With my father-in-law's help this morning, we harvested 500 kilos of apples from our coveted Belle de Boskoop tree. Tomorrow we'll have our annual supply of pure, unmolested apple juice! I say unmolested as I've been thinking a lot about how corporations basically control our entire food chain and how our humble garden provides small yet meaningful spaces of resistance at the margins of our predatory economic system. Plus, I finally got around to reading Joe Bageant’s Dear Hunting with Jesus.

I'm too busy, and mostly too tired to log online these days, much less write blog posts. Don't know when I'll get around to the next one either but here goes...

The exhaustion stems mostly from the unbelievably tiresome task of being a “stay-at-home dad” with our 6 month old. When she does this, like today, I get a little work done. Walnuts, check. Potatoes up before the frost, check. Finish siding the house, check. Replant the blackberries, not yet. Prepare for next weeks lecture that's been on my calender for four months, oh hell no. So I'm "working" tonight.

more after the break

I check my email about once a week, if that. I hardly have time or energy to read a book, especially after all that heavy duty cramming for Ph.D. research grant applications a few months back. And I can't remember the last time I actually completed a movie from start to finish before passing out on the sofa. Auchentoshan has got my back tonight! But I finally figured I should start reading more than wonderful Julia Donaldson stories to my two year old so I grabbed some "light" reading from the library. Actually, I reserved it through the national public library system (which includes university libraries!) which mailed Dear Hunting from the Royal library to our little podunk branch in the sticks-- free of charge. Every book anywhere in the country is available to anyone with a library card in the country. And if it isn’t in Denmark then they'll borrow it from one of their Scandinavian neighbors and send it to me. Oh, those fucking commie, socialist, Nazi bastards! What will they think of next, universal health care? So, we do have a few systems where the social contract isn't based on some Hobbsian dog-eat-dog free for all. But the freakonomic neo-liberals are definitely here! And outside the well established social democratic institutions, privatization and consumerism order our lives here as well.

My wife asked me, “what the hell are you reading” after looking down at the title she reads it out loud, each word slow and deliberate; Dear Hunting with Jesus: Guns, Votes, Debt and Delusion in Redneck America. “This doesn’t look like the typical academic crap you read.” I say, “just some light reading.” And Bageant’s style is light, and tragically witty too. But this is heavy stuff, like David Harvey in Redneck drag. Camilla was not amused. So she says, “hey, my uncle says he heard you’re giving a presentation next week to the local Rotary Klub.” We live in a small town. “Yeah, how did he hear?” “He’s a member, he’ll be there.” She says he’s looking forward to my talk on “Obama and US/Danish foreign policy.” I'll be making most of it up over the next few days. Then she says I should really get in good with them because they fund all the exchange student programs to the US for the local high school kids. She’s obviously thinking ahead. But I don’t need my kids doing an exchange student program to the US. I figured summers with their uncle in Texas, an Austin bartender, should give them all the cultural exchange they’ll ever need. Besides, most of the European kids who've done the exchange trip tell me horror stories of being stuck with fundamentalist Christians or no dancing Mormons, or worse. A summer with Uncle Scott could save the kids from such a risk. He could tell them stories instead of our own born again Catholic childhood over a few cold Shiner Bocks at his Congress St. bar. Mama aint hearin it. Fuck, I gotta do this damn gig.

After Camilla walked on, I surfed over to Bageant’s blog, thinking I might pick up a rhetorical bomb to throw out at this group of unsuspecting civic business heroes next week. Instead, I got sucked into today’s “letter to Joe.” I didn’t find anything too clever to add to my PowerPoint presentation. However, reading his pessimistic reply to Carol’s gloomy letter our garden, and this morning’s apple harvest came back into focus. Bageant doesn't hold out much hope for social movements or grassroots politics. But he does offer a theory of resistance:

However, I do believe that rediscovering the natural self and truly discovering that there is a whole wide world outside the national hallucination liberates the individual and pokes a stick in the eye of authority. Admittedly a small one, but if there are enough of them. A liberated individual does not consume very much, nor succumbs to the sales job that permeates our consumer society, and therefore does not own or purchase very much. Nor pay many taxes, since he or she does not need to earn anything near the national average, being the worst kind of rogue imaginable by the state -- the rogue non-consumer.

This is as good a reflection as any of my philosophy (and desire) of colony gardening and its potential for liberation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in Self-Reliance, "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." It’s the kind of Thoreauvian economic logic I strive for at brief interludes during the day but forget once I’m home, falling asleep to re-runs of Camilla's Desperate Housewives. Yes, I too am in danger of becoming a desperate housewife! What would would Emerson say about that? I know Thoreau disapproves. I’m probably as consumer rogue as Sara Palin’s lipstick. But hell I’m trying. And the man aint gettin a dime of juice money from me this year! Resistance is not futile.