A Final Harvest of Anger
I don’t believe I ever met a farmer who wasn’t, deep down, mad about something--parasites, fallen prices, freak rain, drought, skittish bankers, bad neighbors, rapacious middlemen, fickle consumers, environmentalists, bureaucrats, city folk, society in general. The System.
Stoics, they don’t advertise the anger much, at least not to outsiders. Instead, they vent among themselves over coffee, across a vine, or maybe they slap a “Let ‘em Eat Oil” bumper sticker on the pickup and let it go at that. Mostly they just work their fields, and brood.
Not all can keep the demons contained. Every so often, one of these salts will go off, will take a shotgun and pay a visit to the loan officer who just pulled the plug on the family place. Boom, boom. When this happens, America will pause to nibble its fingernails, wondering what’s gone wrong down on the farm, what’s eating Old MacDonald anyway. Such fretting never lasts more than one or two news cycles. Busy land, America.
Victor Davis Hanson is a farmer who went off. For too long, he kept watch on subdivisions marching toward his vineyards, the economic forces that were making agriculture worthwhile only to flush corporations and fools, the impending loss of a raisin farm that had been created, worked--and lived on--by his family for five generations. It’s over, he concluded three years ago. Done. And so he went looking for a weapon.
*
What he chose, happily enough, was not a gun. Rather, he transported his anger to a keyboard and, in the cold fog of a winter, in the drafty farmhouse his great-great-grandmother had built after the Civil War, he began to write. Tap, tap. He took on all the invading armies--crooked brokers, Napa’s “boutique scum,” corporate agriculture’s “mush mouths in white shirts,” and, yes, even farmers like himself, “walking anachronisms” filled with their “bewildered anger.”
The book poured out in just six weeks. Anger can do that. Hanson called it “Fields Without Dreams.” The publisher (Free Press] balked at the title: too bleak for American farming, a topic traditionally afforded more lyrical treatment. Hanson persisted. A farmer, he’s stubborn--to the point of alienating the very people who would market his book.
“All the reviewers have been stuck on how angry I seem,” Hanson was saying the other day. “I simply wanted to write honestly.”
A 42-year-old man with a slight paunch and well-worked hands, Hanson still looked every bit a farmer, though lately he’s been otherwise occupied. The 200-acre family place is in a sort of limbo. Hanson’s brothers and a cousin still farm some, but most of its vineyards are rented to others, which is one way to save the farm. Hanson, meanwhile, has been busy plugging his book--another way, perhaps, to save a farm. And so American: In order to save the farm, it was necessary to write a book about its death.
*
Hanson did not come as a novice to his literary task. He is a Stanford-educated scholar, a 42-year-old university professor of Greek and Latin. He took the teaching job to supplement income after the farm began to unravel in the Raisin Crash of ’83. The book on one level is a documentary of that bleak passage, the result of a recurring glut. Blessed with rare climate, betrayed by consumer disinterest and an economic system that favors distributors, raisin growers simply keep growing too many raisins. Always have. Always will.
Where Hanson parts company with optimists is that he regards 1983 as more than one bad turn in a long cycle of boom and bust. He has written, persuasively, that the raisin crash was a local piece of a larger trend. His conclusion is that the American family farmer is finished, and that as farm families vanish, with them goes a vital part of American society--its very center.
The final verdict on the future of the American farm lies no longer with the farmer, much less with the abstract thinker or even the politician, but rather with the American people themselves--and they have now passed judgment. They no longer care where or how they get their food, as long as it is firm, fresh and cheap. They have no interest in preventing the urbanization of their farmland as long as parks, Little League fields and an occasional bike lane are left amid the concrete, stucco and asphalt.
They have no need of someone who they are not, who reminds them of their past and not their future. Their romanticism for the farmer is just that, an artificial and quite transient appreciation of his rough-cut visage against the horizon, the stuff of a wine commercial, cigarette ad or impromptu rock concert.
Instinctively, most farmers know this. It’s the real reason they are mad.
