Are You Really Better Off Leaving Agrarians?

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio & Transcript – The agrarian model has just been poo-pooed and totally denigrated.  It has now been relegated to if you’re an agrarian, you’re usually a mass murderer now.  You show up in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in some horror film.  You’re tending to your corn as cover for all the children and people you butcher and suck down into the ground and what have you.  Are you really better off? Check out today’s audio clip and transcript for more…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The second thing that occurs to me is that during the industrial revolution and during the conversion of the agrarian piece of crap model of living in favor of the everyone getting an automobile, mass manufactured, and drive 50, 60, 70, 90 miles away from your home and go make something else, in favor of that.  We were basically told, and we have been assured pretty much for the majority of that revolution, that we were so much better off.  We improved our quality and standards of living and people were better off.  Incomes were rising and all that stuff.  The agrarian model has just been poo-pooed and totally denigrated.  It has now been relegated to if you’re an agrarian, you’re usually a mass murderer now.  You show up in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or in some horror film.  You’re tending to your corn as cover for all the children and people you butcher and suck down into the ground and what have you.  Are you really better off?
The thought occurred to me yesterday as I was on the way to the reFounding Fathers Society meeting last night at the 407 North.  There will be another one the third Thursday in May for southeast Louisiana, who can’t seem to find the time to commiserate with their local [r]epublicans these days.  It occurred to me as I saw traffic lines 300, 350 cars long, that what are all these people doing?  What are we doing?  This idea, this whole thing, you sit in traffic.  I think a traveler from the past would look at this and think there was something seriously mentally wrong with us.  Someone may come from the past and say, “Let me see if I understand this.  You guys get into those little boxes and you spend 20 percent of your time there on your way to go to work?  Wouldn’t it be better to maybe live where you work or work where you live?”

Just a consideration of it — of course, if you bring it up, [mocking] “What, do you want to go back to fields of dreams and what have you?”  I don’t know, but it seems to me that simple solutions, or simple even propositions, are just rejected out of hand in favor of the science of economics.  The science of economics can fix everything.  We can science our way out of this.  We can formula our way out of it.  Maybe someone can help me out here.  Inform me of a modern media miracle where country folks, farmers, are not mass murderers.  AG, have you seen my recent most famous horrible movie, Albino Farm?

AG:  Wait a second, can you go over that again?

Mike:  Oh, God, have mercy.  Lord, forgive me.  Albino Farm is just what I’m talking about, a bunch of city slicker, do-good kids from some university doing a research project on mutants that are cannibals.  They go in search of said mutants and of course they find farming folks out in the middle of nowhere.  And of course, all farmers are mutated, three eyes, extended mouths, four hands, what have you.  Yes, they are cannibals.  If you drive through their town, they kidnap you, they eat you, and then they tow your car over to the junkyard so it looks like it’s a thriving junkyard.  This is about the plot here.  This has been rinsed and repeated about 20,000 times in the last 20 years.
Farming, in other words actually doing what had to be done for 30,000 years since the last ice age to survive is now on par with Ted Bundy.  Farming is now on a par with Jeffrey Dahmer.  You’re a farmer.  You’re a toothless, worthless, hick, hayseed loser.  If you’re sitting in a car and you’re on your way to whatever appointment it may be and you’re running hither and yon and doing this, that and the other, you’re just bait for the farmer.  I don’t see the phone ringing.  Come on!

So Thomas Jefferson was an agrarian.  Sorry, he was.  John Taylor of Caroline was an agrarian.  James Madison was an agrarian.  George Washington was probably the biggest agrarian out of all of them.  You can’t be that because John Deere has replaced the need to be agrarian.  Has he?  Has he really?  Is communication with the earth that provides food for your table and care of it, is that really so disgusting and ripe with apprehension that we should all run quickly away from it as fast as we can, screaming for our lives?  Think about that for a moment.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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