Herd About It?
by Ana Agrarian
I have just finished reading “Praise for the Wisdom of the Last Farmer” by David Mas Masumoto. This is a beautiful book and a joy to read. David is a small organic fruit farmer in California. His grandfathers emigrated to the US from family farms in Japan, in the late 1890’s. In the US at that time alien land laws prevented nonnative-born Asians from owning land. So they worked hard for other farmers, saving their money, and dreaming of the time when their sons could buy a farm. They survived the Great Depression.
Then in December of 1941 Pearl Harbor was bombed and Japanese immigrants and American born Japanese were interned in “relocation camps” and their property confiscated. The dream was brutally postponed again.
In 1950 David’s father bought a farm in California’s Central Valley. After the war was over, when he returned from the Army (yes, as his family lived in the internment camps, he and his brother, and many other young Japanese, enlisted or were drafted into the Army of their new country) he first rented land and then bought what would become his legacy. Grandfather was happy but Grandmother fretted saying “why gamble when they can take it all away?” Her bitterness over the internment and the loss of her older son in the war was a hard thing to overcome. At first she refused to go, but eventually she supplied as necessary a part of the farm work as any of the men.
David acknowledges the difficulties his family has gone through. The unfairness in the early years. The difficulty of running a small farm first with the prejudice against Japanese and later as modern business practices demanded fruit with less flavor but greater resistance to damage while being stored and shipped over long distances.
Last Farmer acknowledges those difficulties but it is not about them. This is a love song. A love song to the wisdom of the last farmer, or previous farmer, his father. It is a song about lessons learned and the patience in which they were applied. David’s father had a stroke and David became the “man in charge” before he was ready. This book is a ballad of the way he and his father learned to farm together then, and the lessons he’s learned from the soil. It is a hope that he will also become a wise farmer and be able to pass that wisdom on to his daughter and to show the same patience as she learns. her way to farm.
This book reminds us why, in the long run we care so much about our farms and farmers. Why we do it, when we feel unappreciated and under the gun, and so tired at the end of the day. It is because the land and our heritage speak to us.
This is a great cartoon. The GOP is,indeed the Party of Death.
http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/ indicates more than 1.3 million Iraqis died since Bush invaded Iraq.
Perhaps reply linked to the wrong column?
Thanks for the link, Eric, but I think Ana’s right. Good piece, Ana, if sad. After all, German-Americans who had been in the American Bundt before WWII were never rounded up and confined as potential spies.
I was commenting on the Party of Death graphic. My comments were cross posted. Sorry.
I am aware of both the Japanese Internment and the American Bund movement. One of the Bund leaders was prosecuted for tax evasion, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund.
There was also a Business Plot (also the Plot Against FDR and the White House Putsch) was a reported political conspiracy in 1933 which involved wealthy businessmen plotting a coup d’état to overthrow United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934 retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified to the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional committee that a group of men had approached him as part of a plot to overthrow Roosevelt in a coup.See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
This was also the era where The Family and the C Streeters got their start. Abraham Vereide, a Christo-fascist, stated The Family and the National Prayer Breakfast.
You may want to read an article I posted yesterday about a battle in which the Russians stopped the Japanese in Mongolia. http://rightardia.blogspot.com/2009/08/decisive-battle-of-khalkhin-gol.html This caused the Japanese to change their strategy from the North to the South and led to the eventual attack on Pearl Harbor.
I suspect the reason the Bund Nazis weren’t rounded up was because they were white. There were many people in the GOP in the 1930 who were sympathetic to the Nazi movement and wanted the US to stay out of the war. For example, GOP Sen. Prescott Bush had some big business investments in Germany that survived the war.
We brought a lot of Nazis to the US after the war and many became active in the GOP. See http://www.bartcop.com/nazigop.htm
Thanks for the in depth reply Eric. Some of this I was aware of (I just read The Family about C Street), and some I wasn’t. Thanks for the links to dig deeper.
I think too that Germans – although distrusted and discriminated upon individually – were not rounded up because they were northern european. Similarly I doubt we would have gone to war with say -Scotland- if Osama had been operating from there instead of Afghanistan. Of course that would have been a harder jumping off point to Iraq too.
Just to pick up on your Scotland comment, it’s incredible that these right-wing ifiots calling themselves ‘terrorists’ and brandishing guns are not being detained for questioning. It may be because a majority of law enforcement agrees with them, but you know damn well that if a black or Hispanic guy showed up at a Bush event armed with a semi-automatic weapon, or said outloud he was a terrorist, he’d be cooling his heels in jail, and probably beaten to a pulp first.
Let me add my thanks as well for your reply and those links, Eric. It’s always nice to read comments by people like you and Ana who know what you’re talking about.