Sunday, February 17, 2013

More on Rural Politics

I said I would eventually write a little bit more about the opportunity to hear a state representative speak at a local farm group dinner.  Now, I'll get into it a little deeper.  I went to the dinner last Tuesday, and it was a very nice event.  There was great food and friendly people.

Before the dinner, a county official gave the invocation (all quotes are based on my memory, and are not verbatim, they are meant to capture the gist of what was said).  It featured the typical, "Thank you God for this food, and the chance to come together" stuff, and also included the now all-too-common, "and thanks for our men and women overseas, who defend our right to meet together and eat together."  This burns me up.  I agree that we should pray for all the soldiers in harm's way, but let's not pretend that if they weren't halfway around the world as targets for residents of those countries to shoot at (and assorted bad guys who go to those countries to shoot at them), we wouldn't be able to have a Cattlemen's dinner in Nowheresville, Ohio.  The freedoms enshrined in the Constitution have to be defended by everyday Americans, right here.  The real threats to those freedoms come from within, as an invasion of this country by a foreign dictator is less likely than my being rewarded in Heaven with 72 virgins.  Any suggestion that what our soldiers are doing around the globe protects our freedoms here is a gross misrepresentation of what their work is doing (of which I really am not sure what it is doing).  I just know it isn't the thing standing between us and tyranny.  Anyway, I think this is just one of those things we do when most of us don't have any personal interest in participating in our military activities around the globe, thanks to the all-volunteer military.

After the dinner (excellent prime rib), the local state representative got a chance to speak.  He started out with a couple of corny (and I'll grudgingly admit, funny) jokes about government, and then quickly got the attention of the room. (paraphrasing) "The agricultural way of life in West Central Ohio is under threat.  The meat-production (soon to be changed to protein production in his speech) industry is under threat.  That threat doesn't come from Washington.  It doesn't come from Columbus."  Here, I thought he might say it came from the phosphorus pollution of Grand Lake St. Mary's and Lake Erie, or from the homeowners on those lakes, instead, "It comes from the Humane Society of the United States."  What?  I think the animal industry already worked out a deal with those guys.  He continued, "They declared war on protein production.  They want to turn all of us into vegetarians.  They want to end our way of life.  They reached a deal with Governor Strickland (evil Democrat) and the industry groups, and demanded 6 things.  We've done 5 of those things.  We regulated exotic animal ownership (only after the legislature tried to renege on that deal, and only after some crazy guy let out all his lions and tigers and shit he owned and killed himself.  No shit).  The only thing we haven't done was make cockfighting illegal.  Cockfighting is still legal (Technically, I believe HSUS wanted cockfighting to be made a felony, as it is already illegal, but don't let that get in the way of an 72-year-old in the midst of a stem winder).  If we give them all six things, they are going to come back and want more stuff."  Now based on what I've seen, it is much more likely that Republicans and ag groups will be the ones coming back to renegotiate.  His point was that the head of  HSUS was a crazy loon, but I think his negotiation of the deal he got indicates he is very rational, and very patient.  But, hey, we need some evil people not like us to hate on, right.

Moving on to other people not like us, he said that people in Cleveland think milk comes from Kroger, and that we need to educate them about the value of agriculture (which I agree with) and how necessary battery cages and gestation crates are (which I'm not so sure about).  Then he moved on to how this was the greatest place in the world to live (I think it is pretty nice).  He talked about how excellent our local schools were, then said half the folks in Cleveland don't know who their fathers are, and half of them drop out of school.  At this point, I could envision a giant thought cloud over the room with images of black people in it.  He went on further about how much better this area was to anywhere else and how important protein production was, and eventually wound up his speech.  I was hoping he would open the floor to questions because I wanted to find out about the HSUS's war on protein production.  I realized they didn't like the animal industry, but I never knew they had it out for soybean and peanut production.  Alas, he didn't.

I find this retail brand of politics, so often practiced by both parties, but definitely mastered on the rural side by Republicans, to be repugnant.  I'm not going to claim that West Central Ohio isn't a very nice place to live, or that urban areas in Cleveland don't have serious social and economic problems.  But the self-congratulatory flattery and playing to already rampant racism is absolutely poisonous to the body politic.  It is writing off  half of the population as degenerate and a threat to our way of life, which is about as true as the idea soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are protecting our right to assemble in Western Ohio.  It allows us to look away from our own shortcomings and encourages us to blame other people for structural changes which are undermining our middle class.  It prevents us from looking for solutions to to the problems we face and the problems folks in urban areas face in a communal manner which has been of service since civilization started.  And in the end, it is all intended to keep rich people rich and protect their (and my) standard of living, while allowing the standard of living of everybody else to slide in the direction of the rising emerging market economies as we seek a sustainable equilibrium with the rest of the world.  I hate to see rural folks buy into it, but buy they do.  I watched as the local extension agent nodded her head in agreement with almost every point the politician made.  She reacted in a way like what I would expect to see from a cult member in Jonestown.  Thank God they had Old Milwaukee Light to drink at the dinner, and not cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.  Somehow, though, I think, the poison was still presented for us to drink.  And I expect that most of the people in the room drank it.

Update: One other thing happened that I wanted to comment on.  During dinner, one of the guys at my table was talking about how valuable ag education was, and he said that they learned more about genetics in ag class than they did in biology.  I really wanted to say that that was because in ag class they could teach how inbreeding led to some genetic weaknesses, but that parents might see teaching the same thing about humans to be an attack on their way of life.  I passed on that opportunity.


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