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.