Really Random Riley...

Photos: William Pote       

Mary followed through this week on an idea we've been threatening to try for a long time--offer a take home family-sized homemade chicken pot pie for all the parents who are here with their field trip kids. Actually, we tried it once before, but--knock on forehead, make woody ding-ding sound--we didn't put a sign out featuring a picture of the pie. Mallory drafted one up and the family pies started whipping out the bakery window like frisbees.

We saw someone tooling around in the cool of the afternoon, (Sunday I think) with a big camera rig, and it was our old village blacksmith William Pote IV, taking a chronicle of the fall. That's his picture of the new restrooms above, which I modestly believe are the best looking privies this side of the Connecticut River, and maybe even this side of the Thames. Click here to see the farm through the eyes of our blacksmith.



Speaking of photographs, I have a singular knack for not having the camera in my hand just when some perfectly emblematic moment announces itself. Is anyone else in the same boat? You lock up the XD high-resolution movie camera, safe in its case, and a shaft of light pokes down through the tavern windows, that makes even the afternoon dust look like a cinnamon fog. You run out of camera battery just as an alpha family walks by, made into angels by the evening light, and you think -- "if I just had THAT picture of THAT family" I wouldn't be able to KEEP Southern Californians away from this place. (This might be something you can only understand if you're a living history-apple-farmer entrepreneur). I found this frustration to be true with writing as well; you need to scribble it all down when the tragicomedy takes place. You can live life, or you can chronicle it. Very few people get to do both.



I know we weren't speaking of the French, but this farm journal isn't obliged to have any common theme, so I will just tell you that the movie "Man on Wire" is worth watching -- with a qualification. It tells the story of a French high wire-walker who was obsessed with the idea of
running a cable between the World Trade Center towers and walking that span, some 1600 feet above the streets of New York. That 1974 dare-devilry, however, was far more complicated than the act itself--since it had to be planned years in advance, with fake IDs and manufactured identities and the ton-weight transportation of high wire equipment to the top of the building, past security guards. The wire was put in place by virtue of an arrow shot from building to building, and it required teams of participants all willing to be arrested for their prank. The entire trapeze rig was put in place in the early hours of the morning, and the wire-walker himself worried that he was too tired to accomplish his task, after helping to build the rig. Sixteen hundred feet above the ground...



There was also a romantic back story. The Frenchman in question, Phillipe Petit, had a devoted girlfriend who helped him string wire, practice high-wind conditions, and sustain his courage, but after the daredevil cheated death, and earned the attention of the Big Apple's media, a New York woman literally offered herself to him, right on the street, by way of "welcome." He took her up on the offer, before he could even enjoy the celebratory embrace of his helpers, and the jilted lover, interviewed some three decades after the event, seems the very picture of disgusting French romantic existentialism. Paraphrasing: "..he had become a new creature now, a creature of celebrity, and this was a new phase of his life, and his old life was over.."



I've had it with the "ugly American" rap. What self-respecting, milk-fed American woman would put up with this? What daughter of Calvin would put on the Camus face and get all coffee-house in the face of infidelity?

Americans may be loud, but the French are rank cliché.

Molly Farr "Sees" the Troubling Future...

I was confirming with Bill Blanchard of Little Big Band fame regarding this Saturday night's Big Band Dance, and he reminded me that I haven't written anything on the farm journal for some time and that he was worried about us.

The truth is that I would love to write a farm journal entry every day, but we've been doing a lot--mostly crunching numbers and trying to plan for an active winter and summer season.



We also set out to improve our video production skills by partnering with no less than comedian Victoria Jackson, (Saturday Night Live) and veteran character actor Basil Hoffman (Milagro Bean Field War), who are also ardent Tea Party activists.



An encounter between past and present is right up our alley, of course, but most of the time we present documentary fragments of the past--Patrick Henry's speech, the controversy surrounding the Stamp Act, George Washington's rules of civility; in this case, we engaged in conjecture: what would the founders' generation think about a cadre of bankers demanding $700 billion in relief? What would they think about representative bodies voting on legislation so complex our delegates have no time to even read the bills, much less study them? What would they think about modern farming and pitting a two inch minnow against humanity's food supply, as in the case of the Delta Smelt?



It's anybody's guess, of course, but it would be difficult to imagine an age of faith, reason, and economy being happy about the modern turn of events in America. I'm an equal opportunity offender, by the way; I believe Democrats and Republicans have been guilty of gross excess over the last century. The industrial economy made them all too greedy for their own approved pork, and now we have a civil service patronage system with voters who are voting to protect their jobs, as much as defend the republic.



The dinosaur media treat the Tea Party movement using a template that substitutes contempt for thought, and they ignore the troubling economic realities that underpin the movement: how can we possibly pay for all of this? What happens when the Chinese won't buy our treasuries? What happens when we kill agricultural production to make ourselves feel good and green? What happens to productivity when the federal government taxes the hard working not just to pay for those who can't, but those who won't work? What happens when ACORN offices use taxpayer money to help pimps run for congress?

What would Molly think about that?

The Death of Certainty II -- Who Owns Me?

Just in case anyone was wondering, I've now taken in three of Michael Sander's Harvard lectures on "Justice," and unless I missed something waiting for the HD video feed to buffer, the Almighty hasn't been referenced once in the search for undergraduate truth. (There's a reason why
they call them "wise fools.") I kept thinking Michael would lead them to at least refer to Jefferson's formulation, ("endowed by their Creator.."), but no such luck. Perhaps--that's where the course is going?

If we don't "own ourselves," who does? The Libertarian argument against progressive taxation is that it represents a theft of our labor, and thus a declaration of ownership by the taxing authority. The Libertarian conludes that unfair taxation is really slavery in disguise and that it violates our ownership of ourselves, but contemporary progressives know slavery is wrong, so they are forced to conclude we don't own ourselves. We are owned by "society." That should set off a few alarm bells, but the students never really could get beyond the concept of majority rule. Professor Sandel, in fact, brow-beat them if they intimated any problem with democracy. I guess he was trying to get them to challenge the limits of mob rule, but no one really seemed to have the answer: we do not own ourselves. How could we "own" ourselves when we we did nothing to create "ourselves?" How could a watch claim ownership of itself? Doesn't the clock-maker own the watch? Doesn't the weaver own the blanket? If the modern mind can't accept God as our owner, it needs to accept "society" as our owner, and the governing democratic arm of society, in these United States, is Congress.

Have you seen Congress lately?

No thanks.

More Funerals for Certainty

If you have an hour or so to spare, you might want to watch what the current crop of Harvard undergraduates are debating. In this WGBH/Harvard University production, professor Michel Sandel encourages the students to imagine themselves on a trolley car without brakes, heading for five rail workers, destined to die if the trolley car doesn't stop. Professor Sandel adds this twist: as trolley car drivers, they can choose to divert their car down a spur line and only kill one rail worker by changing course.

What do they do? Kill the five workers or kill the one worker?



The discussion all takes place in Sanders Theater, where the deep burgundy-brown weight of the walls and the ancient, vaulted light combine to make the participants look unequal to the question. (With a few exceptions, Harvard students don't seem to use the King's English, or marshal the great ideas with any precision these days.)

Professor Sandel is leading them all down the road to consideration of the famous case known as The Queen vs. Dudley and Stephens, the generic version of which has been standard fodder for values clarification courses in public high school. It involves the decision of a ship's captain--adrift in a life-boat after the loss of his ship--to kill an ailing orphan cabin boy, so as to feed the remainder of the crew.

Of course, these scenarios tend to involve endless nuance--did the cabin boy give his consent, would it have been more fair to "draw straws," would the trolley car scenario have been more fair if a fat guy had been pushed over a bridge to stop its progress? (This was literally Professor Sandel's invention, tempting us to wonder, was he inviting the students to conclude "fat people" are expendable?)



In only one instance did I see a student stand and say "murder is murder." Professor Sandel seemed to wax a little indignant at this point, if only for the sake of the drama, and he reminded the student that England was very sympathetic to the plight of the captain. The other lifeboat members, after all, had family waiting for them; the orphan had none. Wouldn't the sum total of happiness be increased by favoring the lives of those who had families?

The student didn't flinch. "That's the argument for street crime," he said. "You kill someone on the sidewalk to feed your family."



Unfortunately, this is about as close as any student got to the ten commandments, or any real sense of the axiomatic. One student did say, flat out, "you don't eat human beings," but most students gave what I would have to call technocratic formulations of maximized value, or sneaky narratives about how to avoid the question altogether.



In an 18th century version of the same exchange, a Harvard classroom full of future ministers and lawyers would make--without question--some reference to the Almighty. Someone would surely step forward with the bold pronouncement, "we have no authority to make such a decision" or "better all die than to remain alive without honor."



Perhaps that sense of the unquestioned--that moral stonewall between God's territory and our own--was behind the "murder is murder" comment, but few contemporary college students would dare even intimate they were leaning on eternal truth, much less mention God and man at Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or even Cal State San Bernardino. (We did have a young friend who mentioned Jesus at a local community college class, only to be threatened with an eye gouging by devout Muslims in the parking lot afterwards, but that's a different story.)

Some folks think that's all well and good. It's better to argue morality in purely secular terms, but there are some assumptions no one seems to be considering. At the beginning of the course, most of the students just assumed that preserving five lives was a good thing, even at the price of another. But the preservation of human life itself, is, arguably, a gift of our Judeo-Christian ancestors. Some cultures value life so little they throw virgins in Volcanoes and widows on funeral pyres.

What happens when the biblical assumptions are washed away by another generation of academics who think God's axioms are too quaint to acknowledge? What happens when technically educated but morally illiterate biologists run the world?



I guess that's already happening. We're letting Sacramento farmers starve in order to preserve a two inch minnow.



Welcome to the Brave New World. Good work, Harvard.

The Tedious Obligation of Repeating the Truth...

James Riley

The first lady took some grief this week, when she claimed her Olympic-pitching trip to Europe would constitute a "sacrifice." According to one source, the first lady enjoys the services of 30 staff members, five press secretaries, and several private chefs, so if you picture life at the White House, it's not so hard to see a first-class European vacation as something of a sacrifice. (I'm a bit of a home-body myself and I don't even have one press secretary.) Trying to convince the International Olympic Committee that gang-infested Chicago would be a great place for a peace-through-atheletics confab seems like a sacrifice to me as well--but the sacrifice would have more to do with self-respect than material comfort.



It calls to mind a sorry truth about economic policy debates: the people who are entrusted to make the decisions almost never feel their real world consequences. Fidel Castro has lived a life of lavish personal indulgence for nearly five decades, even as his people ration soap and mattresses. Kim Jong-il, North Korea's Marxist emperor-god, lives in what Time Magazine called a "seven story pleasure palace," complete with a wave-pool and motorized boogie boards and every instance of Western materialism you can nail to the walls or spread out over a wet bar.

Of course, extravagance of this sort is not just the province of the Marxist aristocracy. The old world nobility was pretty good at this too. Take a look at any pre-19th century prince, earl or even lowly baronet, and you'll see the rich oil colors of Rubens and Ramsay bathing the young princes in silk and silver.



Any economic system, in other words, can keep a few people in clover. The great irony is that socialism, and its evil sister Communism actually claim to be working on behalf of the masses--and their record is far worse than any monarchy you can imagine. Far from establishing an equal distribution of goods and services, Marxists concentrate wealth among the ruling elite and that ruling class can only remain in power through the kind of brutal suppression that would make a Russian Czar wince. Stalin made Adolph Hitler and the Spanish Inquisitors look like school yard bullies--killing or starving something like fifty million of his own people. Conversely, good old free market capitalism is far better at getting, and establishing a sturdy middle class--and this is really, really, really old news. When, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois traveled through American in 1777, he marveled at not being able to find any poor. With a low and easy tax burden, the people were free to feed themselves. It's elementary, Watson.



The tiring truth is that the American people have already learned this lesson, several times. (Sometimes I feel like a teacher with some very slow students.) Back in the sixties and seventies, there was a crypto-romance with socialism and I can remember the day when even the New Yorker admitted, in 1989, that communism was dead. The trophy socialist-states of Sweden and Norway were beginning to grind to a halt and Ronald Reagan had initiated a sustained recovery that turned into a boom, merely by giving the people their money back.



I remember this all clearly because for many years academic, media and union types branded you backward for questioning the great class-free dream of the socialist state. I can remember Ben Stein asking the simple question, towards the end of Jimmy Carter national malaise, why did Hollywood nearly always portray the businessman--the one who employs your kids--as the villain? Why was capitalism always the enemy, when, clearly it provided a better standard of living for more people than any other system yet known to man? The national flirtation with socialism is the macro-equivalent of a despondent man binging on comfort food or drugs. I can remember how sick America once was on this front. I can remember Nixon's wage and price controls. I can remember Jane Fonda sitting her skinny, ugly carcass down on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. I can remember my junior high history teacher, lovingly talking up the Soviet model.

I remember how sick America really was.

So when the New Yorker admitted defeat, it was like a re-birth of the republic. Fresh air. Victory lap. Morning in America again. Every man tending his own vine in the new world. Freedom at last.

..So I hate the current turn of events, the fat, mental laziness of Michael Moore and Garrison Keillor and Rahm Immanuel. It's like explaining something for the ten millionth time to a rebellious child. It's like cleaning the back patio plate glass, only to find it all smudged up again. It's like a flu you've been through and can't shake.



Not this again.



I like history, but I hate repeating it.

Wants, Needs, Desires...and where Fall fits into that whole thing...

The Upper Pumpkin Patch September 30, 2009              

In college they made me read Sigmund Freud, and, even in college, where no one really thinks, I rebelled. Somewhere in the middle of "Civilization and its Discontents," I looked up from a colloquium I was assigned to lead, and I summarized the text by saying, "in this long, boring passage, Freud tells us everything he knows about the streets of Ancient Rome."

Almost everyone laughed, even the instructor. There was one little New Yorker, a child of Marxists, who scowled at me because I was trashing one of his household icons, but most reasonable people enjoyed hearing their own impressions confirmed. College students, in the last fifty years, are figuratively required to bow down and kiss the feet of Marx, Darwin and Freud--three of the biggest losers who ever graced the planet. I say "loser," not because their influence hasn't been substantial, but because their souls are so parched and their world is so relentlessly physical that you have a hard time imagining any of them with a grandchild on their knee. Their world, and the world they have created, is very cold.



A few days ago, a Facebook friend posted a link to a documentary * about a disciple (and relative) of Freud, Edward Bernays, who pioneered "public relations" in America and the concept of product placement in feature films. He was even credited with transforming the image of Calvin Coolidge by bringing celebrities to the White House. I guess his most dubious achievement was paving the way for female cigarette-smoking by re-branding the weed as a "torch of freedom" and linking it to female sufferage. (There was also the standard Freudian interpretation of cigarettes; it's not exactly a documentary for the little kids.) The grain of truth, by my take, in this world of smoke and mirrors is the notion that people don't always make decisions with their rational, thinking selves. They don't buy shoes based on how long the sole leather lasts but how the shoes make them feel about themselves.A 19th century advertisement, in other words, might talk about the shoes' comfort and reliability and workmanship. A 20th century ad will make you feel like a bold, independent romantic -- just because you purchased the right loafers.



Of course, Freud, made it a little more primal than that, but in one sense, whether you call our savage desires "Id" or "sin," it really isn't very innovative to say that we're a mix of motivations when it comes to what we buy--some lofty and some not so lofty. The fact that advertising is now talking to our underpants instead of our minds and hearts, isn't so much a sign of advertising getting more effective as it is an indication we're not the people our great great grandparents were. They could buy shoes based on craftsmanship; we buy them to join a club, and to show off our membership.



Truly, I spend a lot of time wondering how I can woo people up here. A business doesn't do anything, good or bad, until someone agrees to buy its product, so I don't apologize for my marketing obsession, but I think our place puts the lie to Freud and Bernays and the whole slew of Mad Men who think we can't sell anything unless a pretty girl is showing off her nylons. (God created pretty girls, and I have no objection to using them in an ad, but there's a difference between selling an indiscretion and selling a marriage.)



When I look at the pumpkin field up there, I see a marriage. I'm not sure how much time I would spend in a purely clinical explanation of the pumpkins' fiber content or their vitamin/mineral mix, or even how easy they are to carve. I do get it. We're selling sizzle along with the steak. I understand that people don't buy pumpkins on the basis of their chemical inventory, but I think it's a tad demeaning to turn people into pools of Freudian Id and sell to their death wish or their night terrors.

The reality is far different. Before the three stooges took over (Marx, Freud, and Darwin), scholars looked to the ancient texts for truth, and those texts told us,

"What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet." -- Hebrews 2:6-8

I suppose someone could reasonably ask, "when you sell corn on the cob from the barbecue, are you really selling something as abstract as 'honor?'' Or 'how is a purchasing a grilled cheese sandwich at the tavern connected to something as lofty as 'courage?'" How does walking around the pumpkin patch make you a little lower than the angels?



Well..try it some time, and I think you'll see it's not so outrageous at all. It certainly beats the way Freud would sell a day in the pumpkin patch.

Riley's Farm Journal June 30-July 15, 2009

Riley's Farm Feed Summary

June 30 - July 15, 2009

 

Inspired, Unfortunately, by a True Story

                   Restoring Their Rightful Place
                    A "Front Man" Documentary 



                 By James Riley, All Rights Reserved






                               "JEREMY"

               EXT. BEACH - EVENING

               A sullen, brooding teenager, JEREMY
               Grossman, throws pebbles into the surf
               and then turns off in the direction of a
               seaside estate...read more.

A Riley's Farm July 4th..

(Video & Pictures here)

 

Independence

Every day, around here, is something like July 4th, so, over the years we haven't emphasized the holiday, since we always felt we were competing against more flashy versions of the (read more..)

 

Free at Last

Free at Last: Nothing spectacular, just a commentary on the trials of printing envelopes on a HP laser printer:

"...I put landscape. It printed portrait.."

"...great. Now it wants me to order a yellow cartridge.."

"...no, it still says processing MS word...whatever..."

"...how do I tell it I ordered the cartridge anyway?..."

"...Dang. Portrait again. Yup. Same thing. Off the page..."

"...how many of these linen envelopes do we have?..."

"...it's hovering between order yellow and processing MS Word document..."

"...I've seen that menu. I've been here already..."

"...wait..is this the one I just printed or was that the one from the previous job before I replaced the yellow cartridge?..It printed too fast. You know?..."

Have you ever noticed, that with today's technology, there are certain jobs you...read more.

 

In the Good Old Summer Time...

Foggy notions about cost-per-click and Audience Value

I'm debating our decision about evening hours. I think we're the place to have a great dinner in the country--to be certain--but I don't have a spare $100,000 to convince enough people to ...read more.

 

Living History Javascript

It's a bit late for the farm journal, but I was feeling restless and a bit propeller-head from chasing down coyotes and playing with Javascript so as to add a Big Band web countdown and rotating jpg web-ads to the farm journal (above.) Javascript is not that tough--just a little tedious. For those of you who don't know web design, it's..read more.

 

Half Blog, Half Plea

It's 1946 in Old Oak Glen.

I want you to do something for your own good. A few nights ago, my wife and kids dragged me down to the Redlands Bowl for a Tommy Dorsey tribute. I didn't want to take a break--but I did. The night rushed in through the palm trees, along with the melodies, and before long,...read more.

Riley's Farm Journal June 20-29, 2009

Riley's Farm Feed Summary June 20-29, 2009

 

The Timeless Standard

Why It's Difficult to Redeem the Standard in Media June 20, 2009

Your correspondent is not a big fan of the beach, (I'm more of a beatnik, lounge-loving Calvinist) but his kids dragged him down to Newport/Balboa last night for hot dogs and s'mores. The company and the conversation was good, and it was a cold night, so it didn't quite seem as much like the running of the bikini salmon as usual. I marveled to see Ruby's still out there at the end of the Balboa pier. Concept Eateries always seem to change every few years in trendy, high-rent spots and there was the same Ruby's I remember on college trips down to Balboa--clean, polished, stainless steel with homage to swing era Coca Cola advertising. Some of our extended circle of home-schoolers even did a little impromptu swing dancing next to the machine-age appointments, and I took it as proof of my contention that if you adapt some sort of classic standard, family pictures will save you from being memorialized in baggy, prison-inspired beach gear.

My friend, Mike Lewis and I discussed the goal of starting a kind of film academy and center..read more.

Making a Day of it on the Farm (Video)

June 22, 2009

A Restaurant Commercial (Video)

Based on a John Adams Story June 24, 2009

They Just Aren't Man Enough to Say It...

The Anti-Human Agenda of Cap & Trade June 25, 2009

I've written about this before, but the zero population, anti-human, "global village" band of policy freaks know they will never be able to sell what Earth Day baby-hater Paul Ehrlich once tried to pitch when he wrote:

"(We need) compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."

Only a tenured half-wit, or an S.S. field marshal could write that sort of thing. In practice, the way to keep people from read more

Patriots and Parishioners

June 29, 2009

We had a full public house on Saturday with the Pasadena Patriots and our larger than normal read more.

 

 

 

Riley's Farm Journal June 14-19, 2009

Stupid I-Phone Tricks - June 14, 2009

We attended a home school high school graduation last night, and two different celebration parties afterwards. Mary volunteered to pick up a cake for one of the graduation moms and the Iphone GPS pointed us to a non-existent Sam's Club on Perris Blvd, a full 8 miles from its actual location. Borrowing the language of "Galaxy Quest," I kept doggedly advising Mary to allow the "little blue thingy" (indicating our position) to overtake "the little red thingy" (the non-existent Sam's Club). We bowed to this new technology right until...read more.

Pinning Hope on Beasts - June 15, 2009

It might work at birthday parties, but in real life, you would never pin a tail on a donkey, and you certainly wouldn't do it blindfolded. I've watched enough election cycles to know that is exactly what we do as voters. We pin our hopes on a candidate, or, even worse, a party, and we usually get kicked in the teeth. It doesn't matter if..read more...

Shaping Fate - June 16, 2009

One way of remembering the weddings of your life is to chronicle the roles you've played at them: guest, ring-bearer, usher, videographer, present-boy. All of those parts, even that of a guest, has a kind of peril attached to it. People want weddings to go just right, and what if you are the guy whose cell phone blares "La Bamba" right at the "husband and wife" moment? What if you stretch your legs at the wrong.. read more.

Heah, kids, gather 'round the set!

It's time for another episode of..

Customer Service in the

Post Christian World - June 17, 2009

I'm not in the habit of giving consumer financial tips, because I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will extend this advice with respect to dining out and credit cards: if the waiter makes a fishy mistake, have him void the ticket and give you a receipt for the void, then sign the corrected ticket. The other night, at a high concept restaurant called The Inquisition (not really), the waiter handed me a sub-total..read more.

Flat Out Gorgeous This Morning ..AND..

Four Riley's Farm Web Scripts - June 19, 2009

The farm is beyond beautiful this morning--a whole leafy-green salad field of strawberries out there, climbing red roses everywhere, grapes fattening up. You just have to see it... read more.

Summer, Town Crier, Weddings

Jesse Blesch has started in on the painting of a signboard in the tavern that we're wildly excited about. When you walk into the public house, this week, you can see it being hand-lettered and I imagine over the next few weeks, you'll start to see the Hawk itself appearing feather by feather, hue by hue. Nothing beats that hand-painted-right-over-the-planks look. I just stand there and watch it sometimes.

Summer Day Camp is getting some pretty heavy bookings, but we keep getting requests for a week long overnight camp from the Orange County and San Diego parents--so, farm staff, if you're reading this, let's get together and plot it out. (As in today.)

The Strawberries are a' popping--big time. I think we had a lot of people anxious for cherries last weekend, but it was kind of nice to see the patch getting picked by LOTS of families last Saturday, and even a few here and there on a Monday. U-Pick Strawberries are a bargain family outing, and the new high fashion is thriftiness--so get hip. Pick a few strawberries.

All the really cool kids and moms take their dad to the Night Before Father's Day at the Old Packing Shed. There's still time to be one of them. Games, Music, Tributes to Pop! We have towering crates of glass-bottled Dad's Root beer stacked up and ready for you to swill too.

August is not my favorite month around here, (largely because it doesn't seem to be your favorite month around here), so I've decided to give you a little break from what our fearless leader is calling a "Deep Recession." Free music. Michael Wassbottten of the Mill Creek Boys and Freeman House are putting together double-header Americana music on Saturday nights from 5 to 9 PM. Two great bands will be featured at each show. You can pick raspberries and strawberries, enjoy our farm grill barbecue, shop for gifts in the general store, and hear some great music. There's nothing quite like live music on a Summer Saturday night, and the music is free. The barbecue isn't free, because I am not the federal government and I don't have that fancy paper they use to print money, but we will give great value for very off-Broadway prices. Keep checking back.

Mallory and Eric's wedding was something like an hour or two in a pleasant sidewalk cafe located right smack dab in the middle of heaven. I can't do it justice. I really didn't get to enjoy my own wedding, because an arctic storm was blasting through the packing shed, but I had so much fun talking to and dancing with our guests and basking in the joy of it all, that, I confess, I wish there were a wedding everyday around here. (Heah....) Normally, I prefer conversation, but I danced and made toasts and threw rice and got completely OUT of my normally introspective, cranky self. Mallory and Eric did it the right way--and it was cause for a celebration! Praise God.

Summer

I haven't been writing quite as much, because we've been doing some last minute summer planning, and I'm always traumatized by bulk emails, which I had to compose and send out yesterday. I realize that as you all proceed through your day, with your various challenges and personal trials, that a Riley's Farm update may or may not be helpful in making you feel better about life.

Suppose, for example, you're a warehouse foreman and a 40 foot semi-trailer has just damaged your loading door--and you have 30 minutes to find someone responsible to wait for the repair crew, or sit alone in the warehouse all night, guarding expensive imported European cheese and sausage baskets. Someone is reading your email in your office and they yell:

"Heah, Chuck, the strawberries are ready for u-pick at Riley's Farm."

"That's great," you respond, agitated, "but I have a 10 foot hole in the warehouse wall, Duane--and WHAT ARE YOU DOING READING MY EMAIL?"

"I signed you up for the updates, man. The Riley's Farm updates....so you'll know when the strawberries are ready..and when the Father's Day hoe-down thingy is."

"Duane? Have you got that repair crew?"

"I don't know what your talkin' about. Crandall says you're the repair crew. Heah, Riley's Farm has a summer camp."

I suppose our updates could you hit you at a good time, but I'm always afraid our emails will arrive sometime between two big emails you have to send your accountant, pronto, with two really big fat PDF files you can't get to attach, and your wife will be looking over your shoulder, and she'll see the little "Riley's Farm: Father's Day, Strawberries, Summer Camp" and she'll say, "ohh..read that one," and you'll say, "Heather. We've got 10 minutes to get this down to Peter or we're going to have trouble with the franchise tax board. We can do the Riley's Farm huckleberry thing later."

The point I'm trying to make is that you should make some time to celebrate. It will help you forget about the hole in the warehouse wall--and it will address another nagging reality brought home to your correspondent by these pictures of his son, over the years.

Life goes by too quickly.

On Behalf of Goats

Could I have a word with you?

There's something to be said for a small goat company, not publicly traded. If you have more than a few acres, you won't even have to buy your original investment. Someone's kids will grow out of their 4H years, and they will give them away. If you get a male and female, your stock will split over and over again, and you will have several hundred shares, after just a few years. At first, when someone says, "heah, there's a baby goat out there," you think, "heah, cool," and then baby goats are being born more or less every day, almost like mail delivery.

There really is no management class to worry about in a company of goats. In fact the word "class" and goats just don't go together at all. They can be cute sometimes, sort of wise looking, but very--how shall we say?--honest about their needs, candid, frank. Sometimes brutally frank. They are not exactly storybook in their manners.

"Look at that cute little goat eating the hay."

"Look at that cute little goat being bottle fed."

"Oooh, gross. What is that goat Doooo-ing??"

And another goat comes into the world.

Other than creating new baby goats, goats generally just like to eat and run around, and they will mow your lawn for you, or eat down just about anything you want eaten down, and some things you don't want eaten down. They generally look pleased to see you, because they believe you will throw some piece of vegetation, or some section of an old grill cheese sandwich into their pen. And they are generally right about this. They expect you to feed them and they have a way of getting food out of you, and even your guests, even though they have no spoken or written language. If you put a "please don't feed the goats" sign near them, you could almost see the words "yeah, right" being scribbled over the text, before the Sharpie ink dried. No human child has yet been born who does not feel an immediate, visceral need to feed goats upon seeing them for the first time. At 49 years old, I still feel the urge to throw some sort of food into their pen.

The government, by and large, doesn't care about goats, and no one has told the Treasury that goats can move--so there is no goat tax yet. The S.E.C. does not regulate goats, nor does the Department of Transportation, though some goats could drag a grown man to work every day, if there was an old grill-cheesed sandwich in it for them.

Once in a great while, you get a mean, nasty goat--and then you have a free gift for that bus driver who keeps asking whether you sell goats or not. Theoretically, the goats could come in handy if there were some major disaster and you needed a source of fresh protein, though I believe I would wait for the FEMA relief before I tried a goat taco. Still, the ranging, growing flock, from a survivalist standpoint, is comforting.

Sooner or later, of course, the herd will get too large, and then you can call up one of those parents whose child has just joined the local 4H club. I think you can sell a little goat for $40 or $50.

But you won't ever really be parting with it, because later, after the 4H years are over, you'll get it back...

...and some bus driver will be very happy.

Showers, Constitutions

Early Summer Mist

We had a delightful shower this last Saturday with that old Oak Glen summer weather pattern--two or three days of clouds rising like castles over the Forest Falls ridge and then boom--cool winds and rain. This one was just a pleasant late spring wash and I saw guests standing out in it, sort of celebrating. Storms have a kind of signature that lets you know whether they're dangerous or not, and if I could order weather, I would order at least a dozen of these a year. No hail. Light rain. Cool wind. Proof of the Almighty #4324-lr.(3c).

The farm, courtesy of many dedicated hands, is looking more and more story-book these days. There was so much manicured cultivation in every direction, when I walked the place yesterday, that I got to thinking I should remind you all that when you come up, you can spend at least an hour or two exploring the place, along the red-dash marked trail on the farm map. (Follow the map carefully; we do have neighbors.) There are some cross-valley vistas that can't be done justice by any photo, so you should come up and have a meal, then take a walk. Can a corporate restaurant offer you acres of acres of farm land, by way of after-meal constitutional? I think not, sir. (Don't quote that last sentence out of context by the way.)

Taking a Constitutional

Two Quotes this morning, the first from Federalist #78:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

The second, hauntingly, comes from a period more than 30 years later:

"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."



--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821

The first quote is Hamilton's and the second is Jefferson's. They weren't the best of friends, of course, but the erie prescience of Jefferson is difficult to ignore, even if he had the benefit of watching the "federal judiciary" in operation for some years, by the time he made this damning observation.

The fight over Proposition 8 this week, and in the oncoming months, highlights a sorry reality about our judges' soft-spoken but voracious appetite for power.

Hamilton wrote, truthfully, that the role of the courts is to determine if a statute violates the Constitution. "No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid."

Certainly, in instances where our Constitution is very clear, as in the case of the 2nd Amendment, we would expect the court to strike down all kinds of restrictive gun laws, which go far beyond the regulation of the militia and extend to an outright banning of the clear right of the people to "bear" arms.



However, when the life-time appointed jurists began looking to the Constitution's "penumbral emanations" to strike down laws they don't agree with, or use court orders and injunctions to make law they would prefer, they make themselves into whores without the face paint. Read the Constitution of the United States. Do you find any explicit or even implied right to kill another human being in the womb or define marriage however you like? It doesn't exist. It's not there. If you want it there, amend the document, but don't pretend a judge should be making policy. Supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayer advocated just that in a candid, but caught-on-tape moment. In so doing, she broke a trade secret of the guild. ("Shut up, Sonia. We know we make policy; we're just not supposed to tell the public!")

Judges have an obligation, a sacred obligation, to make their arguments without resorting to a chain of implicit and tenuous assumptions about the intent of the original language. When you hear someone talking about the United States Constitution as a "living, breathing document, capable of change," ask them if their marriage licence is "living and breathing." Ask them if their wedding vows can be changed to reflect new partners, as the urge comes along. Ask them if their bank can change their mortgage agreement whenever they feel like it. Ask them if the treasury can just decide whether to make good on its "living, breathing" bond obligations.

Say what you mean, judge, but don't lie to yourself. A judge who makes himself into a legislator is really no better than the worst sort of con artist or rapist or murderer on the street. Each of these thugs has active contempt for the law, but you could argue that the "policy making" judge is far worse than the murderer, because when we feel that even judges can't be trusted to obey the law, why should society? Murderers only kill people. Bad judges can kill the very law that protects us from muderers.

Believe it or not, the founders, in their wisdom, knew that even those appointed to sit on the bench would be capable of this sort of depravity, and they fully expected both the legislature and the executive to check that depravity. In practice, however, they don't. A truly constitutional president would have ordered federal law enforcement to "stand down" on any Roe v. Wade related prosecution or arrest, and he would have allowed the states to make and enforce their own criminal law on the matter. He would have encouraged a show down with the judiciary, when it becomes infected with policy-makers, as opposed to jurists.

Hamilton argued that the judge had no "sword," but in fact he does. If you ask most policeman where their authority comes from, they will hold up a court order. American law enforcement has become nearly unquestioning in its sense of obligation to the courts. Just once, I would like to see an order from the governor (or the president) come into conflict with an order from a judge. Even better, I'd like to see a city council get a little Patrick Henry spirit, and order their police departments not to enforce a federal judicial order they thought was an egregious infringement of their local right to representation.

Let the checks and balances begin.

Memorial Day II

That's just what one family picked yesterday in the strawberry patch. I know I've been relentlessly pitching these little red jewels, but we had dozens and dozens of families in the patch yesterday, and the kids and I were STILL able to do a lot of easy flashlight picking last night.

I can't remember a more pleasant May in these parts for some time. We had a few hot days, but the temperature has had that "just right" feel for most of the last two weeks. Yesterday, one of our local staff members brought her husband by to the tavern, and David Leslie Thomas cajoled him into singing. He belted out a "Danny Boy" and a "How Great Thou Art" that put sandwiches back on plates and made soup spoons hover, mid-gulp.



"No fair," I told him, "making me cry on a Monday."

It being Memorial Day, we also conducted a remembrance of those who had fallen, with Jon Harmon and Sean Villareal sounding off two perfect musket blasts. The song "Taps," I believe, has roots in the Civil War, and it's a bit unnerving to play it on the fife, because it has to be rendered at a dignified, slow tempo, with no opportunity for the missed notes that might be covered up at jig or hornpipe speed. I hope I did it at least small justice.

You could say every day around here is a remembrance. That may account for why we've never been very consistent about calendaring the big holidays--July 4th, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, etc. I think that our problems as a nation are rooted, very much, in our daily forgetfulness of the past, and certainly the yearly, sanctioned, federal homages to tradition sometimes get sacrificed to television, hot dogs, and the bliss of a day off. "Holiday" after all, has its roots in the word "Holy Day." I'm not against a party, but our policy, and our culture, would be a tad more ordered, and peaceful, if we remembered the Divine Source of our blessings on a daily basis--not as a yearly afterthought.

Kevin Hauser, who also stopped by yesterday, and provided the strawberry picture above asked me words to that effect.

"Do you thank God for this place?"

"Every day!" I responded. "Every morning and every night."

Riding Weather

The Eikmeier family has been helping the boys (and the horses) get back into trail shape, and I'm on hold now with the local vet for shots and teeth floating. (I just gave up after ten minutes of saxophone jazz from the horse doctor phone exchange.) According to Linda Eikmeier, horses develop a kind of hook in their teeth that makes them head-shy and not very anxious to take the bridle or the bit--so we're getting that checked out this week. The neat thing about this place is that a lot of very talented, giving people are willing to throw their time in, to make it work.* It's a little humbling. We've got an apple-guru helping us now, a trained architect, a human resources genius, a skilled number cruncher, a life-long farmer, a former Fortune 100 staff accountant, some really fantastic country-cooks, and nearly every flavor of musical talent you can find on the melody-shelf. And that's to say nothing of the dozens of pure ham-bones we have making history fun out on the grounds everyday. I really wish it were easier to start an old fashioned, Bay Colony joint stock company, with everyone in spiritual and economic covenant. I like employees who want to be owners of something someday. If I could succeed in that goal, I'm pretty sure it would cut down on the number of ceramic mugs I have to re-purchase.

 

A Brutal Modern Secret Truth

No one else will tell you fellas this, but I will: if you are young and heart-sick, I have a simple, ancient solution for you: get married.

Find a girl who likes to work, rent an apartment, and start a family.

Modern American adolescence has been crippled by a lot of tripe from the academy and the entertainment industry and even the church. Get these lies out of your head to begin with: 1) the world has too many people. A lie. Listen to a kid laughing sometime and tell me there isn't enough room in the world for another baby. 2) Marriage is emotional slavery. A lie. Marriage is freedom from that modern social train-wreck, "dating." Marriage is getting to see your best friend every day of your life. 3) You can "play around" and not hurt anyone. A lie from the pit of raging hell. Talk to a post-abortion woman sometime, one of the ones who still has a soul. It isn't pretty. And even if you're careful, "broken hearts" sound better in country music than they do crying across the room from you. 4) You need to wait until you are financially stable until you get married. Nonsense. If that were the case, no one would be married but Warren Buffet--and who but a 24K gold-digger would want to marry him? 5) You should "see the world" and "meet lots of people" before you finally settle on "just the right one." Ridiculous. You're starting to sound like a little girl, dude. Choose carefully. But Choose. Choose life, not loneliness.

My daughter is getting married at eighteen--and I am so proud of her I will brag to any stranger I meet on the street about it. I would MUCH rather see her get married then send her off to the local junior college to slum it up with the local club-hoppers and mall addicts. (Get married and THEN go to school; it's a good hedge against some of the no-account, sleep-around set, and it's even a good emotional protection from some of the sleaze-rag faculty.) I will tell you though that Mallory was a little distressed, for a while, by all the well-meaning, but utterly un-Biblical and thoughtless advice she received from people who saw "youth ministry" or "financial security" as their modern day idols.

"Heah, Adam, I know God gave you Eve, but, like, man, are you SURE about this?"

The Real Truths Are Ancient

The other day I picked up a copy of Poor Richard's 1733 Almanack in our gift store and I read Benjamin Franklin's wisdom--"if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas." Technically, I'm not sure if Franklin was re-stating an ancient proverb, or if this was one of his own, but the economy of pure distilled truth seems very Franklinesque to me. The colonials had this much down cold: you are, to a large measure, a product of the company you keep.



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The Real Truths are Ancient, Part I (continued)

Two days ago I referenced "Christians and agnostics who quote 'Judge Not.'" The fact is that everyone in the modern world, of every persuasion, is judged by a Judeo-Christian standard. The world dates its time by Christ. The whole failed socialist collectivist experiment of the 20th century had its roots in a Christian heresy. Even proud atheists like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins owe their sense of fair play to culturally inherited rabbinic or catechetical teaching. When you argue with Bill or Richard, they assume you won't lie and you assume they won't either. You assume they won't kill you when you win the argument and they asssume they aren't free to kill you either--when they lose the argument. The ten commandments are written on the hearts of men, and you have to try very hard to ignore them.

Unfortunately, evil lives to confuse.


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Lockton is practicing Pachebel's Canon downstairs, a nice way to start the day. Now he's gone on to a minuet. Lockton is our sight reader and Samuel is our play-anything-by-ear almost-immediately musician. Nicholas is sawing away on the fiddle a lot more these days and, at house church yesterday morning, a friend's child knocked out a flawless "Be Thou My Vision." I guess you get these little "City on a Hill" glimpses every once in a while to make up for the ubiquitous grunge of even Christian pop music these days.

As I wrote that paragraph, I skipped over to Facebook and watched an advertisement pop up on the right for cyber-profile art of some sort. Over the image of a black-bustiered bimbo, layers of studded-leather were draped into place, along with the words "explore your dark side."

Why? Why dress, look, and act like a loser?



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The High-Minded Fence Straddle

President Obama, at Notre Dame Sunday, made this observation: "The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm." In one sense, he implies here the genius of the American Republic in its ability to reach compromise across widely divergent constituencies. On issues that yield to honorable compromise, this is certainly a hopeful truth about our system. Unfortunately, absolute truths don't yield to compromise and our debate, as a culture, has moved out of the arena of happy compromise and into the righteous frenzy of raging absolutes.

You simply can't imagine a calming, coalition-building sentence beginning with the words "..A Rosa Parks and a Governor Wallace may both love this country.." or "..An abolitionist and a slave-holder may both love this country.." or "..a totalitarian socialist and a free-market capitalist may both love this country.." or "..a German American with Nazi sympathies and a Brooklyn Rabbi may both love this country.."

Some issues simply cannot be solved by high-minded rhetoric and an appeal to "all get along."

With the exception of the Civil War, America's Judeo-Christian consensus meant that most of the time we debated things that yielded to debate, things like the timing of Montana Statehood, the proper route for the Union Pacific Railroad, the advisability of the gold standard. When, however, as a nation we have run up against absolute truth, we get into that territory that begs the question: "I don't care if you're a lawyer or a soldier; which one of you is telling the truth?" We either decide, as a nation, the character of the unvarnished truth, and settle the matter--or we live with the soul-sickness of abiding pure evil. We don't pretend that Rosa Parks should walk to the back of the bus, just because a politician implies that we should all settle down.

Some things simply are not up for a vote. The Constitution, for example, says, explicitly, the right of the people to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed." If you don't believe that, really, you are putting Rosa at the back of the bus and implying that absolute truths should be brought back before the policy wonks for more discussion. In a very real sense, if you question the absolute truths that have sustained the republic--the truths that have taken us to war, and to the streets--you are not really an American. Real leaders unify the people around the justice of eternal truths; they don't ask the sheep to keep feeding the wolves with their own flesh, and hope the jackals will lose their appetite if we all pretend how much we love each other.

There is nothing "high minded" about asking pro-life and pro-abortion Americans to have a "respectful" difference of opinion on the matter--unless you believe that goodness should quietly abide, accommodate, and absorb evil. Americans, according to recent polls, are beginning to see the truth of the matter--and that begins by acknowledging something coalition builders find distasteful: leadership means you encourage people to change their minds when they are wrong.

Strawberry News

I took a whole bushel of strawberries down to Maricela and Jan yesterday and I said, "okay, they'll be coming in at least a bushel or so a day now--even after u-pick--so we want to start featuring strawberry stuff big time."

"Strawberry shakes?" Jan said.

"Check."

"Strawberry pie?" Maricela asked.

"Check."

"Strawberry smoothies?" Jon Harmon asked.

"Check."

"Strawberry tarts," I continued. "Strawberry jam. Strawberry preserves. Strawberry shortcake. Strawberries dipped in chocolate. Strawberry pancakes. Strawberry Cheesecake. Strawberry Pizza. Strawberry Banana Soup. Strawberry Tiramisu. Strawberry Napoleon. Strawberry Buckle. Something new every day with farm-fresh strawberries."

Everyone seemed very excited. Jon even consumed a strawberry or three between each round of ideas.

"We can do this thing," I said.

Come on up and see if I'm right. I sense berry-related stuff in the public house this week.

Wedding or Gang Initiation?

In a few minutes, I'll let you know how long it takes to pick a pint of strawberries. I suspect it will be less than two minutes. They are at that "ridiculously easy" stage of harvesting, so if you like strawberries--and you want a bargain activity with the kids--come on up.

Yesterday a group of location scouts from the Inland Empire Film commission tooled around the farm taking their panorama shots. I think there were some pretty big television shows represented. We let film companies look around, but we turn down an awful lot of them, if we don't think the project is worth promoting. I turned down MTV twice, and about a month ago, I took a gander at the photography of a guy who wanted to do a "fashion runway on the farm." I concluded he he was one of those fruits who enjoy demeaning women for profit, so I told him no thanks. If you ever have a chance to participate in a reality show, by the way, say no. The producers of reality shows are liars--from start to finish. So, we get a lot of lookers, but we don't always ink a deal.

We have a vaguely similar problem with respect to weddings on the farm in that we very heavily promote traditional music to the point that if someone mentions their own band or a D.J., we usually say no. One bride brought up a really neat Irish band and we went along with that, but when someone proposes a D.J., or even a CD of favorites, those things can descend into rap-and-rave-fests within a matter of minutes. (You try telling a juiced-up band of big guys in tuxes their music doesn't fit the Riley's Farm theme.) Some contemporary music, (not all), can make a wedding look more like a gang initation than a celebration of holy matrimony.



Okay, so I'm a folk music snob; it's actually a pretty broad standard though. I would say yes to Mariachis, Big Band, Irish Folk, Blue Grass, Classical, Island music, but if someone put Eminem on the platter and he started in with his F-fest, you might as well turn the old farm into a strip mall and give everyone an Ipod and some face paint. A country wedding should sound at least something like a country wedding.

The kids were watching a wedding reality show last night up at grandma's and the theme seemed to be "Really Extravagant Expensive Could-Have-Purchased-A-Home-with-the-Money-we-Spent-on-this thing" Weddings. No kidding. One of the weddings had a price tag of $450,000. Both of the grooms seemed, um, sort of--how do I put this?--girlish. You would have to be a bit of a femme not to tell the ladies, "look, ladies, with the money you're spending on this we could host a stadium tractor-pull--and make money on the deal."

Anyway, we can host a wedding--a nice, traditional, non-experimental affair for considerably less than half a million dollars.

Sweet Land of Liberty and License

We celebrate liberty around here quite a bit. Heaven knows I shout it out as a Patrick Henry up to five nights a week in the Hawk's Head Public House. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War Adventure, most kids can still sing "My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.." If you've read the farm journal for any length of time, you know how hostile I am to encroachments on constitutional freedoms. Liberty doesn't really need to be sold or marketed. It's the native, universally-recognized objective of all people, everywhere.

But it's interesting that Jefferson and friends did not write: men "are endowed by their Creator with freedom to do anything they please." Fully aware of man's native depravity, and the chaos that would result from lawlessness, they wrote, "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...."

Catch that? Certain unalienable rights. Not infinite and indiscriminate and promiscuous rights, but certain unalienable rights. Those rights, as the founders saw them, could never be indiscriminate, without limiting the freedom of others, and they began, at the base minimum with the right to life.

Indeed, Western Civilization--carrying along with it the banner of a sovereign God, immutable truth, and a scriptural canon--didn't engage in gentle conflict-resolution and anger-management with native cultures. You can't imagine this scene between Cortez and the conquered Aztecs:

                          AZTEC PRIEST
                We would like to keep cutting the
                hearts out of our sacrificial human
                victims.

                            CORTEZ
                Let's talk about that.  Can we
                limit that to Tuesdays and
                Thursdays?

At the very base of any standard of western liberty is the idea that life must be protected, murderers punished, and ritual homicide suppressed. You can't offer "liberty to live" and "liberty to murder" in the same declaration of human rights. The Aztec temples--and their priests--had to go. No arguing. No nuance. No exceptions. Such abominations had to be destroyed. Praise God.

The ever increasing number of pro-life, anti-abortion activists in America routinely face a kind of sneering rejection among people who claim to be pro-life but who vote pro-death. We are told that we can't be "single issue" voters, and while there is some truth to that on other fronts, there can never be multiple truths on the question of life itself.

What, really, in the temporal realm, is more important than life? Can we ever hope to protect our property, our incomes, our churches, if we can't protect life itself? How can we ever hope for an increase in public virtue, for more honesty in our financial transactions, and in our personal lives, if a great slaughter of the innocents is taking place daily in America? If the Aztecs had blood-spatter on their foreheads, we are swimming in oceans of human sacrifice. We make the Aztecs look like the Osmond family. Father Pavone of Priests for Life tells the story of a group of small boys who were reported throwing something off a bridge. When they were questioned, the boys responded that they were throwing "little people." They had found a container of aborted babies behind an abortion clinic and they were throwing them into the river below.



Is this the America the founders envisioned when they wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" Are we really "free" when we permit this sort of outrageous violation of the freedom of the most defenseless, the most innocent life?

In the nineties, that paragon of personal virtue, Bill Clinton, said his goal for abortion would be that, someday, it might be "safe, legal, and rare." Could we say the same thing about slavery? Could we hope that slavery might be "safe, legal, and rare." Would Cortez have accepted this compromise on the subject of human sacrifice? Would "safe, legal and rare human sacrifice" sound like progress in anyone's mind?

The unparalleled thievery of the federal government, in printing money without backing, the shameless financial chicanery of a Bernie Madoff, the short-term, spendthrift irresponsibility of Congress, the federally funded executive bonus, are all part of one devious moral-whole. Why should anyone care about stealing your money if they can kill their own child in the womb? Even Cortez would have known that. Order and civilization absolutely demand--as the first order of business--that you protect life. Why plant a field if you can be butchered, at will, by the local medicine man? Why build a village school if the natives are addicted to infanticide and cannibalism?

It all begins with life. We are worse than barbarians if we abide murder--especially the murder of the smallest, most innocent life. It is not "single issue." It is the first issue. It is the issue that must be solved before anything else can be solved.

Some mistakenly assume that the taking of any life--even those who fall just victim to the hangman or who die in warfare--are protected by this truth, but that would be a false understanding. Historically, we execute those who take life to balance the scales--and to emphasize the high seriousness of the crime against life itself. We prosecute just warfare against barbarian nations. We are not talking about the mere act of taking life, but that of taking innocent life. We are talking about homicide in all its forms--murder, infanticide, cannibalism, abortion.

Moreover, as the founders knew when they attributed the right to life to our "Creator," it cannot be the subject of polite debate or qualification or regulation by human senates and academic panels. It has to be absolute, axiomatic, unquestioned. Those who defend life are decent and normal. Those who argue for murder should be seen as we would now see a slave master or a Nazi prison guard.

There are many, of course, who are morally asleep, who would see this as "extreme," but very few who are asleep enjoy being prodded to wakefulness. Soft recruits do not enjoy boot camp. When a culture like ours--that has for so long accepted child killing in the womb--gets told it is little better, and probably much worse, than the knife-wielding pagans of old, it tends to get cranky and self-righteous. Anti-abortionists are told they are against women's health, or women's rights, even though those same pro-lifers are working to protect the 500,000 "little women" killed in the womb every year. Logic has never been on the side of the "pro-choice" movement. It is a movement that is both morally and mentally asleep.

Science has made it even more brutally clear. The images of the unborn living in the womb are breath-taking in their presentation of a human form, and the heart-rending images of babies ripped limb from limb by the process of abortion are so damning, that--unlike the images of the Nazi Holocaust, which we are properly reminded can "never be forgotten"--these images of babies shredded, burned, literally sucked to death by "doctors" are routinely banned. The abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war can be shown. The murder of 1 million American babies a year cannot.

With respect to our leadership on the abortion issue, I came to the conclusion some years ago that American presidents are really middle managers, that our process no longer encourages true leadership, so I will readily admit that our choices for moral leadership, in the historic American sense, have not been legion, but, I was very surprised that so many Christians, Catholics, and Jews would vote for Barack Obama. Certainly, he was smooth, articulate, and polite to a fault. I never found much content in his actual platform, but I can certainly understand why people value a smiling, "hopeful," face---even if pure evil lurks behind that mask. And "pure evil" is exactly what Barack Obama represents on the abortion front. We have never endured a president who so whole-heartedly supported abortion on demand. He has already rescinded the Mexico City policy, which now forces American taxpayers to pay for abortions abroad. He has moved to lift freedom of conscience protections for medical professionals who choose not to perform abortions. As a candidate, Barack Obama even voted against the "born alive infant protection act" in Illinois, twice--proving he was not only a friend of abortion, but infanticide as well. To make this display of evil even more preposterous, Barack Obama continually treated the nation to his status as a "Christian."

This Sunday, we face the colossal absurdity of a Catholic School, Notre Dame, inviting Barack Obama to speak at its commencement and receive an honorary degree. Some expect nearly 20,000 protestors at the event and many of the seniors refuse to participate. They will engage in prayer services elsewhere on the campus. They are saying, in effect, let us not make a mockery of our institution by honoring a friend of death.

I would submit to you that there is no more true Christianity than the Christianity which states, "you have dishonored the name of Christ, you have made a mockery of His grace, and you will not share my table, until you repent." There is no more true mark of leadership than being willing to say "this is not up for debate. There can be no compromise on people who claim Christ and then claim the right to kill children."

Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame, in other words--not the new, abortion-loving version of higher Catholic education.

May the hearts of the children, someday, be turned back to their fathers--the hearts, at any rate, of those that are still beating after the present holocaust.

Family Night

We took the kids to Macaroni Grill last night, and to a tux fitting for Mallory & Eric's wedding. On the way down the hill, as we passed through Cherry Valley, we saw a teenage girl on a small, fat pony galloping at full tilt up the other side of the street. You never see horses gallop on suburban streets, and I don't think I've seen a pony that fat move quite that fast. The pony's master was holding a new bag of grain on the saddle in front of her, balancing it between her arms and the reins. We all stared at once, fell silent, and then burst out laughing.

"I'm getting this grain home," I said. "That pony is thinking 'I'm getting this grain home--NOW.'"

I turned around to watch. She was still kicking up gravel, charging off in the other direction. "The city of Cherry Valley," I said, thinking out loud, "should pay that girl and her pony to ride the grain around like that. People would drive from miles from all around to see it."

Just as I said that, we turned the corner at the gas station and saw an old homeless man playing an electric guitar--without an amp, next to a trash can. He looked something like Jerry Garcia, and he was singing with a great deal of gusto, multi-tasking for aluminum cans at the same time.

Mary chuckled. "Maybe Cherry Valley is up to something."

 

The Macaroni Grill wasn't full--but I take some fellow-merchant solace in the fact that there was a wait, on a Tuesday night. (Heah, Americans, eat out! Especially at charming little living history farm restaurants.)

I keep thinking I want to tweek the Hawk's Head Public House formula because, really, the Macaroni Grill isn't just good food. A good restaurant has a kind of "atmospheric take-away," a sense-of-place you carry away with you in one of your mental shirt pockets: Cool rooms, wall art, an open view of the grill itself, signature music, credible hospitality on the part of the servers. I don't really want to do the old Bobby McGee's thing, where every server is a character from history. I think there are some waiters who can pull that off, but I find constant drama at the dinner table a little off-putting, and finding people who can act, sing, and serve is...nigh to impossible. What I'm thinking is one, or maybe two people at most, who travel from table to table, eating, arguing, singing. If the guests want to listen in, they can. If not, that's fine too.

There was a time in Men's formal fashion (the 1970s) where tuxedo fashion was dominated by the lady's urge to decorate her man as a kind of fashion accessory. I believe that era has blissfully gone the way of the world, and I can happily report there are no more peach vests or dusty-lime colored dinner jackets for rent. Not that Mallory would do that to us, of course, but it's nice to see clothing more or less settled into a classic trend. If it were up to me, every man would have his clothing issued by Jeeves or by Mary Johns, of our wardrobe department. As far as I'm concerned, when lapels starting get too wide and pants begin to flare and you start to feel you're trying to conduct business in a Yellow Submarine cartoon, then the fashion designers are sitting somewhere having a really good laugh.

Very little that is "new" is really worth it. All the good ideas are old ones.

If you agree, you should like our place.

Their Horsely Nature

Some very good friends of the farm started in with our boys and the horses this last Saturday, teaching them how to walk the horses, how to establish a rapport, how to avoid indulging their childish, "horsely," nature (my word), how to lunge etc, and I was pleasantly surprised at how disciplined Lockton and Samuel were in applying these new equine truths, yesterday when we did our first horse-homework together. Lockton worked on making Winston back up when he got too near a fence or too near the roadside grass, which seemed like a pretty advanced piece of stable-boy art--making a big Thoroughbred go into reverse on command.

It's against my nature, for some reason, to spend an hour in the afternoon pretending I'm a country gentleman, with the time to train horses, and be trained by them. (Getting my saddle muscles back, at 49, seems a little daunting.) Perhaps it's just because I'm always so worried about sales around here that I don't think I have time to ride, but really, this is, after all, a professional obligation. Don't guests expect farmers to know how to ride a horse? Right? ("Yeah, that's it.")

The truth is I'm troubled by the world, by a kind of truth-avoidance I see nearly every day among friends, customers, pastors, politicians, reporters. I watch lives, and nations, and churches going off track in ways that seem subtle at first, but then predictably tragic. It comes with age and the study of history--a kind of weariness at the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. With a horse--when you see it doing something stubborn and "horsely"--you punish it by stopping, backing up, and insisting the thing be done right.

With people, you can't even cough disapproval, or look sidelong, without the self-esteem police writing a ticket. I was having a great time at the Mother's Day event the other night, and then a friend told me he had expressed some of my ideas to a pastor who cautioned him with the same old good-Nazi-Lutheran rationalization for the church remaining silent and never, ever, ever being political. This particular pastoral evasion went like this: "since none of the candidates really represent Christ very well, we shouldn't endorse any of them." That's something like saying, "well, because 1930s American swing dancing was a little risqué, we had no right to go over and liberate Jews from the camps." That's like saying, "because that superior court judge is a bit of a gossip, he doesn't have the right to impose the death penalty on a remorseless killer." Pastors who refuse to make distinctions between the small and the great dangers threatening the flock, shouldn't be shepherding cockroaches into the dustpan, much less the children of God into the promised land.

I said so--very forcefully--and lost my temper in the process.

I am aware, of course, that churches operate under mandate from the federal government, or they lose their tax exempt status, but manufacturing a holy rationale for remaining silent in the face of evil seems particularly craven. I tell people, lately, "if your pastor hasn't given a pro-life, anti-tax, pro 10 commandments sermon in the last month--run, don't walk away. Find a real church."

I mean--really, what will those pastors say on the great and terrible day? "I preached the truth--as long as Caesar let me?"

It's May, It's May

I still can't tell if strawberries will be ready by Saturday, but there's a lot going on here anyway. We'll have some new horse trainers lunging Winston, Q-Tip, and Burrito. It's a pretty sight to behold. David Thomas will be singing in the Hawk's Head Public House--and, if you haven't purchased your tickets for the Night Before Mother's Day Ball, do it now. The two farm stores are full of historical souvenirs,books, and Riley's Farm gear as well--so if you can't stay busy here this Saturday, it's your fault.

Last night we had a little drama here as Luis stumbled up the stairs to our house and explained he had driven the Kawasaki mule off the side of the road on the "Widowmaker" trail to the Mile High Ranch. His friend, Craig, was having breathing problems, so we called 911 and the boys went off to the hospital. They are in good shape, if a little banged up. "How many of these trips across the farm have Luis and Craig been involved in?" I asked Mary. (It seems to me I remember Craig getting a car stuck back there.) Mary couldn't remember. "They were getting hay for Scott," she said. "Well," I said, "we need to put an end to these Luis and Craig expeditions." I paused for a moment and considered that phrasing. "Heah," I repeated. "That's a joke. Luis and and Craig Expeditions. The Luis and Craig Expedition. Get it?"

"Yes, dear," Mary said. "I get it. I get it."

We had some close friends over for dinner last night and they told us a story which deserves to be included in a major feature film, but I can't do it justice here. I was applauding my brother, Scott, for giving my father a life completely at home, around his family, during his declining years. Scott helped him dress, helped him eat, helped him go to the bathroom, and Scott was there when dad passed on. Our close friends had a similar story of taking care of their father at home, during the last month of his life, but there was a bizarre twist to the final chapter. On the very last day of the old man's life, our friends septic system backed up and they were told by the pumping company to begin unearthing the manhole covers before they arrived. As they were digging out the septic system, (at least two feet of earth), their father passed away in the bedroom, just as the hospice worker arrived, to see the whole family digging a hole in the back yard. The hospice worker looked from our grieving friend, to the old man in his final rest, to the mounds of the earth getting larger in the back yard, and said, "you aren't planning on.."

Just as we were hearing this story, Luis stumbled in, with news of the Luis and Craig Expedition.

Life beats fiction--most of the time.

Constitutionally Speaking...

Political discourse has always suffered from what I would have to call the Red Sox Syndrome.

If you picture two baseball fans debating the merits of their teams, you can't imagine one of them calmly leaning over and saying--in as soothing a voice as possible--"Chuck, I know you're a Red Sox fan, and I respect that, but here's why I would like you to consider getting wildly excited about the Yankees."

People have tribal, gut-fed, almost hereditary attachments to the labels they wore growing up. There are life-long Catholics who can't vote pro-life if it means they'll have to check a box against a Democrat. There are 4th generation Republicans who won't defend the Constitution if a Republican happens to be desecrating it. The spirit of party is not the spirit of thinking people, and until we begin thinking beyond party, to what is right, what is true, what is fair, politics will remain a baseball game, with about the same level of rational discourse--pretty slogans, handsome candidates, empty minds, and obscene hecklers. I'm happy to report that the Tea Party movement seems to reflect every political and professional stripe: Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Academics, Civil Servants, and Entrepreneurs.

The common reality among Tea Party types is intellect. If you don't understand Adam Smith and the long, sorry historical record of failed command economies, the Tea Party movement will never excite you. At the Pasadena Tea Party, there was a band of Russian emigres who had personally tasted the fruits of Bolshevism. You see that contingent at a lot of tea parties--refugees from state economies who spent their childhood waiting in line for potatoes. They can't quite believe that America would entertain economic ideas that literally left them hungry as children, in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Block. If you don't understand that politicians promising loans to people who can't repay them, in return for votes, is what caused both the real estate bubble and the current recession, you will never get excited about the Tea Party movement. If you don't understand that there is nothing "free market" about bailing out global mega-corporations, just because they operate, nominally, in the private sector--you will never understand the tea party movement. If you don't understand the moral tradition behind protecting private property, and its real world economic benefits, you won't understand the tea party movement. You have to be a little smarter than Keith Olbermann, in other words, to comprehend basic economics.

Of course, no one wants to be called a socialist today. Politicians still get elected by promising tax cuts--even if they don't mean it. They still pretend they want to promote private sector jobs, but when you head into a recession, the very last thing you want to do is raise taxes or make spending promises that will plunge all of us into greater debt. That's something like putting a cast iron saddle on a race horse and expecting him to run faster.

If you don't understand that, you will never understand the tea party movement.