Fine Lawns, Beauty Contests, Panic

They say that the tradition of the finely manicured English lawn goes back to at least the 15th century, and there are manorial paintings to prove it, complete with images of workers taking the scythe to the Baron's emerald meadow. I'm all for making the watering of sod efficient, but there is a kind of soul-poverty associated with folks who don't want anyone to landscape with that prettiest of all groundcovers, that proof of heaven, that deep green bluegrass carpet beneath your bare summer feet. If someone wants to decorate the backyard with colored gravel, reclaimed asphalt, venus fly traps, and cacti capable of enduring the fifty year draught, fine, but I worship the God who has cattle on a thousand hills--and those cows need grass. There are too many kids around here, praise be, to really have a manicured lawn, but I still say nothing beats that oasis perfection of stumbling upon a Palm Desert golf course, with ponds, grass, and big shade trees.



I think there is something else behind the politically correct objection to grass, and that's an objection to beauty itself. Most of us just aren't beautiful. We want our landscaping to reflect the dreary egalitarian grime of a turd-green tumbleweed garden. ("Just who do they think they are? Putting in a new lawn?") Bobble-headed, bobble-wristed Perez Hilton couldn't allow Miss California, Carrie Prejean, to just be beautiful. He had to hurl insults and obscenities at her because she didn't agree with his take on marriage; but I don't think it was just the politics of the exchange. The reality is that there are many Americans who don't want to put anything at all to a contest, much less beauty. If they have to participate in judging people prettier than they are, they durn well better have the right opinions. Hilton may have been carrying his rainbow banner to the event, but what he really laments is his own ugliness of soul. He wants everyone--including beautiful, truth-telling Miss California--to be as miserable and as detestable and as shallow as he is.

That's really the secret behind any group of friends who don't want one of their number to succeed. It's all one fabric--beautiful lawns, accomplished women, excellent scholarship, financial success. The village will eventually stone or maim anyone too handsome, too wise, or too successful.

Another way of putting it is that we worship safety and the risk-avoidance inherent in just living life. If you plant a lawn, you might lose it. If you enter a contest, you might be runner up. If you go out of doors, and work for a living, you might discover your latent food allergy. There's a part of us deeply angry at anyone courageous enough to live their lives. I saw this poster the other day on an internet forum, and I don't know where to give credit, but it tickled me.

When Joe Biden comments on anything, you know it probably wasn't worth discussing, and that goes for this incredibly overblown swine flu. As Ron Paul reminded us two days ago, in 1976 one person died of the swine flu and 25 died of the cure for it. It's not that you shouldn't study a hazard, but panic is the wrong response--always. We might be safer--and have no immunities whatsoever--if we all wrapped ourselves in poly bags and never left our living rooms, but commerce, agriculture, and the arts would all grind to a halt. Lord save us from these soulless functionaries who don't believe in heaven. All they have is this life and they worship it, literally, to death.

Blast from the Past

There was a legend in my hometown, Arcadia, that the former mayor owned a bomb shelter that was big enough to host an underground high school party or two. The "legend" part of this story might be the size of the underground complex, since a school tour parent and daughter of the mayor in question confirmed its existence for me, and even the high probability of her older brother outfitting a shindig or two down there, but I wager it was more like the bomb shelter at my in-laws old place, which was really just big enough to organize a poker game in reinforced concrete, with ominous red stripes on the wall--indicating the compass positions of March and Norton Air Force base.

I re-watched "Blast from the Past" last night with the kids, and although the language of the plot's post-Cold War chapter is pretty vulgar, there's a powerful argument being made about our culture in this story of a Cal Tech eccentric who builds a vast underground fall-out shelter and mistakes a crashed jet for the first salvos of a nuclear war. The nutty professor takes his pregnant wife down into the compound and locks the doors for a generation. The little family's isolation from the San Fernando Valley for thirty five years reveals a values shift that doesn't seem to be celebrated by the film-makers, which--by itself--puts the flick in my top twenty list.

With the exception of the civil rights movement, the Sixties brought with it not much more than pure social poison--cheap relationships, divorce, drug abuse, and the resulting cynicism that made the "underground child" Adam Webber (Brendan Fraser) seem like a gallant, if innocent, Galahad when he emerges looking for a wife among the ladies of the late 1990s. It's comic stuff, to be certain, but even the characters themselves--when confronted with this picture of civility emerged from the amber--seem to recognize that the world has lost something in its rush to embrace nihilism. When the valley shopkeepers of the 1990s repeatedly curse, Adam Webber says, "would you mind not taking the Lord's name in vain?"

"You have a problem with that, buddy?"

"I certainly do have a problem with that," he says.

"Blast from the Past" is the flip side of "Jurassic Park." In the big lizard flick, saintly old Richard Attenborough tells us to "step aside" and let the re-born, remorseless, scaled monsters enjoy their killing ways. Humans, it is implied, should stand aside and allow even the most evil whims of nature to take their toll, out of deference to a value-neutral biological universe. "Blast from the Past" stands in awe of a human being redeemed from the savagery of nature. Adam Webber would slay the dragon. Lord Attenborough would offer up his children to it.

More evidence of our free-fall...

Seniors & The Sorry Reality of Conflict

If you or someone you know is attached to the management of a senior home, assisted care facility, senior community, or senior anything, let them know about our great summer savings for Seniors at Riley's Farm. We've found that seniors don't like traversing the entire width and breadth of the farm, but they do enjoy a good meal and good, toe-tapping music, amidst the pastoral beauty of their rural youth. Just a few minutes ago, I stretched my right arm out a little too fast and I had a senior moment. I also found that some restaurants begin their senior discount program at age 55. (Six years away for your correspondent, now experiencing a scapular, scraping stream of senior pain.)

 

The Sorry Reality of Conflict

Those of you acquainted with my cranky style and my thoroughgoing embrace of the Calvinist take on man's utterly depraved nature may be surprised to know that I do have my weepy, group-hug moments. There's a ritual I go through after the Revolutionary War Adventure. I try to shake the hands of all the parents and teachers who visit the tour, and I know--of course--that we can't agree on everything, but there are moments of commonality among people that seem to presage the peace of heaven. Sometimes, you can feel it a ballpark, when people of every stripe stand for the national anthem. Sometimes you see even atheists and believers awe-struck by the way Judy Collins sang Amazing Grace. Sometimes friends or co-workers, on parting, after years of working together, forget all their squabbles. For a moment, all they feel is the glow of their common lives, their common share of a journey spent together in life. At the risk of descending into deep absurdity, I remember a news story about Cher weeping at the funeral of Sonny Bono. She had spent most of her post-marriage years ridiculing and mocking her ex-husband, but in the end, all the cheap shots got washed away by the sobbing. Now, to be clear: I can't stand Cher. She's the very picture of what happens when a shallow intellect is fused to a celebrity sense of self. She's a pitiful monument to worshiping whorish youth at all costs, but even in that weeping moment, even I can imagine putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, "there, there."

I'm quite certain God knew that we need these moments of respite from the troubles. You need to turn the speakers up and weep at the Celtic harmonies now and then; you need to picture in your mind's eye an old daddy singing "Danny Boy" to his parted son. You need to clap your hands, sway back and forth in the all gospel choir, and feel the spirit.

But when the music is over, you don't want Cher making public policy. You may be able to sing a hymn, on the gallows, with a remorse-ridden murderer, but you still need to trip the hatch. Simply put, you need the emotion to serve the intellect, and not the other way around. The tragedy of our age is that we have it upside down. Our political leaders are 90% pop-jamboree and 10% ideas--and most of those ideas bankrupt at that. My Marine friend, Steve Klein, reminded me of a time when Hollywood could make a movie where the actors actually sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" without a trace of irony, without the impulse to mock belief in a God whose surpassing love and strength existed to defeat evil. In the scene above, a congregation sings that very song in the middle of a cathedral whose roof has been shorn away by a Nazi air raid. As the chorus swells, the camera looks up to take in the sight of B-17s on their way to defeat the enemy.

The facts are simple, but they are routinely forgotten: both good and evil remain in the world. Those moments of commonality, the thunder of the chorus, shouldn't be there to make us forget our sins, but to proceed on a war footing against them. After you have come to Jesus, after the tears have dried, remember what He said: "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."

More Wine, Less Whine

Mary and I toured Temecula wine country for our anniversary this weekend, and our guide kept talking about the number of new wineries that were being planned, and planted, even in this economy. I should have written down the precise numbers, but I believe she said there were 23 wineries now going through the site permit process, with a goal of establishing a total of 100 new wineries in the next ten years. One of the small farms was even the result of a luxury home distress sale; the new family took the five acre estate and planted grapes all along the hillsides. When we were there, a live band was playing out on the courtyard and the tasting room was awash in guests. Other wineries featured restaurants, spas, gift shops, and a whole calendar full of live music events.

I asked our tour guide, "do you ever have any squabbles between vineyard owners as to who gets more busses, more tourists?"

"No," she said. "We work together."

Simple stuff, really. I think it's known as "a rising tide lifts all boats." Here's to hoping this seaside wisdom catches on--here and generally.

I was telling Mary "you know, in business, it's really not that difficult to offer reasonably good service. If you return your emails, smile at the customers, and make a reasonable effort to provide for their needs, you will be doing better than 99% of the competition."



The simple fact is that most teenagers are not taught to be polite. They are certainly not taught to smile or say hello. Hospitality is not part of our nature, generally. Cool, aloof shyness is more likely to be the norm, and you have to train that reserve out of new employees if you mean to make customers happy. In Temecula,when we approached the tasting rooms--even if they were crowded--the stewards always smiled and were anxious to give you the whole history of their vineyard. One young fellow was the son of a Basque shepherd and he gave us a source for Suffolk sheep. Another walked us through the de-steming and fermentation room and the barrel room--giving us the chemistry of wine making in about fifteen friendly minutes. The girl at Calloway took our picture and asked us all about apple country. I didn't hear one Temecula vineyard owner ragging on their competition, or making sweeping pronouncements about what was, and was not, "Temecula." No one claimed any special expertise for being there longer. No one growled, under their breath, "THEY bring in grapes from outside of the valley."

Granted, they turn their crop into something that can be sold for a premium twelve months a year, and success breeds good breeding. Grinding poverty tends to bring out the desperate in all of us. Oak Glen farmers, and agritourism operators in general, need to cooperatively develop business plans that do more than just pay the bills. We're not saffron-robed ascetics up here, casting wild-flower seed to keep aging hippies happy on their mountain sojourn. We have families, property taxes, compliance costs--and we need to turn a profit!

Could it be that Blackie Wilshire was on to something years ago, when he said, during Prohibition, "well, you could sell a lug of apples for a quarter or a pint of Apple Brandy for $5."

Here's to hoping Oak Glen comes up with more five dollar ideas.

More Scenes, Less Screens

We've added new sod to the south side of the Public House (below), and yesterday, we put 3,000 new strawberry plants into the ground. (I actually saw my first little green strawberry yesterday.)

Mallory is working on summer camp marketing, and she (continued below)...

sent me this article about a mom who wanted to send her child on lots of different, challenging summer day camp experiences and found that most of them were little better than TV-dominated day care centers. Some of the places had nothing but sixteen year olds working for them, with no one "..over the age of 21... to prepare more interactive and creative...activities."

Well, judging by that standard, we are the gold-plated, collector's edition Ferrari of summer day camps, because we feature non stop activities by professional living historians who spend the whole year educating kids.

Now--how to get that message out?

Anniversaries II

Happy Birthday, Will.

It's a beautiful day out there today, nothing like the day Mary and I tied the knot here on the farm--in an April snowstorm 21 years ago. The cold was so intense that afternoon, that one of my dad's salesmen stood too close to a propane heater and unwittingly coaxed a smolder out of his toupee. My nephew Danny was having trouble pronouncing his "R"s back then and he blurted out, "Heah, misto yo how is borning." ("Heah, Mister, you're hair is burning.")

They say weather on your wedding is good luck, and that's been true for us: six kids, same business, near constant companionship...and still friends. Praise be to the Almighty.

When I was a younger man, I can remember women obsessing over their hair, and wondering which bouffant would do the trick to win the man of their dreams. To this day, I don't think I've ever heard a guy friend say, "don't you just love her hair?" It's not even in the top ten list of qualifications. I can tell you that men--gentlemen anyway--are far more attracted to the old world virtues than the female lipstick-and-glitter press would have you believe. In my case, Mary had an aura of hard work and optimism about her--a cheerfulness about business, about entrepreneurial ideas, about work that was the precise opposite of the shoe-and-dress-and-purse shopaholic I had dated just before her. If Mary were ever a feminist, she hid it pretty well. (Men may marry a woman who whines about the glass ceiling, but they won't be happy with the sound of the pounding and the breaking and the shattering.) I wonder if there wasn't something cosmic about God's promise to Adam, to provide him a "helpmate." God didn't say, "I will provide him a big-haired woman who will shop him to death." He promised someone who would "help" him.

So..anyway..girls, if you want to catch a husband, learn the virtues of hard work. It's a lot sexier than you think. There's no bigger turn-off among men than the words "high maintenance."

Black Angus

We are now the proud owners of an Angus bull, two cows, and two little calves. We hope this mini-herd can be turned out onto fenced pasture land within the next year or so, and that we can have a kind of mini-cattle company around these parts--mostly for signature Riley's Farm barbecue beef patrons. Scott doesn't want the herd to get very large, so look for corn-fed-beef of the boutique ranch style soon.

Yesterday, I saw a picture of a very, very rotund guy at San Diego's Earth Day celebration, holding up a sign lamenting beef-eating as the number one cause of global warming. There is a charitable way to look at this: the Almighty writes comedy on occasion, even farce, and it is quite possible that brazen fools are placed along life's road as highway-bollards, warning pilgrims where the sticky idiot-pits are to be found. You see literally thousands of these bollards on college campuses. Sometimes they encircle the place entirely.

Consider Notre Dame. There's a school that is becoming more and more "faith-based" in name only with the administration actually opting for more idiot-bollards than classrooms. Not only does the school invite V----a Monologues onto campus, and deviant film festivals, they've extended a commencement address invitation to the most radically pro-abortion president in American History. Middle class parents: don't send your kids to college. Buy them books.

..and a barbecue beef sandwich.

International People-Hating Day

Google tells me tomorrow is Earth Day, and I suppose I look upon that reality with the same veiled disgust Bill Maher reserves for people of faith. I just don't get either the liturgy, or the zeal, or the tide-pool pilgrimages associated with worshiping what is really a whorish nightmare of a mother--the earth. Think about the unrepentant shrew for a minute: she gives us earthquakes, tornadoes, firestorms, tsunamis, draughts, pestilences, sink-holes, avalanches, plagues, locusts, maggots, monsoons, and village-charring, baby-burning volcanoes. Most of you are reading this in an air-conditioned room somewhere, because the earth, quite simply, is too inhospitable a place to allow for any contemplative work--without shielding yourselves from her heat, wind, rain, and dust. She doesn't even have a very good defense against asteroids. She just whirls on through space like a floozy through the ether, without much care for her young ones. If she were a mother, the cosmic authorities would be writing her up.

Her kids, on the other hand--human beings--are the ones we should have an international celebration for. They build cool adobe bungalows against the heat, and warm alpine cabins against the cold. They selectively breed wild, stingy berries and turn them, over the generations, into fat, juicy strawberries. They turn wild ferrell birds into fat-egg dropping chickens. They carve homes out of oaks and ships out of ore. They harness hydrogen and carbon and steel and send explorers into space. They write symphonies, and poetry, and divine morality plays like "Nicholas Nickleby."

People--at least the reclaimed s0rt--are worth celebrating, not their welfare witch of a mother-Gaia.

When I ponder this extravaganza, I can't help thinking of what I'm ashamed to say is a fellow Stanford man, Paul R. Ehrlich, the father of Earth Day. He's the author of "The Population Bomb," who compared human population growth to cancer and who concluded with these words:

"(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."

Since the writing of this book, earth-worshippers have learned to temper their rhetoric, but Ehrlich took off their mask--at the very birth of their movement. Earth Day, at its root, is deeply anti-human. Only the Communist Chinese are barbarian enough to make Ehrlich's desires policy, but the rest of the world, when talking up the "earth friendly," are really talking about controlling human populations, even if they don't admit it. In America, we're civil enough to make child-rearing merely expensive, by burying expensive environmental studies and rat-friendly mitigation work into the price of a home, but we're really limiting our populations by making large families very expensive. It's the same environmental crap in a different, slightly more procedural, wrapper.

I don't mean to spoil your earth day. I just want you to remember that your children, your parents, your cousins, your friends, are far more important than the dirt upon which you trod, even if Paul Ehrlich says otherwise. It's something to think about whenever you see all the friendly little blue globes everywhere.

The guy who invented this holiday hates you and all your kin.

Tea Parties Now and Then

Now: My untrained eye estimated approximately 300 people at the intersection of Yucaipa and Bryant yesterday, with heavy crowds on all four corners, and colossal good cheer on the part of the protestors to hear so many motorists blaring their horns in loud support of the notion that we are over-taxed as a people. One mother, commenting on the economic slavery to come, hand-crafted a huge sign that read "My Child is Not Your A.T.M."



The idea behind modern political street theater (the Rileys weren't the only ones wearing three cornered hats and sporting the Gadsen Rattlesnake flag) is that a memory will be stirred up in the hearts of the public. That memory, of an ancestry that fought and bled to protect "unalienable rights," may find its way into the voting booth and we can peacefully turn out the current generation of pensioned blood-suckers occupying public office. There are plenty of them in both parties, and their essential characteristic is this: they see the tax-base not as a means to build bridges and protect the homeland, but as a means to hand out jobs, contracts, and goodies to their cronies and constituents. In an era of declining personal morality, there isn't a voter anywhere who isn't susceptible to the message "it's all those _______ (fill in your favorite enemy's) fault." The public trough, to these politicians, is the vast ocean of revenue made possible by people who work for a living. As one old man put it to me yesterday, in the form of a riddle:

"What's the difference between a congressman and a thief?"

"I'm having trouble deciding," I said.

"You can arrest a thief."

The simple truth is that there can be no political liberty without political leadership willing to protect private property. Once you begin taxing one class of people to pay for another, the hard-working either leave, or stop working, and you run out of goodies to spread around. As Margaret Thatcher put it, "the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money."

I'm hoping the current generation of protestors understands that this is not a partisan issue. It's not a matter of Bush or Obama, Clinton or Palin. Both parties have proven they think they know how to spend your money better than you do. I'm also hoping the pastors of America realize that tax-gluttony on the part of our leaders is a deeply spiritual issue, that they begin to remind their flocks they are not very good Christians or Jews if they elect "statesmen" who are willing to steal from them in the name of good stewardship. I can at least hope the pastors of Americas discover their manhood, even if I saw precious few of them out there yesterday.

Then: even though the Boston tea party of December 1773 had a measure of street theater about it, there were, of course, vast differences to contemplate. In the first place, representation was a critical issue in the 18th century controversy. The idea of having absolutely no say in the taxes a foreign legislature places upon you was, and is, a critical threat to individual liberty. Even with representation, the prospect of 51% of the people deciding they can expropriate the wealth of 1% of the population has to be called what it is: democratic theft. If you live in a democracy of cannibals, it is no comfort to know that you were at least democratically voted into the stew pot. The next generation bearing the mantle of sons of liberty need to do more to protect the liberties of economic minorities. Income taxes and death taxes need to be eliminated entirely, in favor of consumption taxes, or tariffs. The raising of tax levels should have a 3/4 barrier in our legislatures and not a paltry 2/3. Pastors, again, this is a spiritual issue. If you vote for a thief, you are a thief.

The Boston Tea Party was also a secret affair. To this day, we're not sure who participated and who didn't. The participants didn't blog about it, and most didn't even mention it on their death beds. It was also, very clearly, a crime against property--specifically intended to protest an even greater crime against property. The participants were willing to risk mass prosecution because they had faith in each others' silence, which really amounted to a kind of blood oath. A year earlier, when 400 Rhode Island men burnt a revenue schooner to the water line, the British authorities couldn't find anyone to testify against them. Call it what you like--but that is solidarity of a sort we can't even imagine today. Today, if you even mention the Constitution as a standard we should re-invigorate, the Department of Homeland Security puts you on a list.

Finally, the original sons of liberty had spiritual ballast. The pastors of the day were willing to talk about a Christ who cared about justice in this human sphere. Certainly there were Tory apologist pastors and firebrand Whigs, but neither party spent as much of their time filtering the message through their own "church-growth" parameters. Christ was King everywhere--not just in the sanctuary.

Let him who has ears to hear, hear.

Up on Cripple Creek, She Sends Me..

There's an ailment common to many Oak Glen fathers: we don't really like taking vacations. Greg Anton told me his father, Wally, was very hesitant to leave this little valley. He would ask his kids "mountains or beach?" hoping they would say mountains, and thus be tricked into staying on the hill. I know that Benita is hard pressed to push Scott off the mountain as well. As for me, I tell the kids, "we live in paradise. Why leave?"

My wife, Mary the Greek, has responded to this reality by making vacations, for me, something like the arrival of ABC's Extreme Makeover super-bus. All I have to do is show up, and I'm whisked away without worry. My clothing is packed. My contact lens paraphernalia is neatly readied. My favorite snack foods are purchased--in ample supply. If you've ever seen BBC's version of P.G. Wodehouses, "Jeeves & Wooster" where Jeeves could prepare English morning tea & cream with nothing but a cow in the meadow and a tin of Earl Grey in his coat pocket, you know something about Mary's resourcefulness.

This time, we landed in San Simeon State Park, in the Washburn campground, where a neat little grove of pine shaded the grassy berm behind the campsite. This tree-canopy looked out upon one of those pastoral vistas that made 18th century gentlemen stop to sharpen their quills and summon up verse by the lambent light of memory. In the distance, of course, was the gentle Pacific, framing the whole western horizon, lapping up onto a forest of Eucalyptus, and then on to the coffee-tilled earth of what looked like a new vineyard in the making. In nearly every direction there was that milky green flourish of pasture grass, and in certain lights you could see distinct herds of cattle moving over and behind the shadow of hills impossibly far away. The highest ridges, in the distance, were covered with oak forests that implied a kind of Tolkienesque mystery of yet more vistas, more rolling valleys, more "cattle on a thousand hills." It was a battle-commander's vista--without the battle.

My beef with vacations, generally, is that they can't compete with that very Tolkienesque power of imagination, or that Madison Avenue version of the RV sitting next to the Montana lakeside--with no one else around and three pound steelheads jumping into the frying pan of their own accord. Imagination, however, can actually be less spectacular than reality. There's a blue flower that comes up on the meadows outside Santa Maria, and it splays out across the pasture grass in misty indigo clouds that roll along with the wind. You would have to wait for a dream to witness a steel black Angus feeding in blankets of blue meadow, but sometimes you get to see just such things on vacation.

We camped with two other families, and two of the eight year old boys, before the tents were even pitched, had a flashlight and a magnifying glass out to examine the tracks in the spring mud. The doors on the cars were just barely open, and Sam and Lockton were busy turning a dog print into the signs of a bear that had just passed through.

"Is that a bear, Mr. Riley?"

"Looks like a dog," I said.

The two of them appeared disappointed by my candor.

"Hmmm," I said, looking again, "maybe so. Maybe a bear cub."

They seemed satisfied with the possibility they were now tracking the wild.

Eric and Nicholas and Lockton and Samuel set up their tent. Mary brought me an extra jacket, and a chair. Within a few minutes, the campfire was picking up strength, and she handed me a glass of chardonnay.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"Couldn't be any better," I replied.

So Many Channels...

It is true that there is a lot of road kill out there on the internet video highway, but the people who put together these Improv Everywherestunts prove there is more originality on the street than there is in the offices of programming executives. I haven't taken the time to research how this outfit is funded, but they certainly seem to be generating enough of an audience for someone to make some money off advertising--and the stunts are really inventive. This one, with 2.9 million views, may not be news to you, but it's pure genius, and this one is no less impressive. Let the media giants and the failed leviathan corporations and the unresponsive government agencies go bankrupt, as far as I'm concerned. We'll get better results starting over, from the ground up.

..And here's a fascinating documentary/reality show from the BBC with a unique premise: Gather twelve people, five of whom have been treated for mental health care issues--ranging from anorexia to bipolar disorder--and send them on a retreat with three psychiatrists for a week. Can the psychiatrists determine who has been treated for what? I won't give away the ending, but it becomes apparent that at least one of the "mental health" care professionals looks like he might be slightly more unhinged than the patients. Over the course of their observations, a few of the diagnostic tests seemed intriguing, but human beings are too complex, and too evasive, for psychiatry to claim the sort of primacy it has earned in public policy. It's really a kind of wacky, secular religion. The three mental health care professionals in this show were suitably humbled, but the "science of the human mind" is used by modern tyrants to deprive people of their liberty, with far more power and range than the Spanish Inquisition every enjoyed. We would be much better off replacing our dependence on therapeutic counseling with pastors, chaplains, and rabbis who consult the ancient texts and dispense universal, immutable truths--as opposed to therapeutic evaluations upon which no two sets of credentials can agree.

The Smell of Anschluss in the Morning

The police state never arrives all at once. It creeps up on you.



One of our vendors only accepts C.O.D. Money order, so we sent Brandon, one of our staff members, down to the post office with $3,400 in cash to buy one. The Postal Clerk said, "how much?"

"$3,400."

"Fill this out."

The post office wanted Brandon's full name, date of birth, driver's license number, social security number, address, and the reason he needed a money order. It also stated, clearly, that the information was strictly voluntary. Brandon, sensing that this was all the information someone would need to begin identity theft, responded:

"This is not mandatory."

"It's voluntary," said the postal worker, "but if you don't fill it out, I can't give you the money order."

"What if I ask for two money orders for $1700 each?"

"No can do. Now that I know you need more than $3,000, I need all this information."

Brandon, to his great credit, responded: "Never mind then. I'll get it somewhere else."

Last week, an air traveler, carrying cash in an airport, was harassed, belittled, and intimidated by TSA workers for responding to their questions with the simple inquiry: "Am I legally obliged to give you that information?" The traveler recorded the conversation and you can listen to it here. For more or less the last twenty years, if you want to identify yourself as a radical, a criminal, or a terrorist--carry cash. What used to be seen as a sign of thrifty self-sufficiency is now seen as an indicator of malevolent intent. In the early 1980s, some of my father's east coast manufacturers purchased Italian lace-making machines for cash, as per the demand of the manufacturer. They traveled to Italy with literally tens of thousands of dollars in their carry-on luggage. At the time, they said it made them a little nervous, but only because thieves might steal their money. It never occurred to them that their own government might be their persecutor.

Let's face it: the War on Terror was a huge farce. Our soldiers served honorably, but we trashed the Constitution at home in order to prop it up, and we made our boys die to install a religious state in Iraq. (The Iraqi Constitution specifically and emphatically states that no law can ever contradict Islam, which lays the groundwork for denying religious freedom, which is "guaranteed" a bit further down in the document.)

A time honored principle of English justice is the simple provision that you are not required to testify against yourself, that you are presumed innocent until the state proves its case beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.

If we give that up, we're little better than the goose-stepping robots who marched into Salzburg and sent the Von Trapp family flying for the hills.

Conspiracy Theory

I haven't been journaling as much, because I've been thinking Summer quite a bit, and getting ready for it--what crops to seed, what advertising venues to consider, where to rent a chipper for our apple prunings, what sort of out door furniture to put underneath the grape arbor. Sometimes, when you run a business, the temptation is just to train your staff on execution issues--to write "to do" lists for them, but the older I get the more I realize that harnessing your staff's intellect is the most important thing you can do. Maricella put our bakery items on display outside the order window--and presto--sales went up. Krystle and Mary Johns put a rack of fifes and newspapers outside the gift store, and--zappo--historic document and fife sales went up.

Really, though, "conspiracy" has been on my mind, because when you don't have cable or Dishnet, sometimes you spend your late night hours typing "documentary" into YouTube, filtering for last week's posts, and then sorting by viewcount. You get LOTS of conspiracy theory, from left, right, center, and straight out of this universe.

On one level, of course, it all seems very nutty. It's hard to imagine George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and Joe Biden running around in Masonic Aprons, bowing down to a huge owl in the forest. (Would they let Joe Biden in? Now that would have to be particularly poor conspiracy planning.) I don't get it. I had a really inglorious rush season at Stanford, and I've never really been a club-joiner, so I see it all as something like the Flintstone episode where Wilma and Betty tried to sneak into the lodge and got their hind ends spanked as part of the initiation ritual--wearing great fur-caps with horns sticking out over each ear. It just seems patently, outrageously absurd.

On the other hand, what is the most common thing you hear in daily conversation?

"..just between you and me..."

We are secretive beings by nature. Do you think that when Senator Chris Dodd arranged for the cozy Countrywide mortgage and the neat little Irish estate, courtesy, ultimately, of the taxpayer, he made a big sunlight show of talking it up on the floor of the Senate? Do you think that when the AIG bonus language was put back in the bailout bill, the treasury department composed a press release of the last minute, secretive action for the New York Times? Why do we think there are "sunshine" and "Brown Act" laws to begin with? Public officials don't really enjoy scrutiny. Even if conspiracy sounds downright nutty, it also sounds downright plausible.

A little more than two years ago, the Federal Reserve just announced that they would no longer publish M3 (money supply) statistics. Presto--changeo. They claimed it cost $1.5 million to calculate how much money was in circulation, so, get this, they were "saving money."

We can give away trillions of dollars to the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street Banks, and the "too big to fail" corporations who have created the mess in the first place, but we can't spend $1.5 million calculating the money supply? Can you imagine a publicly traded company saying, "heah, listen, we just decided not to publish how much stock we have outstanding; it cost too much."

Hello?

The bottom line is that if you're about to do something really, really secretive and despicable--make sure you put on a robe and dance around in the moonlight first.

That way, no one will believe you're up to dirty tricks.