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?
No comments:
Post a Comment