talking on her phone for a ways. But it’s a lovely morning and the dogs are romping in the snow and I just sort of wonder idly who the yuppies are. But as I come around toward the parking lot, there’s an SUV sitting there with the engine running. Again, it’s a car I don’t recognize, and as we pass one another on the backside I ask them if that’s their car that’s running. They tell me it is. I ask why. The woman tells me “because we were freezing.”

Now, here’s where I failed in this exchange. “Totally uncool,” I told them. “Thanks for polluting our dog park.” The man made some crack about his car being the least of the dog park’s problems and I sort of stomped away feeling all angry and stupid about the whole thing. But it made me mad. It’s bad enough to drive a big vehicle like that, but to just leave it running? Now those people knew better, I saw it in her eyes when I asked her why her car was running. But where I failed in the whole exchange was that I was annoyed by them in general. My inner Thoreau was outraged. I wanted to say that maybe if she put down the phone and looked at the lovely morning, maybe if she put down the phone and took two laps around the dog park that would warm her up, maybe if she put down the phone and turned off her car and was actually present that maybe we wouldn’t be in this fix we’re in, but no, I just made a snotty comment to the annoying yuppie types and missed the whole moment. Henry David was spouting bromides in my ear about chopping wood warming one twice and the false economies by which men value success, and frankly, my knee-jerk reaction was that I didn’t like these people and what were they doing in my park when they clearly didn’t know how to behave?

And so I got snotty. Not useful. But I do worry. These are the kinds of people who are supposed to know better than to leave their car running. These are people sort of like me — well educated, well off, professional. These are the kind of people who are supposed to be a part of the solution. And if as a society we can’t get over our own sense of self-importance to make even that kind of small change, to turn the car off, to pay attention, then what hope is there?

Michael Pollan asked exactly these quesitons in last week’s NY Times Magazine, in a piece called “Why Bother?”

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

That’s sort of how I felt when I saw that car running this morning. On the one hand, it was just one car, it was only a few minutes, really? how much damage was it doing? Why bother saying anything? Why bother worrying about it? But in the article Pollan makes a good argument that yes, individual effort is worth the bother, and that even small gestures, when aggregated, can make a difference.

But I don’t think that was my motivation. I was just pissy. Somehow, the combination of the running car, and those two people who were so not present on a beautiful snowy morning beside the Yellowstone River really got to me. They filled me with despair. They annoyed me. I probably saw something of myself in them. And instead of reaching out, and perhaps effecting some change, I failed by indulging in self-righteousness and anger, which allowed them in turn to retreat to defensiveness and to dismiss me as some weirdo hippie (sort of funny, actually). Which does make me wonder how we’re ever going to manage to reach across these divides and effect some change if we can’t even have a civil conversation about a running car at the dog park on a snowy morning. Sigh.

share save 171 16 How Not to be Useful ...

Michelle Obama, a Woman I want in the White House

Posted on by

I was doing laundry yesterday, and while channel surfing in search of something non-football-related to watch, I stumbled upon the UCLA rally. I missed Caroline Kennedy and Oprah, but lucked out and switched to CSPAN just as Michelle Obama began to speak.

She was amazing — funny and smart and fierce — to those who say there’s no there there but empty rhetoric, all I can say is that’s the family I want in the White House — people my age, who just paid off their student loans (which Michelle Obama pointed out had only happened because Barak wrote two best-selling books, and then she wryly mentioned that “this is not a viable financial plan”). Most important though, I want these two people who continue to say that it’s not about them, it’s about us. That it’s about building an America where we all feel that we have a stake, and a chance, and where we’re not each in it alone, but we’re all in it together. She had a lovely bit at the beginning of her speech about how we’re so isolated, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we all have the same problems — aging parents, health insurance, our kids’ schools, finding decent work, building a life and weathering the storms. That we’re all more alike than we are different.

But the thought also occurred to me as I watched this smart woman my age, a woman who reminded me of all the smart women I work with at the Big Corporation, a woman who has had no onus on her to prove her wifely bona fides — that in some ways it’s because Hillary Clinton took the heat 15 years ago for being a wife with a career and an independent identity that Michelle Obama’s credentials and jobs now seem entirely normal. No one makes any fuss over the fact that she’s always had a job, a good job — or that she has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. We’ve come that far at least.

And I think to an extent, Oprah is right — that we’re at a point where we have a black man and a white woman running neck and neck for the Democratic nomination shows that we have won many battles.

Myself, I am not torn by the sort of identity politics issues that Rebecca Traister writes about this morning in Salon — my problems with Hillary stem as much from generational gripes as from anything else. I’m tired of the 1968 generation, and part of me can’t help thinking that the Clintons had their chance and they blew it. I’m tired of finger-wagging candidates who keep telling us they know what’s best more than we do. I’m tired of Democrats who so want to be right that they can’t reach out to people who don’t agree with them. I’m tired of litmus tests and playing defense and internicine squabbles about which one of us is the true progressive, liberal, Democrat.

I want new life, new energy and a new way of thinking that takes into account the possibility that we can all be a little bit better than we’ve been told we can be. I want leadership — not just competence.

I want someone who keeps me standing in my basement after the clothes are folded, riveted by a speech that dares me to believe.

share save 171 16 Michelle Obama, a Woman I want in the White House

My Grandmother’s Voting for Hillary

Posted on by

My 97-year-old grandmother asked for an absentee ballot for the Democratic primary so she can vote for Hillary.

My grandmother has never voted for a Democrat before in her life, but she wanted to “vote for that woman.”

My grandmother was a crack polo player in the 1930s, when polo was a hugely popular public sport (30,000 people took the train up out from Chicago to see the 1938 East-West game, when Will Roger’s team beat the best players from the East coast). Because she was a “girl” my grandmother wasn’t allowed to play — she could play practice matches when someone got hurt, but she never got the chance to compete.

She was also offered a full scholarship to the Northwestern Medical school, which her father convinced her to turn down because she’d be “taking a place from some man who would need to support a family.” Instead, she married my grandfather, and then when he was debhilitated by alcoholism, she supported her family without the aid of anything useful like a medical degree. She was an impatient mother, a woman who would have been much happier running something — a company, a hospital, something other than the Pony and Pet Show she put on with her best friend every summer.

When I was growing up she told me over and over again to stay in school, to get a degree, to go out and make my own money because if you have your own money “no one can tell you what to do.” She told me at about sixteen, long before I even had a boyfriend, that if I ever “got in trouble” to come to her and she’d take care of it. (This from a woman who wanted to abort her fourth child, but couldn’t find anyone back on those days of illegal abortions. My Aunt Molly doesn’t really take it personally, and in fact, she’s the one taking care of my grandmother in her very old age.) And of course, she’s the one who gave me Mrs. Baggot’s ring while whispering fiercely “now you have a really big diamond, and you didn’t have to marry anyone to get it.”

However, there’s always been this weirdly reactionary side to her — I remember her praising Nancy Reagan for walking several steps behind her husband (we mocked her openly for that one). And the only way my mother and two aunts could get out of the house as young women was to get married. But there’s that pissed-off part of my grandmother, the girl who was told she couldn’t play, the woman who had at least two more children than she wanted to, the woman who was convinced not to go to medical school. And that’s the woman who even at 97, is determined to vote for the first woman with a real shot at being the President of the United States. Even if she is a Democrat.

Who knows how many pissed off old ladies there are out there? There’s a group the pollsters haven’t been talking to …

share save 171 16 My Grandmothers Voting for Hillary