Jeremiad against the machine

Published in 1930 by a group of 12 Southern writers based in Vanderbilt College, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition is a collection of essays issued as a stay against further industrialization of the South. Obviously they failed. In many respects the South is no different from any other region in the US. Regionalism has given way to a corporatized banality. The last bastion of yeoman farmers lost out to Detroit and other industrial powerhouses in the late 30s and 40s.
At times racist and patronizing, bitter and nostalgic, prophetic and prescient, I'll Take My Stand desperately tries to convince the South to keep her identity, but to no avail.
The essays offer no practical advice, merely polemic, but some of them...whew. What would the world be like if their ideas had prevailed? There is no way of knowing...at least not until the oil runs out. And that shouldn't happen for another 250 years--right?

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Worth Quoting

There are but three social arrangements which can replace Capitalism: Slavery, Socialism, and Property. --Hilaire Belloc The Servile State

Good reads of 2009

I haven't made a list like this in a while, and I believe I discussed most of these on the blog as I finished them, but I thought I'd make a handy short-hand list for you and me. These are only in the order I read them and do not indicate any preference. The Open Door * Frederica Mathewes-Green The Children of Hurin * J.R.R. Tolkien The Omnivore's Dilemma * Michael Pollan Agrarianism and the Good Society: Land, Culture, Conflict, and Hope * Eric T. Freyfogle Wonderful Fool * Shusaku Endo Up the Rouge: Paddling Detroit's Hidden River * Joel Thurtell and Patricia Beck Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation * Rodney Clapp (I started the following in December, but I haven't finished them--so far they are excellent: Love and Hate in Jamestown * David A. Price and The Picture of Dorian Gray * Oscar Wilde) Try one of these--let me know.

Independent Women?

During breakfast today I was reading an excerpt from a play in The New York Times Magazine (I know, I was a day behind and read Saturday's edition yesterday) entitled Rust . The play, written by a professor at Grand Valley State University, here in Michigan, is a nonfiction drama about the closing of a GM plant in Wyoming, MI. The play itself sounds interesting and I enjoyed the excerpt, but what caught my eye was something a character said. The character is "Academic" and plays a historian and guide to the playwright, also a character. He is explaining the rise of the automobile factories and the effect of the car on American culture. He says, "Women became independent, they go from producers of food and clothing to consumers of food and clothing." This was meant as an earnest, praiseworthy point. I would counter with "How far we've fallen." To say that a woman (or a man) is independent because she has moved from producer to cons

I Am Not Hamlet

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