Down on the farm

An article on the front page of the print section of the Wall Street Journal this morning describes how a huge chunk of America's farming population struggles to make ends meet and stay on their land, taking second and third jobs, working their asses off continually, etc. It is hard not to feel their pain. They are like many sectors of the economy, under relentless pressure to specialize, scale up and build in economies of scale to survive. In general, and I've probably blogged about this before, I think that the mounting difficulty for people to have their own businesses and survive as independent entities is a little-understood undercurrent of many of the maladies facing our society today, starting with the "deaths of despair" phenomenon documented most authoritatively in the work of Ann Case and Angus Deaton, but really visible anywhere you go outside of economic power centers around the world, and ending with craziness like Brexit, Trump, and Putin.

People feel powerless, and men, who are the ones most likely to get worked up and get violent just because of physiology, feel emasculated. As a sidebar, let's just admit that the furor over the government taking away guns is about that: castration. Or, more accurately, having our penises taken away. By God, the Founding Fathers wanted to be sure we could have our metal penises with which to destroy others, in whatever shapes, sizes and capacities we could dream up. You know that was foremost in the minds of Jefferson and Madison.

But I digress.

The thing about the farmers is, we all want farmers to survive. It is part of our sense of place to think that plants and animals are being managed out there in the areas where we don't live and that somebody who looks like us is growing them, getting up at dawn, milking, bailing, etc. It allows us to feel whole. The idea that the countryside might be fully aggregated into large corporate forms is dystopian. There is a long history of rich people making money and then buying farms with pretty houses and porches that run at a loss just to regain that sense of connectivity late in their own lifecycles. We might call them Potemkin farms. At a higher level, the Japanese put insane tariffs on rice, to be sure that there are a few rice farmers left to preserve their national heritage.

So yes, we want these farmers to stay on the land. At least I do. But they all seem to have voted for Trump. We need to figure that out. And it's not because they're stupid, we need to get that shit out of our heads. That's what got us in trouble.