The Northern Agrarian

The following thoughts were originally sent in an email to a few friends and former coworkers. I was encouraged to share them, so I shall.

Sitting on the Amtrak Regional train to Philadelphia on my way home for Thanksgiving, I stare out the window at graffiti covered landmarks and the rest of urban sprawl’s slow, benign destruction of my country and wonder why things are the way they are. Having deemed the replacement of the Mona Lisa with modern slop and William Shakespeare with Nicolas Sparks insufficient, we now look to the amber waves of grain. purple mountains majesty, and the fruited plains as impediments to mini malls and Wal-Marts. Formerly the world’s greatest producer, we are poised to abandoned American industry and its millions of jobs and priceless history in favor of trillion dollar care packages for multinational corporations. What was formerly cliché spitting-into-the-wind about America’s long descent has become reality. Parents can’t take care of their kids anymore; it takes a village. Yet small towns are sacrificed to this urban and suburban mess.

I am aware of the irony. I type this on a laptop. I am a passenger on a train system abhorred by my anti-modernity predecessors such as President Martin Van Buren. I have an ipod and a fairly sophisticated cell phone. But to argue that the advent of technological progress has not in any way dumbed-down our society is nearly impossible, especially if you find yourself–as I recently did–in front of the idiot box trying to figure out how we got from Dickens’s packed-house reading of A Christmas Carol in Boston to “The Hills” and “Gossip Girl.” Or even, over a relatively shorter period of time, Fugazi to Good Charlotte, Bruce Springsteen to Jack Johnson or Dave Matthews. The only question more frightening than “How did we get here?” is “Where are we going?”

Progress, Dr. Flaming Fleming (oops) once opined, is a horribly ugly word. But even uglier is what progress has meant for society. The major movements of modern history, including the Civil Rights and abolitionist movements, the Women’s Rights movement, worker’s rights, etc. only fit C.S. Lewis’ definition of progress, in that they looked to the rich religious and moral justification for equal rights and equal treatment. It is nearly impossible to imagine a secular abolitionist movement in the US, let alone one built on empty platitudes about change and progress. Yet the steps made during those movements serve as little more than a launching pad for special interests to brand their own special desires as “rights” or “needs.”

Just arrived in Baltimore, in the state of Maryland, named after our Holy Mother. I think I see a streetwalker.

But I digress… Why are things the way they are? Poverty is an easy answer, but the conspicuous absence of major increases in the divorce and out-of-wedlock rates during the Great Depression leave that answer in doubt. Plus, there has always been poverty, from Elizabethan England to Ancient Greece. It didn’t stop Thomas More or Plato.

I ran into an old friend from home in the city the other day. Having debated with her online at length on the impact technology has on personal contact, and shared a lot about our own personal lives through technology, we were unable to carry on a five-minute conversation. She didn’t LOL (laugh out loud for the lay folk) at my dry jokes like she apparently does on the internet. Maybe if there was an awkwardly smile and back away (ASBA) acronym my internet conversations would be more honest. Her grandma isn’t sick anymore. I found that out a few hours later via text message.

Still no answers, huh? Maybe the reason why children, teens, and young adults are as overmedicated as they are is because when our parents were teenagers it became clear that children are the worst kind of punishment. Instead of kids being our future, they interrupt and ruin our future. My mother’s friend, recently a mother, has been less than enthused about the prospect of motherhood. She’ll never knew if she could have become a marine biologist. Her baby boy has beautiful eyes, though. Then again, some of us think they all do.

An acquaintance of mine was raped a few months ago in Washington. The poor girl waited for hours to get help at the George Washington University hospital. They told her to get in line behind the wounded gang bangers.

My digressions have done little to help me figure out the question at hand: “Why are things the way they are?” We are actually steering past a nice small town, much like Hudson, Ohio, where I lived for an all-too-brief four years. As the lights disappear over the horizon, I remember riding my bike into “downtown” in Middle School, the town framers wonderfully tone-deaf to the irony of such a peaceful, pretty place being titled such a thing. The lights are getting smaller, but I can still see them.

One of the “funniest” jokes of the 2008 election season was McCain’s “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” joke. Personally, war with harmless religious zealots halfway across the world is always a safe bet to have me in stitches, every time. Maybe it’s easier to laugh at war and the suffering it brings when you have been there, as Mr. McCain has. But for those of us aware of how stretched our military is and the level of involuntary service it would take to kill every America-hater in the world, it is scary. The Mac may find it funny, but I won’t be laughing at my 13-year-old brother’s flag-draped coffin. Over my dead body.

Speaking of dead bodies, Susan Sarandon really wanted me to vote. So much, in fact, that she got all of my idiot friends together and they agreed to blitz me with “informative” movies about global warming and poverty. According to a friend, other people extremely concerned with my vote included Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom (who isn’t even American).

I consider endorsements very important, and although DiCaprio and Bloom’s presumed endorsement of Barack Obama mean less to me than my dog’s, the support of men such as Andrew Bacevich and Christopher Buckley, conservatives who wrote eloquent pieces supporting Obama, are held in high respect by me. But my friends, in hopes of convincing me to vote for Obama, didn’t send me the writings of a man who’s heart was broken when his son was killed in Iraq or the son of conservatism’s most erudite voice. The road to fame and influence isn’t through hard work, intelligence, or eloquence, but through one’s ability to pretend to be someone they are not. Maybe Bacevich and Buckley should keep this in mind. A Buckley led “Titanic” would have been a helluva lot less boring.

I’ve been through Delaware, admirable in its stubbornly unassuming nature, and am not far from Philadelphia. Your guess as to “why we are the way we are” is as good as mine. But rereading these observations, I think many of them are worth considering. As long as we put Grisham ahead of Fitzgerald, Nickleback ahead of the Rolling Stones, and the gangbangers ahead of the rest of us, we will be left to ponder this question. And the more we collectivize, the more the concerns of the low-life become the concerns of a nation.

All we can do is try to keep the newsprint nightmare distant and remote. Let’s hope along with Kevin Devine that we don’t awake in guillotines.