The Golden Age

DuBois would want cowboys to die.

I came to this idea while reading, of all things, this week’s LARP book, which is on the fast food industry and it’s impact on America. Don’t be amazed that a LARP book could actually enter into an intellectual discussion, here; after all, I’m one of the people who picked the thing, and you know what a snob I am. There was a chapter on the beef industry, the slow conglomeration of cattle ranches into cow mega-complexes which then sell their bovine bounty to the major fast food chains and supermarkets, cutting out the little guy. You know, that bold rugged individual so idolized and beloved by the American mindset. The author, Eric Schlosser, a journalist for Atlantic Monthly, bemoaned the loss of this culture, this individual who was truly in touch with nature, and all the simple and elegant beauty the lone rancher represents.

This is the kind of romanticized nonsense I’d expect from a New England urbanite.

The glorious and rugged lifestyle that Schlosser places on a marble pedestal is fully revealed by DuBois. The breathtakingly poor men and women, who are held to the land not through affection but through desperation, work the soil as well as they can but are continually looked down on by society, or held down forcibly by richer individuals. To put it simply, these people are fucking miserable, living the lives of “quiet desperation” which Thoreau described even before W.E.B. came along.

When DuBois spoke of the greatness of higher education, and how it leads to the advancement of the human intellect, he meant it. He had no delusions about the reality of Washington’s life-model, working the land for nothing but profit. He wanted better for not only his people, but for mankind. And now that the manner of killing yourself for crop production is fading, and is left in the hands of the few instead of the many, leaving a greater majority of people to pursue higher ideals and goals, half-wits like Schlosser come along and shed tears over its loss. There’s nothing romantic about tilling soil. It’s a necessity, and as glad as I am that there are people around who are willing to do it (perhaps some of your familes are among them), I am even more glad that our nation produces a massive surplus of food with less farmland than has ever been used before, leaving the former farmers to become current collegiates. This is the progress DuBois spoke of. This is improvement.

I can’t say for sure if any of this is right, or if I even believe half of it. But I’m bothered that what DuBois would have called “advancement” in 1903 is today called “progress” with a cynical intonation by an individual who owes his New York Times bestseller status to the very same consumer culture which he is condemning. If the lifestyle of “quiet desperation” is dying in America, it’s because there’s something better standing beyond it.