J Cullen wrote: ``small farmers who are struggling to stay on the land''
``Who vote Republican, rail against Washington, and live on federal farm subsidies, right? And want the U.S. government to force open foreign markets so they can export grain there, while evoking the homey virtues?'' Doug.
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Anyone remember or see Bertolucci's, `Italia', with de Niro and Depardeau? It's about the lifelong relationship between a land owner's son and his tenet forman's son and their struggle with each other over the land they both depend on. During the Thirties, the owner's family become fascists and the forman's become communists.
>From my experience with small shops, contractors, and long ago visits
to grandparents in small farming communities in Illinois, Oklahoma and
Maryland, and more recent visits to similar communities in Iowa,
Texas, Pennsylvania, Idaho, New York, Oregon; the smaller the farmer,
shop owner, or contractor, the bigger the capitalist--or at least the
more Capital figures in their imagination, dreams, and desires.
What US populism must issue from is not a community interest, a collective sense of work and valuation, but from the frustrated desire to individually possess land, freed from some over baring interest like banks and commodity markets; the desire to return to some primal state of capitalism. There is a reason this landed or wealth-derived-from-land class were among the first targets of most revolutions. The tap root of Capital issues from them.
And then there is Rousseau's comment that it all started the first time somebody drew a line around some land and declared it theirs.
Chuck Grimes