A new phrase: 'ICE tax'

 My newspaper reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, arrested 2,250 people in Georgia in July, a 50 percent increase over June. On the same day agency officials were bragging about their public service, I heard the expression “ICE tax.”

The phrase, which was new to me, refers to the hidden costs people pay because of the intimidation of mass arrests and deportations.

A lot of the agricultural workers in the South and Southwest are from Mexico. The pay is borderline, and ICE agents are viewed like sicarios, the enforcers for the cartels. If you’re a migrant worker weighing costs and benefits, you might decide the annual trip north is just not worth it.

It’s apparently surprised some American farmers that they have not been overrun by local folks who want to work in the heat harvesting crops.

Farmers, who are already paying disastrous fuel prices because of a disastrous war, are having to pay higher wages. The higher costs are showing up at the supermarket.

It’s not just agricultural workers. A lot of the people working for low wages at nursing homes and at construction sites are also from Mexico. The homebuilding industry is slowing down in some areas. Nursing homes are raising rates.

I wonder whether the new phrase will catch on.

• Source: I’m not sure who coined the phrase, but an advocacy group called America’s Voice used it in a report mentioned here:

https://americasvoice.org/press_releases/watch-lawmakers-an-economist-and-a-care-worker-sound-the-alarm-on-the-ice-tax-hitting-southwestern-families/

So long, hummingbirds

 Fewer hummingbirds are at our feeders. August was such a frenzy I found myself just barely able to watch from my easy chair. It’s feeling you get from watching a nailbiter of a ballgame from the bleachers.

Terry Johnson, a fine naturalist who lives in Central Georgia, said the Ruby-throated hummingbirds go in waves — the males leaving as early as July, the females going next, and this year’s birds going last. 

Most of us know that the birds mobbed the feeders to store up fuel for the migration southwest, crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

Johnson had the numbers: During the feeding frenzy, the weight of the average female increases from 3.5 grams to 5.5. Each gram of fat can be converted into about 300 miles.

I have been trying to imagine it — what a 57 percent change in weight would be like. The gain in a few weeks. The loss in a few days.

'The Problem of Tobacco'

 Wendell Berry, who taught English at the University of Kentucky, was probably the state’s most famous farmer. He argued with the dean of the university’s agriculture school.

The dean was right about some things: Berry used draft horses and other “primitive” methods. If every farmer adapted those methods tomorrow, American farmers couldn’t feed the American people.

I think that’s true, but I’m sure it misses the point. Berry’s point was that we humans had better adopt a way of agriculture that doesn’t poison and destroy the earth.

That’s what right about his defense of “primitive” farming methods. And it’s what’s wrong with his defense of tobacco.

Berry said some things about tobacco that are true but that contradict the argument he made everywhere else. We humans badly need an agriculture that doesn’t poison the earth and doesn’t kill other plants and animals. “Animals” should be taken broadly, to include us.

If we humans are going to develop a better way of growing our food that does less damage to the earth and its creatures, we ought to stop growing crops that poison us. Tobacco is addictive and carcinogenic. It’s poison.

It you’re curious about Berry’s arguments, I’ve including a link below. He says a lot of things about the economics of farming, the policies behind federal agricultural programs and about free choice involving legal products that might interest you.

But the arguments just make me mad. Part of that is because Berry and I share a heritage.

The South has always been a peculiar place and part of that off-kilter quality is because it buys into arguments like this.

In colonial days, at least some people knew that slavery was wrong. But “respectable” people — people with money, people in pulpits, people in banks — raised grave concerns about the economy and the structure of society.

When I was a boy, people in the South knew that Jim Crow was wrong, that denying human rights to human beings was outrageously wrong. But “respectable” people raised grave concerns about the economy and social structure. It made me mad then — and makes me mad now.

It made me mad that the region’s writers peddled these arguments. It made me mad enough to start writing for perhaps the smallest daily newspaper in Texas. I wasn’t trying to change the world. I wanted to try to influence a small community that included the family farm.

I think Wendell Berry was wrong about tobacco. But I know he was right about the larger argument: We’ve got to stop poisoning the earth — and its creatures — as we go about the business of growing something to eat.

I think Berry is one of the most important thinkers and writers of my lifetime. I’ll continue to read him. I don’t think he was perfect.

• Source: You can find Wendell Berry’s essay “The Problem of Tobacco” here:

https://www.kerrykkuehn.com/resources/large/berry_tobacco.pdf

And thanks, Michael, for the nudge.

‘A Timbered Choir’

 Yesterday’s note was on Wendell Berry’s collection of Sabbath poems, A Timbered Choir. I’m not sure you’d enjoy it, but I thought I’d give you some samples so you could see what kind of book it is.

My favorite poem is just four lines, and I’ve quoted it before:

 

Best of any song

is bird song

in the quiet, but first

you must have the quiet.

 

I’ve written essays about why I am, by profession, a woods walker. Berry got it in 17 words.

Some of Berry’s poems always provoke a personal reaction — that is, they get to me in a way they might not get to you. Berry, while walking the woods on Sunday mornings, sometimes mused about his work as a writer.

 

I would not have been a poet

except that I have been in love

alive in this mortal world,

or any essayist except that I

have been bewildered or afraid …

 

I read those lines and knew in my bones I was an essayist, though newspaper people call them columnists.

Finally, there is no level ground in the Geogia Piedmont. The Wise Woman and I live on a slope with a woodlot and a garden on terraces made by hand with a shovel and crowbar.

 

We keep an old way

In light and breath to stay

This household on its slope.

 

Berry wrote more than 50 books. I’ve admired his essays on agriculture and rural life, his long essay on American racism and his short stories. But if I were looking for a place to start on this wonderful American writer, it’d be A Timbered Choir.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, pp. 207, 182, 128.

Where no path is worn

 I think of Wendell Berry as an essayist, but I tend to read his poetry. 

He made it a practice to spend Sunday mornings in the woods, just being quiet and listening. A Timbered Choiris a collection of his Sabbath poems from 1979 to 1997. Here’s the beginning of II from 1979: 

 

Another Sunday morning comes

And I resume the standing Sabbath

Of the woods, where the finest blooms

Of time return, and where no path

 

Is worn but wears its makers out

At last, and disappears in leaves

Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut

Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

 

In the risen season. Past life lives

In the living.

 

Berry called himself an amateur poet. He said he did the work for the love of the work to his own satisfaction. Those were two of the conditions of self-employment, he said.

I’m not a poet. But, like Berry, I’m a self-employed woods walker. And like Berry, I sometimes find that my mind seems open and aware for a moment. I see things that I had overlooked — those “finest blooms” that I previously had been in too much of a hurry to see.

I get a whiff of what these poems are about. I tend to come back to them. I can’t imagine a spiritual life that doesn’t grow out of the natural world.

• Source: Wendell Berry, A Timbered Choir; Berkeley, Calif.: Centerpoint, 1998, p. 6.

Wendell Berry, 1934 – 2026

 Wendell Berry was the kind of fellow who hated to go anywhere without his pocketknife or his dog. He was the kind of fellow who spoke to me, the kind of writer I read.

News of any death is sad. But I’m grateful that such a writer lived in our lifetime. The landscapes he saw are the landscapes in front of us now. We can see them, appreciate them and conserve them. Or we can, as we are apt to do, see nothing much at all.

I’m going to be reading Berry for bit. I think I’ll start with A Timbered Choir.

Thoreau and the publishing world

 A recurring theme: I’m trying to think about writing — not the craft of writing but the part that comes before it.

Imagine Henry David Thoreau at 25, being told by everyone that he really should find a career. He’s got a degree from Harvard, though he often wonders what it’s for. He’s tried keeping a school. There had been more spectacular failures, one can suppose.

He worked for Emerson for a while, and the great man got him a gig tutoring a nephew. Ralph Waldo’s brother William was a businessman on Staten Island, close enough to give Thoreau a gateway to the publishing world of New York.

The problem, in 1843, was there wasn’t much of a publishing world.

Poe was scraping by, barely, with poetry and short fiction. Longfellow was publishing poetry, but it’d be another decade before he felt he could leave his teaching job and focus on writing.

Can you imagine Thoreau trying to write for a market? Doing a knockoff or cover of one of Poe’s horror stories, for example? Or a long poem narrating the exploits of a Revolutionary War hero?

No one was writing the kind of thing that Thoreau wanted to write. He was interested in the question of the best way to live. He wanted to conduct tests and trials — to travel on rivers or hike across Cape Cod or maybe live in a cabin at Walden Pond — and report on the experiences. What could he learn? What could he convey to friends and readers?

That’s a vital bit of knowledge, finding out what it is that you want to do. Thoreau wasn’t clear when he left college.

He was clearer after seeing the glittering publishing world of New York. By seeing what was there, he got a better sense of what he didn’t want to do. And it wasn’t long before he began thinking about books that contained reports of his investigations and what he’d learned.

• Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau; Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. 128-49.