Sows, Cows, Chicken Runs, And American Politicians - The False Idyll Of The Farm And The Real Idyll Of Power

America has become decidedly urban.  The percentage of Americans living in rural areas is barely twenty-five percent.  Yet  the legacy of the farm, the bucolic, unhindered, idyllic life lingers on.  'Family values', that oft-cited foundation of America - multi-generational living together, sharing in the milking, the plowing, and the feeding; eating hearty breakfasts together after grace; a devout religious faith, a patriotism, and love of land and country - has always been the heart and soul of American politics. 

Whether that life still exists, or whether it ever did, makes no difference.  It must have at one time, and the spirit still linger on.  It is that spirit of wholesomeness, piety, and good neighborliness which keeps American's heads up.  Who wouldn't think of morning in Bolivar, Ohio, the sun rising over the cornfields, the cows lowing in the pasture, the cluck of chickens down from the roost when cities are in flames?

Or at least they seem to be.  Hiram Pickens was from Bolivar, a small farm community in Ohio's farmland, and grew up believing that this was what God intended.  While he didn't romanticize the life - tractor payments were sometimes hard to find, Fall rains had ruined much of last year's wheat harvest, an encephalitic virus hit the pigs, and his father had to take out a second mortgage to fix the roof - it was all in all the right way. 

 

He had met, courted, and married his childhood sweetheart, the daughter of a neighboring farmer, a sweet, blonde, cornflower blue-eyed, simple girl whom he had first noticed in church, sitting in the pew in front of him.  She sang Hymn 42 as though the Angel Gabriel himself was the choirmaster, her eyes bright and tearful at the passion of Christ.  She wore a white organza dress, her hair curled and tied with blue ribbons, she was fresh from her bath, and she was everything that the young Hiram had ever dreamed of. 

They settled in the community, too young to buy a farm and too youthful to settle down.  As much as their family and their history was in Bolivar, their youthful, romantic vision won the day.  They would see the world.  They would make a difference. 

Hiram had gone to a small, vocational school in Findlay and Laura Dean had gone to the teachers' college in Lima; but neither education had given them any direction, any purpose, or any meaning.  They both felt as aimless as they were when they entered.  

The farm beckoned.  They were welcome at either family's farm and both sets of parents were hopeful that they would do so, but it didn't feel right. For all their love of farm life, there had to be something else out there. 

As it is with most ambitious farm boys, Hiram hooked his wagon to a star, no different from Bill Clinton, an Arkansas cracker who drove a local politician around until he was noticed, given favors, and using them made his way to the statehouse and Washington.  

Hiram's star was Alphonse B. Wheeler, a conservative firebrand serving in the legislature but with Congress written all over him.  Wheeler was a master politician, homespun and gifted with a silver tongue so eloquent that he could charm farmers from Polly's Junction to Chillicothe. They listened enraptured when he spoke, invoking God, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers and thundering against the socialists in Washington  who were bound and determined to upset the very motherlode of propriety.

 

So as Hiram advanced from gofer to driver to aide de camp to political aide, he learned and grew to embrace the political fundamentalism of his mentor; and when he was asked by Wheeler to speak to a group of young farmers, he was more than up to the task.  He was at times heartfelt, at others charming, and at still others prophetic.  He had a natural talent for conviction, and although at times he saw himself as a mountebank or a vaudevillian, he knew that this God-given ability to elicit smiles, nods, eagerness, and commitment was his meal ticket. 

Hiram came by this skill quite naturally.  Rural America had always been the home of snake oil salesmen, shell game artists, con men, tricksters, and preachers.  It was a caveat emptor land where the buyer was a credulous, naive, and desperately hopeful rube who had no chance against men like Hiram who had the gift. 

 

While he believed in his message - the creeping rot of socialism - he was more energized by his ability to win hearts and minds, to get people to do his bidding, to follow him wherever he led.  He felt anointed, not with any actual oil of truth, but with pure and absolute power. Of course he would use this power responsibly and never lead people down a primrose path which led to thorns and brambles, but soon enough the exhilaration of command was overpowering and became and end in and of itself. 

'Come walk with me', his father said on a Sunday visit by his boy to the farm; and the two of them strolled through the barnyard, past the milking shed, the pig stye, and the chicken run.  The smells were evocative and overpowering.  The lure of the farm was inescapable. 

'This is where I come from', thought Hiram fondly but with a circumspection he had never experienced before.  Family values - what exactly were they other than economic constructs to keep a farm family intact?  Without the ideal of Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen, fidelity, hard work, and persistence, the farm would go under, lost and forgotten.   There was no nobility in manual labor, no dignity in getting up with the sun, no honor in reaping the harvest.  Only donkey work.  His father was the animal at the wrong end of the plow. 

He had been sold a bill of goods.  Farm life was one of backbreaking labor, penury, and economic servitude.  There was nothing special or extraordinary about a rural existence, nothing particularly meaningful.  It was a type of existence as governed by economic principles as any other.  'Man is an economic animal', said Marx, a being governed by supply and demand, labor and capital, dollars and cents in every aspect of his life. 

 

Yet childhood has staying power, and as much as he denied it on his way to the political holy land, he could not.  Bolivar was him, not K Street and the Capitol.  He was a farm boy and always would be; but like any ambitious politician especially one with The Gift, the ties that bind loosened and he became a man's man, houses in St. Bart's and Rimini, attractive women in his harem, fabulous wealth, status, and influence.  Now this is what it's all about, he thought as he sailed one fine day from Anguilla to Barbados.

Are politics that corrupting? That transformative? That overpowering? Yes, but not because of politics but because of America - not family values, but acquisition, the hearthstone of human nature.  America is still a Wild West country less because of history and tradition than the double helix.  The little pockets of complaisance - the Bolivar farm - act as counterpoints to the real ethos of the country, doing Nature's bidding. 

The farm, Laura Dean, his childhood, and the family values of Bolivar, Ohio stayed put until plowed under while he plowed his own furrows, reaped a fortune of his own, and never looked back.