“I have an affinity for machinery,” confesses farmer John Peterson in Angelic Organics Farm News (August 27). “One machine can sometimes do the work of twenty laborers. It will never sneak out of the field in the middle of the morning for a nap. It’s usually where I left it. If it breaks I can almost always fix it. And I’ve never seen a drunk chisel plow. On the other hand, the 656 Farmall tractor has never made me lunch, I’ve never flirted with the wheel hoe, and I’ve never enjoyed an Amazake White Russian with the tiller.”
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“This is a nation in which every driver stuck in a traffic jam thinks that it’s everybody else’s cars causing the tie-up,” writes James Krohe Jr., reviewing Anthony Downs’s book New Visions for Metropolitan America in the farewell issue of Chicago Enterprise (September/October). “Before cities can improve, Downs says, in effect, people must improve–be more thoughtful, more generous, less afraid, better. That is not a new vision, but an old daydream.”
“Clinton’s perfidy on issues of social justice and racial equality puts the [Congressional Black] Caucus in a situation comparable to that which faced black Republicans after Reconstruction,” reflects Northwestern’s Adolph Reed Jr. in the Progressive (October). Clinton’s “staging of photo-ops at black churches and his fawning over black homicide victims’ families to sell his draconian crime bill bring to mind J.K. Vardaman’s and Ben Tillman’s insistence a hundred years ago that disfranchisement and Jim Crow were good for black Mississippians and South Carolinians….I am haunted by the image of the last cohort of black Southern state legislators waiting to be driven out of office after the restoration of white supremacy a century ago. Their pathetic efforts to fashion compromises with an increasingly obdurate tyranny are a poignant reminder that at times the greatest danger lies in not standing on principle.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Carl Kock.
