onwards, christian soldiers.

The national geographic article everyone's staking positions on. Up in arms,

In his letter to Johns, Hoeven said the article was "way off the mark." He urged its editors back to the state to report on North Dakota's growing economy, well-educated citizens, solid infrastructure and clean environment.

John's responded that the article "was never intended to be an in-depth look at the economy of North Dakota, nor were we attempting to offer a portrayal of the state in its entirety. We were looking at the rural North Dakota landscape and probing the stories behind some of the abandoned homes that still stand." (star tribune)

vigilante defensives have no qualms talking about nodak's 'growing economy' in the same firebreath as they wonder why kids these days have become either drunk outward emigrants (ahem) or listless locals drinking their way towards useless college degrees. what if these might be, shock, sewn and reaped from the very same sensibly warm cloth? but this one won't keep many of us warm in a blizzard.

it's the one in which tin roof cesspool hog farms and monstrous mechanics and a biodiversity as white as the asses of 92.3% of the population have been ordained the law of the ever-eroding land. the one in which our our agri-culture is "based as much on petroleum as on the soil...[in which] we need petrolem exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat (berry). in which we funnel subsidies (out of every one of our paychecks) to the biggest and most exploitive. in which we pour poison directly onto food (wtf?), call it intellectual property, ship it directly out of the state, and then drive over to the golden corral™ to eat a steak that was raised in argentina.

the grain being harvested next to the tracks will be moved out of the lankin area by those same tracks. next stop panama!

we shit where we eat but we don't eat what we grow. and we're cocksure that linear productivity and incessant, unexamined technological 'innovation' is the only road to the future. the ditches of this road are littered with massively displaced and disoriented people who are, in this cosmos, just slow, lousily obsolete machines. so afraid of our capacities as human animals, experts tell us we are unable to do things for ourselves and then we pay them to do those things for us. women are scared to push out the very babies they grew themselves and hire surgical specialists who are paid hansomely to reinforce this. we are terrified of the social implications and raised eyebrows that come from learning for ourselves so we take out massive loans to sit in classrooms. and we're all to blame, this isn't just oppressor and oppressed. every one of us is implicated in burning up our world and freezing each other out of our relationships with one another. i paralyze myself with fear over the future and forget how delicious this very instant is. but we're also double agents. we do things to prop up the status quo while at the same time doing things to break it down. i'm complicit in treating people like broken machines who need $25 tabs of aspirin by working in the hospital, but i also surreptitiously guard the door as women take off their monitors so they don't have to be tied down to a hospital bed in labor.

so, what do we do? who knows! but a good start is to quit treating the 'economy' as some prideful mythical creature that must always grow, or like a clitoris needing constant stimulus. (we should, of course, be focusing on real clits instead). the 'economy' does not take into account the real-life costs of anything, especially the (non-monetary) costs of displacement of people from their farms or towns or sub-prime mortgaged homes or their countries for that matter. it's a measure of complete unsustainability.

start embracing possibilities that are excluded from dominant arrangements. constantly try to make one thing that you currently buy, learn one thing that you don't currently know, look at one viewpoint that you don't currently look at, get awkward. eat real-live food that was grown close to you or grow it yourself. get a good parka and get a bus pass, get a bike, take a walk. i hear there are some nice food coops out there, perhaps even in dead-and-dying North Dakota :). start thinking about things as being parts of the cycles that they are. one thing never ever stands alone, and seeing this can help delineate the effects that we have on everything else, including each other. don't think that health has ever been something you get from a 'healthcare professional', but notice how health is part of that whole cycle-wholeness, and it most definitely includes other people, the land, and other creatures, kum-bah-yah. nobody's got it perfect, but that's exactly because we can't control everything and should not even be arrogant enough to try (and goddess knows i try).

if we're part of everything else, then our current agricultural practices (and most of our large-scale actions) are suicide. national geographic was not way off the mark, and we all know it even if we don't want to see pictures of it in a large national publication. they're right about the 'irreversible' thing; cheap oil and changing mobility have changed the landscape forever, starting with allowing for the movement of europeans onto the land in the first place. the secret is that landscapes constantly change, everything does. but for many, the change that is brought by our collective charging onwards, by train or tractor, can be a lonely prospect, especially on an empty prairie:

[T]he man walked the tracks each day for the two miles into town, did this year after year. One day he apparently did not hear the train and was killed. Bjella pauses, lets the tale float almost weightlessly in the air with its whisper of suicide. Self-destruction is not a forbidden subject in North Dakota, and people easily tick off cases in their neighborhoods. One woman came across a death book compiled in the early decades of the 20th century. She says the records show a remarkable number of people killed by trains. (link)

trust me
you can hear a train coming on the prairie
a mealed muscled scream charged air
generations ears to the ground steel gallop full bore

broke down busted
how much despair dares
nostalgia, utopia, boomtown
big-agro diaspora
step over the ties that bind to the place
cattle catcher aimed for the center of the face