The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
Oliver Goldsmith was writing his poem 'The Deserted Village' in 1770, probably at almost exactly the same time James Cook was setting eyes on the east coast of Australia and wondering about its farming potential.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay ...
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied
In the England that Goldsmith was writing about, big landholders, through mechanisms such as enclosures, were throwing small farmers off the land . In the cities the rich were getting richer and richer, in part as a consequence of the industrial revolution which was gathering pace. The gap between rich and poor was widening as the rich got richer and the poor had been left behind - reduced to agricultural labouring or poor wages in the new factories. The backbone of old England - the yeoman farmers each with their own farm forming the support of the local village - was being rapidly lost, and the result was Goldsmith's diagnosis that what was being lost was being lost forever, and the land would not fare well. Hard to believe that 237 years later, in the country that, unknown to Goldsmith, was being discovered as he wrote, the same pattern of events would occur with the same results.
In Australia in 2007 huge agri-businesses are rapidly replacing family farms and there are few if any opportunities for young people to continue on the land. Villages and towns in rural areas are faltering - rural populations fall and big companies (and governments) withdraw services. Deserted villages can't be far away. Meanwhile in the cities, artificial wealth creation through property, takeovers, consolidations, outsourcing, asset stripping, and private equity piracy, all serve to make a handful of people very rich indeed. At the same time new workplace laws (mustn't say 'work choices', mustn't) ensure that wages and conditions will gradually fall for the poor all over Australia. A growing gap between rich and poor, and a growing divide between the rich of the cities and the poor of the country. How could John Howard say late last year - The country overall is still doing very well (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/36204/)? A country in which farming is going downhill can never be 'doing well', no matter how rich some individuals and corporations become in the cities.
And over the top of all that, the government's decision to continue to support coal mining and the oil industry instead of agriculture, through its refusal to act on global warming, means that once rich farming areas are going to become uninhabitable non-farming areas within a few decades at most. Oliver Goldsmith didn't know that the industrial revolution, getting underway and causing some of the ills he observed, would ultimately result in the global warming that now has a stranglehold on Australian farmers. 'Ill fares the land' indeed!
Just like TS Eliot here I am, an old man in a dry month, being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. While you wait with me, check out the contents of a category on this blog, or have a browse through recent entries, or try the lucky dip of the quotes on the left.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)