By James Kanady
Pissed Again
I grew up in Pratt, graduated as a Fighting Frog, and then two years at Pratt JUCO (where I morphed into a Beaver) before I migrated to Austin, Texas, to attend the University of Texas at Austin. My world became huge. Influences abounded. I grew up as a reader, but good Lord, Austin was this book lover’s dream.
It was there where I learned about a man named Wendell Berry, who passed away on Aug. 31. I knew he was a farmer in Kentucky, an essayist, novelist, poet, and a defender of communities, proper land use, and right human relations. “The Unsettling of America—Culture & Agriculture” was the first book of his I ever bought in 1978. I became hooked. On my bookshelf in my home office now are 39 of his books. He stated his aim in Unsettling early on: (1) to show how deeply rooted in our past is the mentality of exploitation; (2) to show how fundamentally revolutionary it is; and (3) to show how crucial to our history—hence, to our own minds—is the question of how we will relate to our land. This question, now that the corporate revolution has so determinedly invaded the farmland, returns us to our oldest crisis.
And, man, did he ever show it. The relationship between people and the land was his focus, his life. Of Berry, Cactus Edward Abbey wrote that he is not only a good novelist and poet, but a brilliant essayist, able to combine clear thinking, strong language, and comprehensive ideas in a sure, graceful, wholly unified style.
That is exactly what sucked me into Berry’s vortex. His craft was honed during his time as a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University along with a who’s who of amazing writers: Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Gains, and Ken Kesey. He turned his back on academia in favor of a life devoted to his farm and family near Lane’s Landing, Ky.
I was so nonplused by the time I finished “Unsettling,” I backtracked and absorbed “The Hidden Wound,” “The Long-Legged House,” and “A Continuous Harmony;” and his novels, “Nathan Coulter,” “A Place on Earth,” and “The Memory of Old Jack.” From that point, whenever a new Wendell was published, I gobbled it up as if sustenance, which is what all his books are to my soul and spirit.
Maybe someday humans will wake up and act on what Wendell dedicated his life to, but it won’t be in the year of our Lord, 2026. The same forces Wendell has battled his entire life have grown and multiplied in the last 10 years, and are even more rapacious than ever. Our elected rulers are sycophants, handmaidens to power, grift, and amassing ever more resources. Their level of inhumanity is truly criminal at this point. They are sucking the wealth out of this nation and leaving devastation.
Wendell knew what is painfully obvious: billionaires do not give a damn for anyone not in their club. And if you question their authority, oh, you are woke, a communist, and for God’s sake, a Liberal. You are as much of an “other” as immigrants, women, blacks, Hispanics, Haitians, aw, hell, anybody not them, and by virtue of that, you are an enemy to their aims.
I urge you to seek out and grab Wendell’s books with both arms. If for no other reason than to compare his wise remedies with the narrow acts of the people in power. Wendell knew what the great southern writer, Rick Bragg knows … it all boils down to class:
Class is hard, because if you really start talking
about inequality, all of a sudden you have to
ask yourself where your own f—king trust fund
came from. Where did your wealth come from? Well,
more than likely it came from squeezing those people.
It came from making them work in heat no human
being should have to endure. It came from making
their mothers and fathers work in sweatshops in New
Jersey. It came from making miners in northeast Alabama
work in holes barely big enough for a dog to fit in. When
has wealth ever come in a pure and honest, clean and decent
way? More likely, people got squeezed at the neck somewhere
down the line.
Wendell Berry knew this. Read him.
Please!
James Kanady is the resource/program development advisor and creator of special projects for New Beginnings in Hutchinson. He is a published author and avid reader.