CORPORAT
GOVERNMEN
THESIS
BIO
&
We live in a modern world filled with industrialization, and a government that is meant to protect the people. Instead it protects big corporations and constantly wages wars which not only ravages the land but the peoples individuality as well. This book examines this idea through selected works by Wendell Berry, and uses the collages to convey a sense of confusion this contradiction creates.
Written by David Skinker: For many of us, daily life is not an exercise in conviction. Our actions part ways from our ideals. In moments of weakness, we yield, like tall grass in a strong wind, to forces beyond our control. What others say, we accept. What happens to be on sale, we buy. What we actually think and believe is less a factor in how we live. At seventy-seven years old, Wendell Berry continues as a great contrary example to the compromises others take in stride. Instead of being at odds with his conscience, he is at odds with his times. Cheerful in dissent, he writes to document and defend what is being lost to the forces of modernization, and to explain how he lives and what he thinks. He is the sum of his beliefs. And those beliefs arise from a longstanding tradition most fully expressed in the American family farm, a self-sustaining economic enterprise that reinforced familial bonds and human obligations to the natural environment. The word husbandry, in his usage, combines the commitments of a spouse with the responsibilities of the farmer to his land and his animals. And what care the farmer bestows on the land and his livestock may even be reciprocated in due time.
COM OMI
HEL
MPR ISE,
LL!
do so.
the center of a town or city, and they routinely
sion can destroy a landscape or a community or
devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggres-
protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice
we need our state and national governments to
cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions,
Because as individuals or even as communities we
our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of
economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of
is a freedom that makes greed the dominant
the “free market” and “free enterprise,” but this
trators and their political abettors in the name of
Such damage is justified by its corporate perpe-
can afford to undersell them.
suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors
as big farmers and chain stores. They should not
economic justice,the same freedom in the market,
and the small merchant deserve the same
from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer
land and people to be protected against economic violence .
other people along with their communities and
livelihoods. There are such things as economic
minimize, either, the large responsibility that is
I don’t want to minimize that. But I don’t want to
our delusion and our destructiveness, and
e citizens have a large responsibility for
sufferances impossible to justify.
but also by public subsidies, incentives, and
public submission and regulatory malfeasance,
allowed them to be used against us, not just by
weapons of massive destruction. We have
W
borne by government.
to our land and our land’s people. Because of
energy and raw materials at an immense cost
corporations, yielding an immense wealth of
a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness
We have failed to acknowledge this threat and It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens to act in our own defense. As a result, our once beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been
individually cannot provide for themselves. But
governments have tended to assume that this
responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police
and the military services. They have used their
regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly.
small businesses by means of volume discounts
that failure also, our towns and cities have been Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned
against economic violence. It is true that economic
violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as
bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be
Febuary,
1968
2
In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war
s p r e a d i n g
, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.
W
e cannot immunize the continents and There is not a more exemplary history of our the oceans against our contempt for small contempt for small places than that of Eastern Kentucky coal mining, which has enriched many places and small streams. Small destructions add absentee corporate shareholders and left the up, and finally they are understood collectively region impoverished and defaced. Coal industry as large destructions. Excessive nutrient run off representatives are now defending mountain from farms and animal factories in the Mississippi removal and its attendant damage to forests, watershed has caused, in the Gulf of Mexico, a streams, wells, dwellings, roads,and community hypoxic or “dead zone” of five or six thousand life by saying that in”10, 15, 20 years” the land square miles. In forty-odd years, strip mining in will be restored, and that such mining has the Appalachian coal fields, culminating in “created the [level] land” needed for further industrial development.
mountain removal, has gone far toward the
destruction of a whole region, with untold
damage to the region’s people, to watersheds, and to the waters downstream.
But when you remove a mountain you also remove the topsoil and the forest, and you do immeasurable violence to the ecosystem and the watershed. These things are not to be restored in ten or twenty years, or in ten or twenty hundred years. As for the manufacture of level places for industrial development, the supply has already far exceeded any foreseeable demand. And the devastation continues.
CONTEMPT
FOR PLACES
SMALL
of a House
E BUILD IN
for the
To know the inhabiting reasons of trees and streams, old men who shed their lives on the world like leaves, I watch them go.
And I go. I build the place of my leaving.
The days arc into vision like fish leaping, their shining caught in the stream.
I watch them go in homage and sorrow.
I build the place of my dream.
I build the place of my leaving that the dark may come clean.
DAR
to know the
DAR
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by DARK FEET and DARK WINGS.
at
AWAKE NIGHT
Late in the night I pay the unrest lowe to the life that has never lived and cannot live now. What the world could be is my good dream and my agony when, dreaming it I lie awake and turn and look into the dark. I think of a luxury in the sturdiness and grace of necessary things, not III frivolity. That would heal the earth, and heal men. But the end, too, is part of the pattern, the last labor of the heart: to learn to lie still, one with the earth again, and
let the world go.
the highest point and had seen the six smokes
as it was, she could imagine it empty, windowless,
way it was. As easily as she could see the house
seem arbitrary and awry. Nothing had to be the
and far away, as if remembered from another
of the six houses rising straight up into the wide
the tin roof blowing away, the chimneys crum-
n a bright, still day in the late fall, after all
down falling light. She knew which smoke came
bling, the cellar caved in, weeds in the yard. She
world or another life. Her sickness made things
from which house. It was like watching the rising
could imagine Elton and herself gone, and the
the leaves were down, she had stood on
up of prayers or some less acknowledged commu-
O
nication between Earth and Heaven. She could
rest of them: Hardy, Hample, Cotman, and
Quail–gone too.
not say to herself how it made her feel.
She loved her jars of vegetables and preserves
on the cellar shelves, and the potato bin beneath,
the cured hams and shoulders and bacons hanging
in the smokehouse, the two hens already brooding
their clutches of marked eggs, the egg basket
and the cream bucket slowly filling, week after
week. But today these things seemed precious
A JONQUIL
MARY PENN
FOR
FAMILIAR
THE
The hand is risen from the earth, the sap risen, leaf come back to branch, bird to nest crotch. Beans lift their heads up in the row. The known returns to be known again. Going and coming back, it forms its curves,
a nerved ghostly anatomy in the air.
Other works by Wendell Berry: Fiction: Fidelity: Five Stories, 1992 Hannah Coulter, 2004 Jayber Crow, 2000 The Memory of Old Jack, 1974 Nathan Coulter, 1960 A Place on Earth, 1967 Remembering, 1988 That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 2004 Watch with Me and Six Other Stories of the Yet Remembered Ptolemy Proudfoot and His Wife, Miss Minnie, 1994 The Wild Birds: Six Stories of the Port William Membership, 1986 A World Lost, 1996
Poetry: The Broken Ground, 1964 Clearing, 1977 Collected Poems: 1951-1982, 1982 The Country of Marriage, 1973 Entries, 1994 Farming: A Hand Book, 1970 Given: New Poems, 2005 Openings, 1968 A Part, 1980 Sabbaths: Poems, 1987 Sayings and Doings, 1975 The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999 A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, 1998 The Wheel, 1982
Essays: Another Turn of the Crank, 1996 The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, 2002 Citizenship Papers, 2003 A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural & Agricultural, 1972 The Gift of Good Land, 1981 Harlan Hubbard: Life and Work, 1990 The Hidden Wound, 1970 Home Economics: Fourteen Essays, 1987 Life Is a Miracle, 2000 The Long-Legged House, 2004 Recollected Essays: 1965-1980, 1981 Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, 1992 Standing by Words, 1983 The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky’s Red River Gorge, 1971 The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 1977 What Are People For?, 1990
Works Cited: Berry, Wendell. Fidelity Five Stories. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992 Berry, Wendell. Collected Poems 1957-1982. New York: North Point Press; Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987 Berry, Wendell. The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays. Berkeley: Counter Point, 2005
Colophon: This book was designed by Nikolai Laba using Futura, provided texts, and found/made imagery for the collages. This book was made for the class Typography II at the Washington University in St. Louis in November of 2014.