Riley's Farm Journal

Riley's Farm Journal June 14-19, 2009

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:42:00 EST

Stupid I-Phone Tricks - June 14, 2009

We attended a home school high school graduation last night, and two different celebration parties afterwards. Mary volunteered to pick up a cake for one of the graduation moms and the Iphone GPS pointed us to a non-existent Sam's Club on Perris Blvd, a full 8 miles from its actual location. Borrowing the language of "Galaxy Quest," I kept doggedly advising Mary to allow the "little blue thingy" (indicating our position) to overtake "the little red thingy" (the non-existent Sam's Club). We bowed to this new technology right until...read more.

Pinning Hope on Beasts - June 15, 2009

It might work at birthday parties, but in real life, you would never pin a tail on a donkey, and you certainly wouldn't do it blindfolded. I've watched enough election cycles to know that is exactly what we do as voters. We pin our hopes on a candidate, or, even worse, a party, and we usually get kicked in the teeth. It doesn't matter if..read more...

Shaping Fate - June 16, 2009

One way of remembering the weddings of your life is to chronicle the roles you've played at them: guest, ring-bearer, usher, videographer, present-boy. All of those parts, even that of a guest, has a kind of peril attached to it. People want weddings to go just right, and what if you are the guy whose cell phone blares "La Bamba" right at the "husband and wife" moment? What if you stretch your legs at the wrong.. read more.

Heah, kids, gather 'round the set!
It's time for another episode of..

Customer Service in the
Post Christian World - June 17, 2009

I'm not in the habit of giving consumer financial tips, because I don't know what I'm talking about, but I will extend this advice with respect to dining out and credit cards: if the waiter makes a fishy mistake, have him void the ticket and give you a receipt for the void, then sign the corrected ticket. The other night, at a high concept restaurant called The Inquisition (not really), the waiter handed me a sub-total..read more.

Flat Out Gorgeous This Morning ..AND..
Four Riley's Farm Web Scripts - June 19, 2009

The farm is beyond beautiful this morning--a whole leafy-green salad field of strawberries out there, climbing red roses everywhere, grapes fattening up. You just have to see it... read more.

Summer, Town Crier, Weddings

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:16:00 EST

Jesse Blesch has started in on the painting of a signboard in the tavern that we're wildly excited about. When you walk into the public house, this week, you can see it being hand-lettered and I imagine over the next few weeks, you'll start to see the Hawk itself appearing feather by feather, hue by hue. Nothing beats that hand-painted-right-over-the-planks look. I just stand there and watch it sometimes.

Summer Day Camp is getting some pretty heavy bookings, but we keep getting requests for a week long overnight camp from the Orange County and San Diego parents--so, farm staff, if you're reading this, let's get together and plot it out. (As in today.)

The Strawberries are a' popping--big time. I think we had a lot of people anxious for cherries last weekend, but it was kind of nice to see the patch getting picked by LOTS of families last Saturday, and even a few here and there on a Monday. U-Pick Strawberries are a bargain family outing, and the new high fashion is thriftiness--so get hip. Pick a few strawberries.

All the really cool kids and moms take their dad to the Night Before Father's Day at the Old Packing Shed. There's still time to be one of them. Games, Music, Tributes to Pop! We have towering crates of glass-bottled Dad's Root beer stacked up and ready for you to swill too.

August is not my favorite month around here, (largely because it doesn't seem to be your favorite month around here), so I've decided to give you a little break from what our fearless leader is calling a "Deep Recession." Free music. Michael Wassbottten of the Mill Creek Boys and Freeman House are putting together double-header Americana music on Saturday nights from 5 to 9 PM. Two great bands will be featured at each show. You can pick raspberries and strawberries, enjoy our farm grill barbecue, shop for gifts in the general store, and hear some great music. There's nothing quite like live music on a Summer Saturday night, and the music is free. The barbecue isn't free, because I am not the federal government and I don't have that fancy paper they use to print money, but we will give great value for very off-Broadway prices. Keep checking back.

Mallory and Eric's wedding was something like an hour or two in a pleasant sidewalk cafe located right smack dab in the middle of heaven. I can't do it justice. I really didn't get to enjoy my own wedding, because an arctic storm was blasting through the packing shed, but I had so much fun talking to and dancing with our guests and basking in the joy of it all, that, I confess, I wish there were a wedding everyday around here. (Heah....) Normally, I prefer conversation, but I danced and made toasts and threw rice and got completely OUT of my normally introspective, cranky self. Mallory and Eric did it the right way--and it was cause for a celebration! Praise God.

Summer

I haven't been writing quite as much, because we've been doing some last minute summer planning, and I'm always traumatized by bulk emails, which I had to compose and send out yesterday. I realize that as you all proceed through your day, with your various challenges and personal trials, that a Riley's Farm update may or may not be helpful in making you feel better about life.

Suppose, for example, you're a warehouse foreman and a 40 foot semi-trailer has just damaged your loading door--and you have 30 minutes to find someone responsible to wait for the repair crew, or sit alone in the warehouse all night, guarding expensive imported European cheese and sausage baskets. Someone is reading your email in your office and they yell:

"Heah, Chuck, the strawberries are ready for u-pick at Riley's Farm."

"That's great," you respond, agitated, "but I have a 10 foot hole in the warehouse wall, Duane--and WHAT ARE YOU DOING READING MY EMAIL?"

"I signed you up for the updates, man. The Riley's Farm updates....so you'll know when the strawberries are ready..and when the Father's Day hoe-down thingy is."

"Duane? Have you got that repair crew?"

"I don't know what your talkin' about. Crandall says you're the repair crew. Heah, Riley's Farm has a summer camp."

I suppose our updates could you hit you at a good time, but I'm always afraid our emails will arrive sometime between two big emails you have to send your accountant, pronto, with two really big fat PDF files you can't get to attach, and your wife will be looking over your shoulder, and she'll see the little "Riley's Farm: Father's Day, Strawberries, Summer Camp" and she'll say, "ohh..read that one," and you'll say, "Heather. We've got 10 minutes to get this down to Peter or we're going to have trouble with the franchise tax board. We can do the Riley's Farm huckleberry thing later."

The point I'm trying to make is that you should make some time to celebrate. It will help you forget about the hole in the warehouse wall--and it will address another nagging reality brought home to your correspondent by these pictures of his son, over the years.

Life goes by too quickly.

On Behalf of Goats

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:34:00 EST

Could I have a word with you?

There's something to be said for a small goat company, not publicly traded. If you have more than a few acres, you won't even have to buy your original investment. Someone's kids will grow out of their 4H years, and they will give them away. If you get a male and female, your stock will split over and over again, and you will have several hundred shares, after just a few years. At first, when someone says, "heah, there's a baby goat out there," you think, "heah, cool," and then baby goats are being born more or less every day, almost like mail delivery.

There really is no management class to worry about in a company of goats. In fact the word "class" and goats just don't go together at all. They can be cute sometimes, sort of wise looking, but very--how shall we say?--honest about their needs, candid, frank. Sometimes brutally frank. They are not exactly storybook in their manners.

"Look at that cute little goat eating the hay."

"Look at that cute little goat being bottle fed."

"Oooh, gross. What is that goat Doooo-ing??"

And another goat comes into the world.

Other than creating new baby goats, goats generally just like to eat and run around, and they will mow your lawn for you, or eat down just about anything you want eaten down, and some things you don't want eaten down. They generally look pleased to see you, because they believe you will throw some piece of vegetation, or some section of an old grill cheese sandwich into their pen. And they are generally right about this. They expect you to feed them and they have a way of getting food out of you, and even your guests, even though they have no spoken or written language. If you put a "please don't feed the goats" sign near them, you could almost see the words "yeah, right" being scribbled over the text, before the Sharpie ink dried. No human child has yet been born who does not feel an immediate, visceral need to feed goats upon seeing them for the first time. At 49 years old, I still feel the urge to throw some sort of food into their pen.

The government, by and large, doesn't care about goats, and no one has told the Treasury that goats can move--so there is no goat tax yet. The S.E.C. does not regulate goats, nor does the Department of Transportation, though some goats could drag a grown man to work every day, if there was an old grill-cheesed sandwich in it for them.

Once in a great while, you get a mean, nasty goat--and then you have a free gift for that bus driver who keeps asking whether you sell goats or not. Theoretically, the goats could come in handy if there were some major disaster and you needed a source of fresh protein, though I believe I would wait for the FEMA relief before I tried a goat taco. Still, the ranging, growing flock, from a survivalist standpoint, is comforting.

Sooner or later, of course, the herd will get too large, and then you can call up one of those parents whose child has just joined the local 4H club. I think you can sell a little goat for $40 or $50.

But you won't ever really be parting with it, because later, after the 4H years are over, you'll get it back...

...and some bus driver will be very happy.

Showers, Constitutions

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:31:00 EST

Early Summer Mist

We had a delightful shower this last Saturday with that old Oak Glen summer weather pattern--two or three days of clouds rising like castles over the Forest Falls ridge and then boom--cool winds and rain. This one was just a pleasant late spring wash and I saw guests standing out in it, sort of celebrating. Storms have a kind of signature that lets you know whether they're dangerous or not, and if I could order weather, I would order at least a dozen of these a year. No hail. Light rain. Cool wind. Proof of the Almighty #4324-lr.(3c).

The farm, courtesy of many dedicated hands, is looking more and more story-book these days. There was so much manicured cultivation in every direction, when I walked the place yesterday, that I got to thinking I should remind you all that when you come up, you can spend at least an hour or two exploring the place, along the red-dash marked trail on the farm map. (Follow the map carefully; we do have neighbors.) There are some cross-valley vistas that can't be done justice by any photo, so you should come up and have a meal, then take a walk. Can a corporate restaurant offer you acres of acres of farm land, by way of after-meal constitutional? I think not, sir. (Don't quote that last sentence out of context by the way.)

Taking a Constitutional

Two Quotes this morning, the first from Federalist #78:

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.

The second, hauntingly, comes from a period more than 30 years later:

"It has long, however, been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821

The first quote is Hamilton's and the second is Jefferson's. They weren't the best of friends, of course, but the erie prescience of Jefferson is difficult to ignore, even if he had the benefit of watching the "federal judiciary" in operation for some years, by the time he made this damning observation.

The fight over Proposition 8 this week, and in the oncoming months, highlights a sorry reality about our judges' soft-spoken but voracious appetite for power.

Hamilton wrote, truthfully, that the role of the courts is to determine if a statute violates the Constitution. "No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid."

Certainly, in instances where our Constitution is very clear, as in the case of the 2nd Amendment, we would expect the court to strike down all kinds of restrictive gun laws, which go far beyond the regulation of the militia and extend to an outright banning of the clear right of the people to "bear" arms.

However, when the life-time appointed jurists began looking to the Constitution's "penumbral emanations" to strike down laws they don't agree with, or use court orders and injunctions to make law they would prefer, they make themselves into whores without the face paint. Read the Constitution of the United States. Do you find any explicit or even implied right to kill another human being in the womb or define marriage however you like? It doesn't exist. It's not there. If you want it there, amend the document, but don't pretend a judge should be making policy. Supreme court nominee Sonia Sotomayer advocated just that in a candid, but caught-on-tape moment. In so doing, she broke a trade secret of the guild. ("Shut up, Sonia. We know we make policy; we're just not supposed to tell the public!")

Judges have an obligation, a sacred obligation, to make their arguments without resorting to a chain of implicit and tenuous assumptions about the intent of the original language. When you hear someone talking about the United States Constitution as a "living, breathing document, capable of change," ask them if their marriage licence is "living and breathing." Ask them if their wedding vows can be changed to reflect new partners, as the urge comes along. Ask them if their bank can change their mortgage agreement whenever they feel like it. Ask them if the treasury can just decide whether to make good on its "living, breathing" bond obligations.

Say what you mean, judge, but don't lie to yourself. A judge who makes himself into a legislator is really no better than the worst sort of con artist or rapist or murderer on the street. Each of these thugs has active contempt for the law, but you could argue that the "policy making" judge is far worse than the murderer, because when we feel that even judges can't be trusted to obey the law, why should society? Murderers only kill people. Bad judges can kill the very law that protects us from muderers.

Believe it or not, the founders, in their wisdom, knew that even those appointed to sit on the bench would be capable of this sort of depravity, and they fully expected both the legislature and the executive to check that depravity. In practice, however, they don't. A truly constitutional president would have ordered federal law enforcement to "stand down" on any Roe v. Wade related prosecution or arrest, and he would have allowed the states to make and enforce their own criminal law on the matter. He would have encouraged a show down with the judiciary, when it becomes infected with policy-makers, as opposed to jurists.

Hamilton argued that the judge had no "sword," but in fact he does. If you ask most policeman where their authority comes from, they will hold up a court order. American law enforcement has become nearly unquestioning in its sense of obligation to the courts. Just once, I would like to see an order from the governor (or the president) come into conflict with an order from a judge. Even better, I'd like to see a city council get a little Patrick Henry spirit, and order their police departments not to enforce a federal judicial order they thought was an egregious infringement of their local right to representation.

Let the checks and balances begin.

Riding Weather, A Brutal Modern Secret Truth

Wed, 27 May 2009 12:29:00 EST

Memorial Day II

That's just what one family picked yesterday in the strawberry patch. I know I've been relentlessly pitching these little red jewels, but we had dozens and dozens of families in the patch yesterday, and the kids and I were STILL able to do a lot of easy flashlight picking last night.

I can't remember a more pleasant May in these parts for some time. We had a few hot days, but the temperature has had that "just right" feel for most of the last two weeks. Yesterday, one of our local staff members brought her husband by to the tavern, and David Leslie Thomas cajoled him into singing. He belted out a "Danny Boy" and a "How Great Thou Art" that put sandwiches back on plates and made soup spoons hover, mid-gulp.

"No fair," I told him, "making me cry on a Monday."

It being Memorial Day, we also conducted a remembrance of those who had fallen, with Jon Harmon and Sean Villareal sounding off two perfect musket blasts. The song "Taps," I believe, has roots in the Civil War, and it's a bit unnerving to play it on the fife, because it has to be rendered at a dignified, slow tempo, with no opportunity for the missed notes that might be covered up at jig or hornpipe speed. I hope I did it at least small justice.

You could say every day around here is a remembrance. That may account for why we've never been very consistent about calendaring the big holidays--July 4th, Memorial Day, Presidents Day, etc. I think that our problems as a nation are rooted, very much, in our daily forgetfulness of the past, and certainly the yearly, sanctioned, federal homages to tradition sometimes get sacrificed to television, hot dogs, and the bliss of a day off. "Holiday" after all, has its roots in the word "Holy Day." I'm not against a party, but our policy, and our culture, would be a tad more ordered, and peaceful, if we remembered the Divine Source of our blessings on a daily basis--not as a yearly afterthought.

Kevin Hauser, who also stopped by yesterday, and provided the strawberry picture above asked me words to that effect.

"Do you thank God for this place?"

"Every day!" I responded. "Every morning and every night."

Riding Weather

The Eikmeier family has been helping the boys (and the horses) get back into trail shape, and I'm on hold now with the local vet for shots and teeth floating. (I just gave up after ten minutes of saxophone jazz from the horse doctor phone exchange.) According to Linda Eikmeier, horses develop a kind of hook in their teeth that makes them head-shy and not very anxious to take the bridle or the bit--so we're getting that checked out this week. The neat thing about this place is that a lot of very talented, giving people are willing to throw their time in, to make it work.* It's a little humbling. We've got an apple-guru helping us now, a trained architect, a human resources genius, a skilled number cruncher, a life-long farmer, a former Fortune 100 staff accountant, some really fantastic country-cooks, and nearly every flavor of musical talent you can find on the melody-shelf. And that's to say nothing of the dozens of pure ham-bones we have making history fun out on the grounds everyday. I really wish it were easier to start an old fashioned, Bay Colony joint stock company, with everyone in spiritual and economic covenant. I like employees who want to be owners of something someday. If I could succeed in that goal, I'm pretty sure it would cut down on the number of ceramic mugs I have to re-purchase.

A Brutal Modern Secret Truth

No one else will tell you fellas this, but I will: if you are young and heart-sick, I have a simple, ancient solution for you: get married.

Find a girl who likes to work, rent an apartment, and start a family.

Modern American adolescence has been crippled by a lot of tripe from the academy and the entertainment industry and even the church. Get these lies out of your head to begin with: 1) the world has too many people. A lie. Listen to a kid laughing sometime and tell me there isn't enough room in the world for another baby. 2) Marriage is emotional slavery. A lie. Marriage is freedom from that modern social train-wreck, "dating." Marriage is getting to see your best friend every day of your life. 3) You can "play around" and not hurt anyone. A lie from the pit of raging hell. Talk to a post-abortion woman sometime, one of the ones who still has a soul. It isn't pretty. And even if you're careful, "broken hearts" sound better in country music than they do crying across the room from you. 4) You need to wait until you are financially stable until you get married. Nonsense. If that were the case, no one would be married but Warren Buffet--and who but a 24K gold-digger would want to marry him? 5) You should "see the world" and "meet lots of people" before you finally settle on "just the right one." Ridiculous. You're starting to sound like a little girl, dude. Choose carefully. But Choose. Choose life, not loneliness.

My daughter is getting married at eighteen--and I am so proud of her I will brag to any stranger I meet on the street about it. I would MUCH rather see her get married then send her off to the local junior college to slum it up with the local club-hoppers and mall addicts. (Get married and THEN go to school; it's a good hedge against some of the no-account, sleep-around set, and it's even a good emotional protection from some of the sleaze-rag faculty.) I will tell you though that Mallory was a little distressed, for a while, by all the well-meaning, but utterly un-Biblical and thoughtless advice she received from people who saw "youth ministry" or "financial security" as their modern day idols.

"Heah, Adam, I know God gave you Eve, but, like, man, are you SURE about this?"

The Real Truths are Ancient, Part I

Tue, 26 May 2009 09:49:00 EST

The other day I picked up a copy of Poor Richard's 1733 Almanack in our gift store and I read Benjamin Franklin's wisdom--"if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas." Technically, I'm not sure if Franklin was re-stating an ancient proverb, or if this was one of his own, but the economy of pure distilled truth seems very Franklinesque to me. The colonials had this much down cold: you are, to a large measure, a product of the company you keep.

Read More...

The Real Truths are Ancient, Part I (continued)

Two days ago I referenced "Christians and agnostics who quote 'Judge Not.'" The fact is that everyone in the modern world, of every persuasion, is judged by a Judeo-Christian standard. The world dates its time by Christ. The whole failed socialist collectivist experiment of the 20th century had its roots in a Christian heresy. Even proud atheists like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins owe their sense of fair play to culturally inherited rabbinic or catechetical teaching. When you argue with Bill or Richard, they assume you won't lie and you assume they won't either. You assume they won't kill you when you win the argument and they asssume they aren't free to kill you either--when they lose the argument. The ten commandments are written on the hearts of men, and you have to try very hard to ignore them.

Unfortunately, evil lives to confuse.

Read More...

Lockton is practicing Pachebel's Canon downstairs, a nice way to start the day. Now he's gone on to a minuet. Lockton is our sight reader and Samuel is our play-anything-by-ear almost-immediately musician. Nicholas is sawing away on the fiddle a lot more these days and, at house church yesterday morning, a friend's child knocked out a flawless "Be Thou My Vision." I guess you get these little "City on a Hill" glimpses every once in a while to make up for the ubiquitous grunge of even Christian pop music these days.

As I wrote that paragraph, I skipped over to Facebook and watched an advertisement pop up on the right for cyber-profile art of some sort. Over the image of a black-bustiered bimbo, layers of studded-leather were draped into place, along with the words "explore your dark side."

Why? Why dress, look, and act like a loser?

Read More...

Strawberry News

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:41:00 EST

I took a whole bushel of strawberries down to Maricela and Jan yesterday and I said, "okay, they'll be coming in at least a bushel or so a day now--even after u-pick--so we want to start featuring strawberry stuff big time."

"Strawberry shakes?" Jan said.

"Check."

"Strawberry pie?" Maricela asked.

"Check."

"Strawberry smoothies?" Jon Harmon asked.

"Check."

"Strawberry tarts," I continued. "Strawberry jam. Strawberry preserves. Strawberry shortcake. Strawberries dipped in chocolate. Strawberry pancakes. Strawberry Cheesecake. Strawberry Pizza. Strawberry Banana Soup. Strawberry Tiramisu. Strawberry Napoleon. Strawberry Buckle. Something new every day with farm-fresh strawberries."

Everyone seemed very excited. Jon even consumed a strawberry or three between each round of ideas.

"We can do this thing," I said.

Come on up and see if I'm right. I sense berry-related stuff in the public house this week.

The High-Minded Fence Straddle

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:41:00 EST

President Obama, at Notre Dame Sunday, made this observation: "The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm." In one sense, he implies here the genius of the American Republic in its ability to reach compromise across widely divergent constituencies. On issues that yield to honorable compromise, this is certainly a hopeful truth about our system. Unfortunately, absolute truths don't yield to compromise and our debate, as a culture, has moved out of the arena of happy compromise and into the righteous frenzy of raging absolutes.

You simply can't imagine a calming, coalition-building sentence beginning with the words "..A Rosa Parks and a Governor Wallace may both love this country.." or "..An abolitionist and a slave-holder may both love this country.." or "..a totalitarian socialist and a free-market capitalist may both love this country.." or "..a German American with Nazi sympathies and a Brooklyn Rabbi may both love this country.."

Some issues simply cannot be solved by high-minded rhetoric and an appeal to "all get along."

With the exception of the Civil War, America's Judeo-Christian consensus meant that most of the time we debated things that yielded to debate, things like the timing of Montana Statehood, the proper route for the Union Pacific Railroad, the advisability of the gold standard. When, however, as a nation we have run up against absolute truth, we get into that territory that begs the question: "I don't care if you're a lawyer or a soldier; which one of you is telling the truth?" We either decide, as a nation, the character of the unvarnished truth, and settle the matter--or we live with the soul-sickness of abiding pure evil. We don't pretend that Rosa Parks should walk to the back of the bus, just because a politician implies that we should all settle down.

Some things simply are not up for a vote. The Constitution, for example, says, explicitly, the right of the people to keep and bear arms "shall not be infringed." If you don't believe that, really, you are putting Rosa at the back of the bus and implying that absolute truths should be brought back before the policy wonks for more discussion. In a very real sense, if you question the absolute truths that have sustained the republic--the truths that have taken us to war, and to the streets--you are not really an American. Real leaders unify the people around the justice of eternal truths; they don't ask the sheep to keep feeding the wolves with their own flesh, and hope the jackals will lose their appetite if we all pretend how much we love each other.

There is nothing "high minded" about asking pro-life and pro-abortion Americans to have a "respectful" difference of opinion on the matter--unless you believe that goodness should quietly abide, accommodate, and absorb evil. Americans, according to recent polls, are beginning to see the truth of the matter--and that begins by acknowledging something coalition builders find distasteful: leadership means you encourage people to change their minds when they are wrong.

Wedding or Gang Initiation?

Mon, 18 May 2009 14:05:00 EST

In a few minutes, I'll let you know how long it takes to pick a pint of strawberries. I suspect it will be less than two minutes. They are at that "ridiculously easy" stage of harvesting, so if you like strawberries--and you want a bargain activity with the kids--come on up.

Yesterday a group of location scouts from the Inland Empire Film commission tooled around the farm taking their panorama shots. I think there were some pretty big television shows represented. We let film companies look around, but we turn down an awful lot of them, if we don't think the project is worth promoting. I turned down MTV twice, and about a month ago, I took a gander at the photography of a guy who wanted to do a "fashion runway on the farm." I concluded he he was one of those fruits who enjoy demeaning women for profit, so I told him no thanks. If you ever have a chance to participate in a reality show, by the way, say no. The producers of reality shows are liars--from start to finish. So, we get a lot of lookers, but we don't always ink a deal.

We have a vaguely similar problem with respect to weddings on the farm in that we very heavily promote traditional music to the point that if someone mentions their own band or a D.J., we usually say no. One bride brought up a really neat Irish band and we went along with that, but when someone proposes a D.J., or even a CD of favorites, those things can descend into rap-and-rave-fests within a matter of minutes. (You try telling a juiced-up band of big guys in tuxes their music doesn't fit the Riley's Farm theme.) Some contemporary music, (not all), can make a wedding look more like a gang initation than a celebration of holy matrimony.

Okay, so I'm a folk music snob; it's actually a pretty broad standard though. I would say yes to Mariachis, Big Band, Irish Folk, Blue Grass, Classical, Island music, but if someone put Eminem on the platter and he started in with his F-fest, you might as well turn the old farm into a strip mall and give everyone an Ipod and some face paint. A country wedding should sound at least something like a country wedding.

The kids were watching a wedding reality show last night up at grandma's and the theme seemed to be "Really Extravagant Expensive Could-Have-Purchased-A-Home-with-the-Money-we-Spent-on-this thing" Weddings. No kidding. One of the weddings had a price tag of $450,000. Both of the grooms seemed, um, sort of--how do I put this?--girlish. You would have to be a bit of a femme not to tell the ladies, "look, ladies, with the money you're spending on this we could host a stadium tractor-pull--and make money on the deal."

Anyway, we can host a wedding--a nice, traditional, non-experimental affair for considerably less than half a million dollars.

Sweet Land of Liberty and License

Sat, 16 May 2009 13:58:00 EST

We celebrate liberty around here quite a bit. Heaven knows I shout it out as a Patrick Henry up to five nights a week in the Hawk's Head Public House. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War Adventure, most kids can still sing "My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.." If you've read the farm journal for any length of time, you know how hostile I am to encroachments on constitutional freedoms. Liberty doesn't really need to be sold or marketed. It's the native, universally-recognized objective of all people, everywhere.

But it's interesting that Jefferson and friends did not write: men "are endowed by their Creator with freedom to do anything they please." Fully aware of man's native depravity, and the chaos that would result from lawlessness, they wrote, "they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness...."

Catch that? Certain unalienable rights. Not infinite and indiscriminate and promiscuous rights, but certain unalienable rights. Those rights, as the founders saw them, could never be indiscriminate, without limiting the freedom of others, and they began, at the base minimum with the right to life.

Indeed, Western Civilization--carrying along with it the banner of a sovereign God, immutable truth, and a scriptural canon--didn't engage in gentle conflict-resolution and anger-management with native cultures. You can't imagine this scene between Cortez and the conquered Aztecs:

                          AZTEC PRIEST
                We would like to keep cutting the
                hearts out of our sacrificial human
                victims.

                            CORTEZ
                Let's talk about that.  Can we
                limit that to Tuesdays and
                Thursdays?

At the very base of any standard of western liberty is the idea that life must be protected, murderers punished, and ritual homicide suppressed. You can't offer "liberty to live" and "liberty to murder" in the same declaration of human rights. The Aztec temples--and their priests--had to go. No arguing. No nuance. No exceptions. Such abominations had to be destroyed. Praise God.

The ever increasing number of pro-life, anti-abortion activists in America routinely face a kind of sneering rejection among people who claim to be pro-life but who vote pro-death. We are told that we can't be "single issue" voters, and while there is some truth to that on other fronts, there can never be multiple truths on the question of life itself.

What, really, in the temporal realm, is more important than life? Can we ever hope to protect our property, our incomes, our churches, if we can't protect life itself? How can we ever hope for an increase in public virtue, for more honesty in our financial transactions, and in our personal lives, if a great slaughter of the innocents is taking place daily in America? If the Aztecs had blood-spatter on their foreheads, we are swimming in oceans of human sacrifice. We make the Aztecs look like the Osmond family. Father Pavone of Priests for Life tells the story of a group of small boys who were reported throwing something off a bridge. When they were questioned, the boys responded that they were throwing "little people." They had found a container of aborted babies behind an abortion clinic and they were throwing them into the river below.

Is this the America the founders envisioned when they wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" Are we really "free" when we permit this sort of outrageous violation of the freedom of the most defenseless, the most innocent life?

In the nineties, that paragon of personal virtue, Bill Clinton, said his goal for abortion would be that, someday, it might be "safe, legal, and rare." Could we say the same thing about slavery? Could we hope that slavery might be "safe, legal, and rare." Would Cortez have accepted this compromise on the subject of human sacrifice? Would "safe, legal and rare human sacrifice" sound like progress in anyone's mind?

The unparalleled thievery of the federal government, in printing money without backing, the shameless financial chicanery of a Bernie Madoff, the short-term, spendthrift irresponsibility of Congress, the federally funded executive bonus, are all part of one devious moral-whole. Why should anyone care about stealing your money if they can kill their own child in the womb? Even Cortez would have known that. Order and civilization absolutely demand--as the first order of business--that you protect life. Why plant a field if you can be butchered, at will, by the local medicine man? Why build a village school if the natives are addicted to infanticide and cannibalism?

It all begins with life. We are worse than barbarians if we abide murder--especially the murder of the smallest, most innocent life. It is not "single issue." It is the first issue. It is the issue that must be solved before anything else can be solved.

Some mistakenly assume that the taking of any life--even those who fall just victim to the hangman or who die in warfare--are protected by this truth, but that would be a false understanding. Historically, we execute those who take life to balance the scales--and to emphasize the high seriousness of the crime against life itself. We prosecute just warfare against barbarian nations. We are not talking about the mere act of taking life, but that of taking innocent life. We are talking about homicide in all its forms--murder, infanticide, cannibalism, abortion.

Moreover, as the founders knew when they attributed the right to life to our "Creator," it cannot be the subject of polite debate or qualification or regulation by human senates and academic panels. It has to be absolute, axiomatic, unquestioned. Those who defend life are decent and normal. Those who argue for murder should be seen as we would now see a slave master or a Nazi prison guard.

There are many, of course, who are morally asleep, who would see this as "extreme," but very few who are asleep enjoy being prodded to wakefulness. Soft recruits do not enjoy boot camp. When a culture like ours--that has for so long accepted child killing in the womb--gets told it is little better, and probably much worse, than the knife-wielding pagans of old, it tends to get cranky and self-righteous. Anti-abortionists are told they are against women's health, or women's rights, even though those same pro-lifers are working to protect the 500,000 "little women" killed in the womb every year. Logic has never been on the side of the "pro-choice" movement. It is a movement that is both morally and mentally asleep.

Science has made it even more brutally clear. The images of the unborn living in the womb are breath-taking in their presentation of a human form, and the heart-rending images of babies ripped limb from limb by the process of abortion are so damning, that--unlike the images of the Nazi Holocaust, which we are properly reminded can "never be forgotten"--these images of babies shredded, burned, literally sucked to death by "doctors" are routinely banned. The abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war can be shown. The murder of 1 million American babies a year cannot.

With respect to our leadership on the abortion issue, I came to the conclusion some years ago that American presidents are really middle managers, that our process no longer encourages true leadership, so I will readily admit that our choices for moral leadership, in the historic American sense, have not been legion, but, I was very surprised that so many Christians, Catholics, and Jews would vote for Barack Obama. Certainly, he was smooth, articulate, and polite to a fault. I never found much content in his actual platform, but I can certainly understand why people value a smiling, "hopeful," face---even if pure evil lurks behind that mask. And "pure evil" is exactly what Barack Obama represents on the abortion front. We have never endured a president who so whole-heartedly supported abortion on demand. He has already rescinded the Mexico City policy, which now forces American taxpayers to pay for abortions abroad. He has moved to lift freedom of conscience protections for medical professionals who choose not to perform abortions. As a candidate, Barack Obama even voted against the "born alive infant protection act" in Illinois, twice--proving he was not only a friend of abortion, but infanticide as well. To make this display of evil even more preposterous, Barack Obama continually treated the nation to his status as a "Christian."

This Sunday, we face the colossal absurdity of a Catholic School, Notre Dame, inviting Barack Obama to speak at its commencement and receive an honorary degree. Some expect nearly 20,000 protestors at the event and many of the seniors refuse to participate. They will engage in prayer services elsewhere on the campus. They are saying, in effect, let us not make a mockery of our institution by honoring a friend of death.

I would submit to you that there is no more true Christianity than the Christianity which states, "you have dishonored the name of Christ, you have made a mockery of His grace, and you will not share my table, until you repent." There is no more true mark of leadership than being willing to say "this is not up for debate. There can be no compromise on people who claim Christ and then claim the right to kill children."

Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame, in other words--not the new, abortion-loving version of higher Catholic education.

May the hearts of the children, someday, be turned back to their fathers--the hearts, at any rate, of those that are still beating after the present holocaust.

Family Night

Wed, 13 May 2009 12:09:00 EST

We took the kids to Macaroni Grill last night, and to a tux fitting for Mallory & Eric's wedding. On the way down the hill, as we passed through Cherry Valley, we saw a teenage girl on a small, fat pony galloping at full tilt up the other side of the street. You never see horses gallop on suburban streets, and I don't think I've seen a pony that fat move quite that fast. The pony's master was holding a new bag of grain on the saddle in front of her, balancing it between her arms and the reins. We all stared at once, fell silent, and then burst out laughing.

"I'm getting this grain home," I said. "That pony is thinking 'I'm getting this grain home--NOW.'"

I turned around to watch. She was still kicking up gravel, charging off in the other direction. "The city of Cherry Valley," I said, thinking out loud, "should pay that girl and her pony to ride the grain around like that. People would drive from miles from all around to see it."

Just as I said that, we turned the corner at the gas station and saw an old homeless man playing an electric guitar--without an amp, next to a trash can. He looked something like Jerry Garcia, and he was singing with a great deal of gusto, multi-tasking for aluminum cans at the same time.

Mary chuckled. "Maybe Cherry Valley is up to something."

The Macaroni Grill wasn't full--but I take some fellow-merchant solace in the fact that there was a wait, on a Tuesday night. (Heah, Americans, eat out! Especially at charming little living history farm restaurants.)

I keep thinking I want to tweek the Hawk's Head Public House formula because, really, the Macaroni Grill isn't just good food. A good restaurant has a kind of "atmospheric take-away," a sense-of-place you carry away with you in one of your mental shirt pockets: Cool rooms, wall art, an open view of the grill itself, signature music, credible hospitality on the part of the servers. I don't really want to do the old Bobby McGee's thing, where every server is a character from history. I think there are some waiters who can pull that off, but I find constant drama at the dinner table a little off-putting, and finding people who can act, sing, and serve is...nigh to impossible. What I'm thinking is one, or maybe two people at most, who travel from table to table, eating, arguing, singing. If the guests want to listen in, they can. If not, that's fine too.

There was a time in Men's formal fashion (the 1970s) where tuxedo fashion was dominated by the lady's urge to decorate her man as a kind of fashion accessory. I believe that era has blissfully gone the way of the world, and I can happily report there are no more peach vests or dusty-lime colored dinner jackets for rent. Not that Mallory would do that to us, of course, but it's nice to see clothing more or less settled into a classic trend. If it were up to me, every man would have his clothing issued by Jeeves or by Mary Johns, of our wardrobe department. As far as I'm concerned, when lapels starting get too wide and pants begin to flare and you start to feel you're trying to conduct business in a Yellow Submarine cartoon, then the fashion designers are sitting somewhere having a really good laugh.

Very little that is "new" is really worth it. All the good ideas are old ones.

If you agree, you should like our place.

Their Horsely Nature

Tue, 12 May 2009 12:12:00 EST

Some very good friends of the farm started in with our boys and the horses this last Saturday, teaching them how to walk the horses, how to establish a rapport, how to avoid indulging their childish, "horsely," nature (my word), how to lunge etc, and I was pleasantly surprised at how disciplined Lockton and Samuel were in applying these new equine truths, yesterday when we did our first horse-homework together. Lockton worked on making Winston back up when he got too near a fence or too near the roadside grass, which seemed like a pretty advanced piece of stable-boy art--making a big Thoroughbred go into reverse on command.

It's against my nature, for some reason, to spend an hour in the afternoon pretending I'm a country gentleman, with the time to train horses, and be trained by them. (Getting my saddle muscles back, at 49, seems a little daunting.) Perhaps it's just because I'm always so worried about sales around here that I don't think I have time to ride, but really, this is, after all, a professional obligation. Don't guests expect farmers to know how to ride a horse? Right? ("Yeah, that's it.")

The truth is I'm troubled by the world, by a kind of truth-avoidance I see nearly every day among friends, customers, pastors, politicians, reporters. I watch lives, and nations, and churches going off track in ways that seem subtle at first, but then predictably tragic. It comes with age and the study of history--a kind of weariness at the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. With a horse--when you see it doing something stubborn and "horsely"--you punish it by stopping, backing up, and insisting the thing be done right.

With people, you can't even cough disapproval, or look sidelong, without the self-esteem police writing a ticket. I was having a great time at the Mother's Day event the other night, and then a friend told me he had expressed some of my ideas to a pastor who cautioned him with the same old good-Nazi-Lutheran rationalization for the church remaining silent and never, ever, ever being political. This particular pastoral evasion went like this: "since none of the candidates really represent Christ very well, we shouldn't endorse any of them." That's something like saying, "well, because 1930s American swing dancing was a little risqué, we had no right to go over and liberate Jews from the camps." That's like saying, "because that superior court judge is a bit of a gossip, he doesn't have the right to impose the death penalty on a remorseless killer." Pastors who refuse to make distinctions between the small and the great dangers threatening the flock, shouldn't be shepherding cockroaches into the dustpan, much less the children of God into the promised land.

I said so--very forcefully--and lost my temper in the process.

I am aware, of course, that churches operate under mandate from the federal government, or they lose their tax exempt status, but manufacturing a holy rationale for remaining silent in the face of evil seems particularly craven. I tell people, lately, "if your pastor hasn't given a pro-life, anti-tax, pro 10 commandments sermon in the last month--run, don't walk away. Find a real church."

I mean--really, what will those pastors say on the great and terrible day? "I preached the truth--as long as Caesar let me?"

It's May, It's May...

Thu, 07 May 2009 13:20:00 EST

I still can't tell if strawberries will be ready by Saturday, but there's a lot going on here anyway. We'll have some new horse trainers lunging Winston, Q-Tip, and Burrito. It's a pretty sight to behold. David Thomas will be singing in the Hawk's Head Public House--and, if you haven't purchased your tickets for the Night Before Mother's Day Ball, do it now. The two farm stores are full of historical souvenirs,books, and Riley's Farm gear as well--so if you can't stay busy here this Saturday, it's your fault.

Last night we had a little drama here as Luis stumbled up the stairs to our house and explained he had driven the Kawasaki mule off the side of the road on the "Widowmaker" trail to the Mile High Ranch. His friend, Craig, was having breathing problems, so we called 911 and the boys went off to the hospital. They are in good shape, if a little banged up. "How many of these trips across the farm have Luis and Craig been involved in?" I asked Mary. (It seems to me I remember Craig getting a car stuck back there.) Mary couldn't remember. "They were getting hay for Scott," she said. "Well," I said, "we need to put an end to these Luis and Craig expeditions." I paused for a moment and considered that phrasing. "Heah," I repeated. "That's a joke. Luis and and Craig Expeditions. The Luis and Craig Expedition. Get it?"

"Yes, dear," Mary said. "I get it. I get it."

We had some close friends over for dinner last night and they told us a story which deserves to be included in a major feature film, but I can't do it justice here. I was applauding my brother, Scott, for giving my father a life completely at home, around his family, during his declining years. Scott helped him dress, helped him eat, helped him go to the bathroom, and Scott was there when dad passed on. Our close friends had a similar story of taking care of their father at home, during the last month of his life, but there was a bizarre twist to the final chapter. On the very last day of the old man's life, our friends septic system backed up and they were told by the pumping company to begin unearthing the manhole covers before they arrived. As they were digging out the septic system, (at least two feet of earth), their father passed away in the bedroom, just as the hospice worker arrived, to see the whole family digging a hole in the back yard. The hospice worker looked from our grieving friend, to the old man in his final rest, to the mounds of the earth getting larger in the back yard, and said, "you aren't planning on.."

Just as we were hearing this story, Luis stumbled in, with news of the Luis and Craig Expedition.

Life beats fiction--most of the time.

Constitutionally Speaking...

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:00:00 EST

Political discourse has always suffered from what I would have to call the Red Sox Syndrome.

If you picture two baseball fans debating the merits of their teams, you can't imagine one of them calmly leaning over and saying--in as soothing a voice as possible--"Chuck, I know you're a Red Sox fan, and I respect that, but here's why I would like you to consider getting wildly excited about the Yankees."

People have tribal, gut-fed, almost hereditary attachments to the labels they wore growing up. There are life-long Catholics who can't vote pro-life if it means they'll have to check a box against a Democrat. There are 4th generation Republicans who won't defend the Constitution if a Republican happens to be desecrating it. The spirit of party is not the spirit of thinking people, and until we begin thinking beyond party, to what is right, what is true, what is fair, politics will remain a baseball game, with about the same level of rational discourse--pretty slogans, handsome candidates, empty minds, and obscene hecklers. I'm happy to report that the Tea Party movement seems to reflect every political and professional stripe: Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Academics, Civil Servants, and Entrepreneurs.

The common reality among Tea Party types is intellect. If you don't understand Adam Smith and the long, sorry historical record of failed command economies, the Tea Party movement will never excite you. At the Pasadena Tea Party, there was a band of Russian emigres who had personally tasted the fruits of Bolshevism. You see that contingent at a lot of tea parties--refugees from state economies who spent their childhood waiting in line for potatoes. They can't quite believe that America would entertain economic ideas that literally left them hungry as children, in places like Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the Eastern Block. If you don't understand that politicians promising loans to people who can't repay them, in return for votes, is what caused both the real estate bubble and the current recession, you will never get excited about the Tea Party movement. If you don't understand that there is nothing "free market" about bailing out global mega-corporations, just because they operate, nominally, in the private sector--you will never understand the tea party movement. If you don't understand the moral tradition behind protecting private property, and its real world economic benefits, you won't understand the tea party movement. You have to be a little smarter than Keith Olbermann, in other words, to comprehend basic economics.

Of course, no one wants to be called a socialist today. Politicians still get elected by promising tax cuts--even if they don't mean it. They still pretend they want to promote private sector jobs, but when you head into a recession, the very last thing you want to do is raise taxes or make spending promises that will plunge all of us into greater debt. That's something like putting a cast iron saddle on a race horse and expecting him to run faster.

If you don't understand that, you will never understand the tea party movement.

Wedding Pictures

Fri, 01 May 2009 11:10:00 EST

Jeff Hammond is working on updating our wedding brochures & flash graphics, and I was astounded by all the stunning images that have been taken here on the farm. A good marketing graphic has a way of isolating a moment and then serving it up to the viewer in a crystal goblet, as though you could simply make an appointment for the sort of joy, radiance, and sweetness you see in the face of the bride on the right. The startling truth is that I've been witness to a thousand such moments of abundant joy here on the old homestead.

"You look happy about all of this," someone will say. "Here's a Kleenex. Is that your daughter? How are you related to the wedding couple?"

"I'm not."

"Friend of the family?"

"No."

Then there's kind of an awkward pause, followed by my half-explanation: "I just sort of manage the facilities here."

"Oh. You must enjoy your work."

"I do actually."

And that's the the truth. I like it when people host a good quality party, an anniversary, a wedding, a birthday party. I'm with Tevya on this.

"...it takes a wedding to make us say, let's live another day.."

Beauty Contests, Fine Manicured Lawns, Panic

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:34:00 EST

They say that the tradition of the finely manicured English lawn goes back to at least the 15th century, and there are manorial paintings to prove it, complete with images of workers taking the scythe to the Baron's emerald meadow. I'm all for making the watering of sod efficient, but there is a kind of soul-poverty associated with folks who don't want anyone to landscape with that prettiest of all groundcovers, that proof of heaven, that deep green bluegrass carpet beneath your bare summer feet. If someone wants to decorate the backyard with colored gravel, reclaimed asphalt, venus fly traps, and cacti capable of enduring the fifty year draught, fine, but I worship the God who has cattle on a thousand hills--and those cows need grass. There are too many kids around here, praise be, to really have a manicured lawn, but I still say nothing beats that oasis perfection of stumbling upon a Palm Desert golf course, with ponds, grass, and big shade trees.

I think there is something else behind the politically correct objection to grass, and that's an objection to beauty itself. Most of us just aren't beautiful. We want our landscaping to reflect the dreary egalitarian grime of a turd-green tumbleweed garden. ("Just who do they think they are? Putting in a new lawn?") Bobble-headed, bobble-wristed Perez Hilton couldn't allow Miss California, Carrie Prejean, to just be beautiful. He had to hurl insults and obscenities at her because she didn't agree with his take on marriage; but I don't think it was just the politics of the exchange. The reality is that there are many Americans who don't want to put anything at all to a contest, much less beauty. If they have to participate in judging people prettier than they are, they durn well better have the right opinions. Hilton may have been carrying his rainbow banner to the event, but what he really laments is his own ugliness of soul. He wants everyone--including beautiful, truth-telling Miss California--to be as miserable and as detestable and as shallow as he is.

That's really the secret behind any group of friends who don't want one of their number to succeed. It's all one fabric--beautiful lawns, accomplished women, excellent scholarship, financial success. The village will eventually stone or maim anyone too handsome, too wise, or too successful.

Another way of putting it is that we worship safety and the risk-avoidance inherent in just living life. If you plant a lawn, you might lose it. If you enter a contest, you might be runner up. If you go out of doors, and work for a living, you might discover your latent food allergy. There's a part of us deeply angry at anyone courageous enough to live their lives. I saw this poster the other day on an internet forum, and I don't know where to give credit, but it tickled me.

When Joe Biden comments on anything, you know it probably wasn't worth discussing, and that goes for this incredibly overblown swine flu. As Ron Paul reminded us two days ago, in 1976 one person died of the swine flu and 25 died of the cure for it. It's not that you shouldn't study a hazard, but panic is the wrong response--always. We might be safer--and have no immunities whatsoever--if we all wrapped ourselves in poly bags and never left our living rooms, but commerce, agriculture, and the arts would all grind to a halt. Lord save us from these soulless functionaries who don't believe in heaven. All they have is this life and they worship it, literally, to death.

Blast from the Past

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:56:00 EST

There was a legend in my hometown, Arcadia, that the former mayor owned a bomb shelter that was big enough to host an underground high school party or two. The "legend" part of this story might be the size of the underground complex, since a school tour parent and daughter of the mayor in question confirmed its existence for me, and even the high probability of her older brother outfitting a shindig or two down there, but I wager it was more like the bomb shelter at my in-laws old place, which was really just big enough to organize a poker game in reinforced concrete, with ominous red stripes on the wall--indicating the compass positions of March and Norton Air Force base.

I re-watched "Blast from the Past" last night with the kids, and although the language of the plot's post-Cold War chapter is pretty vulgar, there's a powerful argument being made about our culture in this story of a Cal Tech eccentric who builds a vast underground fall-out shelter and mistakes a crashed jet for the first salvos of a nuclear war. The nutty professor takes his pregnant wife down into the compound and locks the doors for a generation. The little family's isolation from the San Fernando Valley for thirty five years reveals a values shift that doesn't seem to be celebrated by the film-makers, which--by itself--puts the flick in my top twenty list.

With the exception of the civil rights movement, the Sixties brought with it not much more than pure social poison--cheap relationships, divorce, drug abuse, and the resulting cynicism that made the "underground child" Adam Webber (Brendan Fraser) seem like a gallant, if innocent, Galahad when he emerges looking for a wife among the ladies of the late 1990s. It's comic stuff, to be certain, but even the characters themselves--when confronted with this picture of civility emerged from the amber--seem to recognize that the world has lost something in its rush to embrace nihilism. When the valley shopkeepers of the 1990s repeatedly curse, Adam Webber says, "would you mind not taking the Lord's name in vain?"

"You have a problem with that, buddy?"

"I certainly do have a problem with that," he says.

"Blast from the Past" is the flip side of "Jurassic Park." In the big lizard flick, saintly old Richard Attenborough tells us to "step aside" and let the re-born, remorseless, scaled monsters enjoy their killing ways. Humans, it is implied, should stand aside and allow even the most evil whims of nature to take their toll, out of deference to a value-neutral biological universe. "Blast from the Past" stands in awe of a human being redeemed from the savagery of nature. Adam Webber would slay the dragon. Lord Attenborough would offer up his children to it.

More evidence of our free-fall...

Seniors & The Sorry Reality of Conflict

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:45:00 EST

If you or someone you know is attached to the management of a senior home, assisted care facility, senior community, or senior anything, let them know about our great summer savings for Seniors at Riley's Farm. We've found that seniors don't like traversing the entire width and breadth of the farm, but they do enjoy a good meal and good, toe-tapping music, amidst the pastoral beauty of their rural youth. Just a few minutes ago, I stretched my right arm out a little too fast and I had a senior moment. I also found that some restaurants begin their senior discount program at age 55. (Six years away for your correspondent, now experiencing a scapular, scraping stream of senior pain.)

The Sorry Reality of Conflict

Those of you acquainted with my cranky style and my thoroughgoing embrace of the Calvinist take on man's utterly depraved nature may be surprised to know that I do have my weepy, group-hug moments. There's a ritual I go through after the Revolutionary War Adventure. I try to shake the hands of all the parents and teachers who visit the tour, and I know--of course--that we can't agree on everything, but there are moments of commonality among people that seem to presage the peace of heaven. Sometimes, you can feel it a ballpark, when people of every stripe stand for the national anthem. Sometimes you see even atheists and believers awe-struck by the way Judy Collins sang Amazing Grace. Sometimes friends or co-workers, on parting, after years of working together, forget all their squabbles. For a moment, all they feel is the glow of their common lives, their common share of a journey spent together in life. At the risk of descending into deep absurdity, I remember a news story about Cher weeping at the funeral of Sonny Bono. She had spent most of her post-marriage years ridiculing and mocking her ex-husband, but in the end, all the cheap shots got washed away by the sobbing. Now, to be clear: I can't stand Cher. She's the very picture of what happens when a shallow intellect is fused to a celebrity sense of self. She's a pitiful monument to worshiping whorish youth at all costs, but even in that weeping moment, even I can imagine putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, "there, there."

I'm quite certain God knew that we need these moments of respite from the troubles. You need to turn the speakers up and weep at the Celtic harmonies now and then; you need to picture in your mind's eye an old daddy singing "Danny Boy" to his parted son. You need to clap your hands, sway back and forth in the all gospel choir, and feel the spirit.

But when the music is over, you don't want Cher making public policy. You may be able to sing a hymn, on the gallows, with a remorse-ridden murderer, but you still need to trip the hatch. Simply put, you need the emotion to serve the intellect, and not the other way around. The tragedy of our age is that we have it upside down. Our political leaders are 90% pop-jamboree and 10% ideas--and most of those ideas bankrupt at that. My Marine friend, Steve Klein, reminded me of a time when Hollywood could make a movie where the actors actually sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" without a trace of irony, without the impulse to mock belief in a God whose surpassing love and strength existed to defeat evil. In the scene above, a congregation sings that very song in the middle of a cathedral whose roof has been shorn away by a Nazi air raid. As the chorus swells, the camera looks up to take in the sight of B-17s on their way to defeat the enemy.

The facts are simple, but they are routinely forgotten: both good and evil remain in the world. Those moments of commonality, the thunder of the chorus, shouldn't be there to make us forget our sins, but to proceed on a war footing against them. After you have come to Jesus, after the tears have dried, remember what He said: "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."

More Wine, Less Whine

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:43:00 EST

Mary and I toured Temecula wine country for our anniversary this weekend, and our guide kept talking about the number of new wineries that were being planned, and planted, even in this economy. I should have written down the precise numbers, but I believe she said there were 23 wineries now going through the site permit process, with a goal of establishing a total of 100 new wineries in the next ten years. One of the small farms was even the result of a luxury home distress sale; the new family took the five acre estate and planted grapes all along the hillsides. When we were there, a live band was playing out on the courtyard and the tasting room was awash in guests. Other wineries featured restaurants, spas, gift shops, and a whole calendar full of live music events.

I asked our tour guide, "do you ever have any squabbles between vineyard owners as to who gets more busses, more tourists?"

"No," she said. "We work together."

Simple stuff, really. I think it's known as "a rising tide lifts all boats." Here's to hoping this seaside wisdom catches on--here and generally.

I was telling Mary "you know, in business, it's really not that difficult to offer reasonably good service. If you return your emails, smile at the customers, and make a reasonable effort to provide for their needs, you will be doing better than 99% of the competition."

The simple fact is that most teenagers are not taught to be polite. They are certainly not taught to smile or say hello. Hospitality is not part of our nature, generally. Cool, aloof shyness is more likely to be the norm, and you have to train that reserve out of new employees if you mean to make customers happy. In Temecula,when we approached the tasting rooms--even if they were crowded--the stewards always smiled and were anxious to give you the whole history of their vineyard. One young fellow was the son of a Basque shepherd and he gave us a source for Suffolk sheep. Another walked us through the de-steming and fermentation room and the barrel room--giving us the chemistry of wine making in about fifteen friendly minutes. The girl at Calloway took our picture and asked us all about apple country. I didn't hear one Temecula vineyard owner ragging on their competition, or making sweeping pronouncements about what was, and was not, "Temecula." No one claimed any special expertise for being there longer. No one growled, under their breath, "THEY bring in grapes from outside of the valley."

Granted, they turn their crop into something that can be sold for a premium twelve months a year, and success breeds good breeding. Grinding poverty tends to bring out the desperate in all of us. Oak Glen farmers, and agritourism operators in general, need to cooperatively develop business plans that do more than just pay the bills. We're not saffron-robed ascetics up here, casting wild-flower seed to keep aging hippies happy on their mountain sojourn. We have families, property taxes, compliance costs--and we need to turn a profit!

Could it be that Blackie Wilshire was on to something years ago, when he said, during Prohibition, "well, you could sell a lug of apples for a quarter or a pint of Apple Brandy for $5."

Here's to hoping Oak Glen comes up with more five dollar ideas.

Less Screens, More Scenes

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:14:00 EST

We've added new sod to the south side of the Public House (below), and yesterday, we put 3,000 new strawberry plants into the ground. (I actually saw my first little green strawberry yesterday.)

Mallory is working on summer camp marketing, and she (continued below)...

sent me this article about a mom who wanted to send her child on lots of different, challenging summer day camp experiences and found that most of them were little better than TV-dominated day care centers. Some of the places had nothing but sixteen year olds working for them, with no one "..over the age of 21... to prepare more interactive and creative...activities."

Well, judging by that standard, we are the gold-plated, collector's edition Ferrari of summer day camps, because we feature non stop activities by professional living historians who spend the whole year educating kids.

Now--how to get that message out?

Anniversaries II

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 11:33:00 EST

Happy Birthday, Will.

It's a beautiful day out there today, nothing like the day Mary and I tied the knot here on the farm--in an April snowstorm 21 years ago. The cold was so intense that afternoon, that one of my dad's salesmen stood too close to a propane heater and unwittingly coaxed a smolder out of his toupee. My nephew Danny was having trouble pronouncing his "R"s back then and he blurted out, "Heah, misto yo how is borning." ("Heah, Mister, you're hair is burning.")

They say weather on your wedding is good luck, and that's been true for us: six kids, same business, near constant companionship...and still friends. Praise be to the Almighty.

When I was a younger man, I can remember women obsessing over their hair, and wondering which bouffant would do the trick to win the man of their dreams. To this day, I don't think I've ever heard a guy friend say, "don't you just love her hair?" It's not even in the top ten list of qualifications. I can tell you that men--gentlemen anyway--are far more attracted to the old world virtues than the female lipstick-and-glitter press would have you believe. In my case, Mary had an aura of hard work and optimism about her--a cheerfulness about business, about entrepreneurial ideas, about work that was the precise opposite of the shoe-and-dress-and-purse shopaholic I had dated just before her. If Mary were ever a feminist, she hid it pretty well. (Men may marry a woman who whines about the glass ceiling, but they won't be happy with the sound of the pounding and the breaking and the shattering.) I wonder if there wasn't something cosmic about God's promise to Adam, to provide him a "helpmate." God didn't say, "I will provide him a big-haired woman who will shop him to death." He promised someone who would "help" him.

So..anyway..girls, if you want to catch a husband, learn the virtues of hard work. It's a lot sexier than you think. There's no bigger turn-off among men than the words "high maintenance."

Black Angus

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:19:00 EST

We are now the proud owners of an Angus bull, two cows, and two little calves. We hope this mini-herd can be turned out onto fenced pasture land within the next year or so, and that we can have a kind of mini-cattle company around these parts--mostly for signature Riley's Farm barbecue beef patrons. Scott doesn't want the herd to get very large, so look for corn-fed-beef of the boutique ranch style soon.

Yesterday, I saw a picture of a very, very rotund guy at San Diego's Earth Day celebration, holding up a sign lamenting beef-eating as the number one cause of global warming. There is a charitable way to look at this: the Almighty writes comedy on occasion, even farce, and it is quite possible that brazen fools are placed along life's road as highway-bollards, warning pilgrims where the sticky idiot-pits are to be found. You see literally thousands of these bollards on college campuses. Sometimes they encircle the place entirely.

Consider Notre Dame. There's a school that is becoming more and more "faith-based" in name only with the administration actually opting for more idiot-bollards than classrooms. Not only does the school invite V----a Monologues onto campus, and deviant film festivals, they've extended a commencement address invitation to the most radically pro-abortion president in American History. Middle class parents: don't send your kids to college. Buy them books.

..and a barbecue beef sandwich.

International People-Hating Day

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:24:00 EST

Google tells me tomorrow is Earth Day, and I suppose I look upon that reality with the same veiled disgust Bill Maher reserves for people of faith. I just don't get either the liturgy, or the zeal, or the tide-pool pilgrimages associated with worshiping what is really a whorish nightmare of a mother--the earth. Think about the unrepentant shrew for a minute: she gives us earthquakes, tornadoes, firestorms, tsunamis, draughts, pestilences, sink-holes, avalanches, plagues, locusts, maggots, monsoons, and village-charring, baby-burning volcanoes. Most of you are reading this in an air-conditioned room somewhere, because the earth, quite simply, is too inhospitable a place to allow for any contemplative work--without shielding yourselves from her heat, wind, rain, and dust. She doesn't even have a very good defense against asteroids. She just whirls on through space like a floozy through the ether, without much care for her young ones. If she were a mother, the cosmic authorities would be writing her up.

Her kids, on the other hand--human beings--are the ones we should have an international celebration for. They build cool adobe bungalows against the heat, and warm alpine cabins against the cold. They selectively breed wild, stingy berries and turn them, over the generations, into fat, juicy strawberries. They turn wild ferrell birds into fat-egg dropping chickens. They carve homes out of oaks and ships out of ore. They harness hydrogen and carbon and steel and send explorers into space. They write symphonies, and poetry, and divine morality plays like "Nicholas Nickleby."

People--at least the reclaimed s0rt--are worth celebrating, not their welfare witch of a mother-Gaia.

When I ponder this extravaganza, I can't help thinking of what I'm ashamed to say is a fellow Stanford man, Paul R. Ehrlich, the father of Earth Day. He's the author of "The Population Bomb," who compared human population growth to cancer and who concluded with these words:

"(We need) compulsory birth regulation... (through) the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size."

Since the writing of this book, earth-worshippers have learned to temper their rhetoric, but Ehrlich took off their mask--at the very birth of their movement. Earth Day, at its root, is deeply anti-human. Only the Communist Chinese are barbarian enough to make Ehrlich's desires policy, but the rest of the world, when talking up the "earth friendly," are really talking about controlling human populations, even if they don't admit it. In America, we're civil enough to make child-rearing merely expensive, by burying expensive environmental studies and rat-friendly mitigation work into the price of a home, but we're really limiting our populations by making large families very expensive. It's the same environmental crap in a different, slightly more procedural, wrapper.

I don't mean to spoil your earth day. I just want you to remember that your children, your parents, your cousins, your friends, are far more important than the dirt upon which you trod, even if Paul Ehrlich says otherwise. It's something to think about whenever you see all the friendly little blue globes everywhere.

The guy who invented this holiday hates you and all your kin.

Tea Parties Now and Then

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:49:00 EST

Now: My untrained eye estimated approximately 300 people at the intersection of Yucaipa and Bryant yesterday, with heavy crowds on all four corners, and colossal good cheer on the part of the protestors to hear so many motorists blaring their horns in loud support of the notion that we are over-taxed as a people. One mother, commenting on the economic slavery to come, hand-crafted a huge sign that read "My Child is Not Your A.T.M."

The idea behind modern political street theater (the Rileys weren't the only ones wearing three cornered hats and sporting the Gadsen Rattlesnake flag) is that a memory will be stirred up in the hearts of the public. That memory, of an ancestry that fought and bled to protect "unalienable rights," may find its way into the voting booth and we can peacefully turn out the current generation of pensioned blood-suckers occupying public office. There are plenty of them in both parties, and their essential characteristic is this: they see the tax-base not as a means to build bridges and protect the homeland, but as a means to hand out jobs, contracts, and goodies to their cronies and constituents. In an era of declining personal morality, there isn't a voter anywhere who isn't susceptible to the message "it's all those _______ (fill in your favorite enemy's) fault." The public trough, to these politicians, is the vast ocean of revenue made possible by people who work for a living. As one old man put it to me yesterday, in the form of a riddle:

"What's the difference between a congressman and a thief?"

"I'm having trouble deciding," I said.

"You can arrest a thief."

The simple truth is that there can be no political liberty without political leadership willing to protect private property. Once you begin taxing one class of people to pay for another, the hard-working either leave, or stop working, and you run out of goodies to spread around. As Margaret Thatcher put it, "the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other peoples' money."

I'm hoping the current generation of protestors understands that this is not a partisan issue. It's not a matter of Bush or Obama, Clinton or Palin. Both parties have proven they think they know how to spend your money better than you do. I'm also hoping the pastors of America realize that tax-gluttony on the part of our leaders is a deeply spiritual issue, that they begin to remind their flocks they are not very good Christians or Jews if they elect "statesmen" who are willing to steal from them in the name of good stewardship. I can at least hope the pastors of Americas discover their manhood, even if I saw precious few of them out there yesterday.

Then: even though the Boston tea party of December 1773 had a measure of street theater about it, there were, of course, vast differences to contemplate. In the first place, representation was a critical issue in the 18th century controversy. The idea of having absolutely no say in the taxes a foreign legislature places upon you was, and is, a critical threat to individual liberty. Even with representation, the prospect of 51% of the people deciding they can expropriate the wealth of 1% of the population has to be called what it is: democratic theft. If you live in a democracy of cannibals, it is no comfort to know that you were at least democratically voted into the stew pot. The next generation bearing the mantle of sons of liberty need to do more to protect the liberties of economic minorities. Income taxes and death taxes need to be eliminated entirely, in favor of consumption taxes, or tariffs. The raising of tax levels should have a 3/4 barrier in our legislatures and not a paltry 2/3. Pastors, again, this is a spiritual issue. If you vote for a thief, you are a thief.

The Boston Tea Party was also a secret affair. To this day, we're not sure who participated and who didn't. The participants didn't blog about it, and most didn't even mention it on their death beds. It was also, very clearly, a crime against property--specifically intended to protest an even greater crime against property. The participants were willing to risk mass prosecution because they had faith in each others' silence, which really amounted to a kind of blood oath. A year earlier, when 400 Rhode Island men burnt a revenue schooner to the water line, the British authorities couldn't find anyone to testify against them. Call it what you like--but that is solidarity of a sort we can't even imagine today. Today, if you even mention the Constitution as a standard we should re-invigorate, the Department of Homeland Security puts you on a list.

Finally, the original sons of liberty had spiritual ballast. The pastors of the day were willing to talk about a Christ who cared about justice in this human sphere. Certainly there were Tory apologist pastors and firebrand Whigs, but neither party spent as much of their time filtering the message through their own "church-growth" parameters. Christ was King everywhere--not just in the sanctuary.

Let him who has ears to hear, hear.

Up on Cripple Creek, She Sends Me..

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:57:00 EST

There's an ailment common to many Oak Glen fathers: we don't really like taking vacations. Greg Anton told me his father, Wally, was very hesitant to leave this little valley. He would ask his kids "mountains or beach?" hoping they would say mountains, and thus be tricked into staying on the hill. I know that Benita is hard pressed to push Scott off the mountain as well. As for me, I tell the kids, "we live in paradise. Why leave?"

My wife, Mary the Greek, has responded to this reality by making vacations, for me, something like the arrival of ABC's Extreme Makeover super-bus. All I have to do is show up, and I'm whisked away without worry. My clothing is packed. My contact lens paraphernalia is neatly readied. My favorite snack foods are purchased--in ample supply. If you've ever seen BBC's version of P.G. Wodehouses, "Jeeves & Wooster" where Jeeves could prepare English morning tea & cream with nothing but a cow in the meadow and a tin of Earl Grey in his coat pocket, you know something about Mary's resourcefulness.

This time, we landed in San Simeon State Park, in the Washburn campground, where a neat little grove of pine shaded the grassy berm behind the campsite. This tree-canopy looked out upon one of those pastoral vistas that made 18th century gentlemen stop to sharpen their quills and summon up verse by the lambent light of memory. In the distance, of course, was the gentle Pacific, framing the whole western horizon, lapping up onto a forest of Eucalyptus, and then on to the coffee-tilled earth of what looked like a new vineyard in the making. In nearly every direction there was that milky green flourish of pasture grass, and in certain lights you could see distinct herds of cattle moving over and behind the shadow of hills impossibly far away. The highest ridges, in the distance, were covered with oak forests that implied a kind of Tolkienesque mystery of yet more vistas, more rolling valleys, more "cattle on a thousand hills." It was a battle-commander's vista--without the battle.

My beef with vacations, generally, is that they can't compete with that very Tolkienesque power of imagination, or that Madison Avenue version of the RV sitting next to the Montana lakeside--with no one else around and three pound steelheads jumping into the frying pan of their own accord. Imagination, however, can actually be less spectacular than reality. There's a blue flower that comes up on the meadows outside Santa Maria, and it splays out across the pasture grass in misty indigo clouds that roll along with the wind. You would have to wait for a dream to witness a steel black Angus feeding in blankets of blue meadow, but sometimes you get to see just such things on vacation.

We camped with two other families, and two of the eight year old boys, before the tents were even pitched, had a flashlight and a magnifying glass out to examine the tracks in the spring mud. The doors on the cars were just barely open, and Sam and Lockton were busy turning a dog print into the signs of a bear that had just passed through.

"Is that a bear, Mr. Riley?"

"Looks like a dog," I said.

The two of them appeared disappointed by my candor.

"Hmmm," I said, looking again, "maybe so. Maybe a bear cub."

They seemed satisfied with the possibility they were now tracking the wild.

Eric and Nicholas and Lockton and Samuel set up their tent. Mary brought me an extra jacket, and a chair. Within a few minutes, the campfire was picking up strength, and she handed me a glass of chardonnay.

"What do you think?" she asked.

"Couldn't be any better," I replied.

So Many Channels...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 12:02:00 EST

It is true that there is a lot of road kill out there on the internet video highway, but the people who put together these Improv Everywherestunts prove there is more originality on the street than there is in the offices of programming executives. I haven't taken the time to research how this outfit is funded, but they certainly seem to be generating enough of an audience for someone to make some money off advertising--and the stunts are really inventive. This one, with 2.9 million views, may not be news to you, but it's pure genius, and this one is no less impressive. Let the media giants and the failed leviathan corporations and the unresponsive government agencies go bankrupt, as far as I'm concerned. We'll get better results starting over, from the ground up.

..And here's a fascinating documentary/reality show from the BBC with a unique premise: Gather twelve people, five of whom have been treated for mental health care issues--ranging from anorexia to bipolar disorder--and send them on a retreat with three psychiatrists for a week. Can the psychiatrists determine who has been treated for what? I won't give away the ending, but it becomes apparent that at least one of the "mental health" care professionals looks like he might be slightly more unhinged than the patients. Over the course of their observations, a few of the diagnostic tests seemed intriguing, but human beings are too complex, and too evasive, for psychiatry to claim the sort of primacy it has earned in public policy. It's really a kind of wacky, secular religion. The three mental health care professionals in this show were suitably humbled, but the "science of the human mind" is used by modern tyrants to deprive people of their liberty, with far more power and range than the Spanish Inquisition every enjoyed. We would be much better off replacing our dependence on therapeutic counseling with pastors, chaplains, and rabbis who consult the ancient texts and dispense universal, immutable truths--as opposed to therapeutic evaluations upon which no two sets of credentials can agree.

The Smell of Anschluss in the Morning

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:41:00 EST

The police state never arrives all at once. It creeps up on you.

One of our vendors only accepts C.O.D. Money order, so we sent Brandon, one of our staff members, down to the post office with $3,400 in cash to buy one. The Postal Clerk said, "how much?"

"$3,400."

"Fill this out."

The post office wanted Brandon's full name, date of birth, driver's license number, social security number, address, and the reason he needed a money order. It also stated, clearly, that the information was strictly voluntary. Brandon, sensing that this was all the information someone would need to begin identity theft, responded:

"This is not mandatory."

"It's voluntary," said the postal worker, "but if you don't fill it out, I can't give you the money order."

"What if I ask for two money orders for $1700 each?"

"No can do. Now that I know you need more than $3,000, I need all this information."

Brandon, to his great credit, responded: "Never mind then. I'll get it somewhere else."

Last week, an air traveler, carrying cash in an airport, was harassed, belittled, and intimidated by TSA workers for responding to their questions with the simple inquiry: "Am I legally obliged to give you that information?" The traveler recorded the conversation and you can listen to it here. For more or less the last twenty years, if you want to identify yourself as a radical, a criminal, or a terrorist--carry cash. What used to be seen as a sign of thrifty self-sufficiency is now seen as an indicator of malevolent intent. In the early 1980s, some of my father's east coast manufacturers purchased Italian lace-making machines for cash, as per the demand of the manufacturer. They traveled to Italy with literally tens of thousands of dollars in their carry-on luggage. At the time, they said it made them a little nervous, but only because thieves might steal their money. It never occurred to them that their own government might be their persecutor.

Let's face it: the War on Terror was a huge farce. Our soldiers served honorably, but we trashed the Constitution at home in order to prop it up, and we made our boys die to install a religious state in Iraq. (The Iraqi Constitution specifically and emphatically states that no law can ever contradict Islam, which lays the groundwork for denying religious freedom, which is "guaranteed" a bit further down in the document.)

A time honored principle of English justice is the simple provision that you are not required to testify against yourself, that you are presumed innocent until the state proves its case beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.

If we give that up, we're little better than the goose-stepping robots who marched into Salzburg and sent the Von Trapp family flying for the hills.

Conspiracy Theory

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 13:38:00 EST

I haven't been journaling as much, because I've been thinking Summer quite a bit, and getting ready for it--what crops to seed, what advertising venues to consider, where to rent a chipper for our apple prunings, what sort of out door furniture to put underneath the grape arbor. Sometimes, when you run a business, the temptation is just to train your staff on execution issues--to write "to do" lists for them, but the older I get the more I realize that harnessing your staff's intellect is the most important thing you can do. Maricella put our bakery items on display outside the order window--and presto--sales went up. Krystle and Mary Johns put a rack of fifes and newspapers outside the gift store, and--zappo--historic document and fife sales went up.

Really, though, "conspiracy" has been on my mind, because when you don't have cable or Dishnet, sometimes you spend your late night hours typing "documentary" into YouTube, filtering for last week's posts, and then sorting by viewcount. You get LOTS of conspiracy theory, from left, right, center, and straight out of this universe.

On one level, of course, it all seems very nutty. It's hard to imagine George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, and Joe Biden running around in Masonic Aprons, bowing down to a huge owl in the forest. (Would they let Joe Biden in? Now that would have to be particularly poor conspiracy planning.) I don't get it. I had a really inglorious rush season at Stanford, and I've never really been a club-joiner, so I see it all as something like the Flintstone episode where Wilma and Betty tried to sneak into the lodge and got their hind ends spanked as part of the initiation ritual--wearing great fur-caps with horns sticking out over each ear. It just seems patently, outrageously absurd.

On the other hand, what is the most common thing you hear in daily conversation?

"..just between you and me..."

We are secretive beings by nature. Do you think that when Senator Chris Dodd arranged for the cozy Countrywide mortgage and the neat little Irish estate, courtesy, ultimately, of the taxpayer, he made a big sunlight show of talking it up on the floor of the Senate? Do you think that when the AIG bonus language was put back in the bailout bill, the treasury department composed a press release of the last minute, secretive action for the New York Times? Why do we think there are "sunshine" and "Brown Act" laws to begin with? Public officials don't really enjoy scrutiny. Even if conspiracy sounds downright nutty, it also sounds downright plausible.

A little more than two years ago, the Federal Reserve just announced that they would no longer publish M3 (money supply) statistics. Presto--changeo. They claimed it cost $1.5 million to calculate how much money was in circulation, so, get this, they were "saving money."

We can give away trillions of dollars to the International Monetary Fund, Wall Street Banks, and the "too big to fail" corporations who have created the mess in the first place, but we can't spend $1.5 million calculating the money supply? Can you imagine a publicly traded company saying, "heah, listen, we just decided not to publish how much stock we have outstanding; it cost too much."

Hello?

The bottom line is that if you're about to do something really, really secretive and despicable--make sure you put on a robe and dance around in the moonlight first.

That way, no one will believe you're up to dirty tricks.

Why Truth Beats Fiction

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:17:00 EST

You can't make this stuff up: According to the Associated Press, an Ohio man was arrested after he was alleged to have consumed fifteen beers, just prior to making too sharp a high speed turn on his motorized bar stool.

It seems to me, in one sense, that's the very stuff of what family legend is made. You can almost imagine the conversation at wedding receptions and birthday parties: "Yeah, that's my Uncle Zack; he got a DUI on his bar stool," followed by "that's him? I heard about this!"

Years ago some of my high school friends stole over the high wall of a monastery at midnight to harrass--I'm sorry to say--the monks. The story is so strange on a number of accounts, even though it's true. In the first place, who lives close to a monastery anymore? In the suburbs? In the 70s? The story goes that one of these teenage ruffians had to scamper up an olive tree and sit in it all night, because a big, barrel-chested Friar Tuck stormed out of the monastery and started pumpking rock salt out of a shotgun.

My wife has a colorful Greek uncle, who--as family lore has it--wandered between mildly pixilated and vaguely dangerous. He was given to making up words, and entire phrases, in a language no one else understood. ("Is that Greek?" strangers would ask, and the Greek relatives would respond, "no one knows what he's saying.") This side of the family was part of the Greek resistance to the Nazis during World War II and "Uncle George" was rumored to have left the love of his life in Greece when he came to America. From all accounts, he was crazy--in more or less an amusing way--until one day, in a fight with a deputy sheriff, he wound up locking the deputy in the trunk of his squad car. When he was arrested, he heard a familiar voice over the wall of the jail--and fell into a conversation with another relative who was arrested on an entirely different matter. Call it a family reunion, I guess.

How is it that events completely beyond the pale in the here and now somehow become gentle legends when considered in the abstract, at a distance? It's nearly suicidal to pursue a life of legend, and people who try to make a legend out of their antics usually wind up hospitalized, dead, or worse, but sometimes the Almighty allows an act born of passion, a sheer piece of momentary idiocy, to stand more or less unrequited by the physical and legal universe. Call it mercy, or comedy, I guess--the Divine sort.

At any rate, don't try any of this at home. No one will believe you.

All I need is loving you and ...

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:06:00 EST

One of these days, I'm going to make a systematic study of what a singer means, when she turns to the band and says, "Key of G, fellas." (I mean I know a tad, but not as much as you could find out reading this article and pondering it for a few weeks.)

The kids are downright aching to play music these days, so I'm trying to figure out what a reasonable family ensemble objective might be with suitably 18th century flavor. I downloaded a new version of Cakewalk yesterday, tooled around with my new fife in the key of F, tried to accompany David Thomas on the guitar in the public house, asked Freeman a few questions about keyed instruments, waxed more confused, then went to playing with the innumerable MIDI settings on banks, patches, and the like, and finally got Cakewalk outputting acoustic grand piano sound on three tracks. I typed in the melody line for a fife tune that was played on the morning of April 19, 1775 at Lexington--the White Cockade. I wondered what harmony or counter melody might sound like in three parts. Here's my first try at three part something or other. (Turn up the speakers, but not too loud.)

Dunno what I did there--whether it's harmony, counter-melody, or just pure "dissonance." It sounds a little too "barber-shoppy" to me for the 18th century. There's a maddening phrase you see quite a bit when you read about 18th century folk music. It usually goes something like this: "crude scores were written on broadsides and in the journals of itinerant country musicians, but the ensemble was expected to come up with their own harmonies."

Now, I just need to see whether any "itinerant country musician" wrote a harmony somewhere, and if someone has been kind enough out there in internet land to sequence it for me--as an example. Then I have to figure out parts for piano, tin whistle (6 keys to choose from), fife (two keys to choose from so far), fiddle, and recorder, and...voice.

Fun, frustrating stuff..

Father Knows Best

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 12:09:00 EST

I find movies like Liam Neeson's "Taken" better than Sunday School. Think about it; there's more truth bundled in this revenge drama than in most church teaching today: 1) there are evil disgusting people in the world, 2) when someone has the courage to put them down like the dogs they are, we should celebrate that strength 3) fathers have an instinct for the danger facing their children and that instinct should be honored, 4) teenage girls shouldn't be traveling in foreign capitals by themselves 5) when bureaucratic functionaries value their jobs over justice, they become part of the evil they claim to be fighting, and 6) Islam--with its "one morality for us, another for the Kuffars"-- doesn't exactly make for a happy sing-along at the U.N. peoples' choir.

People of faith hear the words of the Psalmist (58:10): "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked," but there is a disconnect when it is played out either in reality, or in film. (I'm not sure if fellow theater goers appreciated my whispered cheer--'send the little jackal back to hell!') After all, it's probably a good thing that we have a sense of mercy, written on our hearts, or we would all be something like the savage Druids and Celts and Aztecs and Animists from which we descend. However, there is also a false mercy operating in our own generation that keeps Charlie Manson eating meals and reading fan mail in prison. Obviously, we need to be a nation of laws, not of men, but the sort of human vermin that kidnap travelers for sale into the harem-trade know that very proceduralism works in their favor. A public firing squad for the authors of these cartels--and they do exist--would be good for the soul of the nation, and for the safety of international travelers.

Granted, I don't quite buy Liam Neeson as an American. I think the story would have been equally effective if he had played an IRA partisan, retired from the troubles, and brought back into the fray by the theft of his daughter. I could also do without car chases, and, of course, the plot is full of the outright improbable, but in a generation given to mutant special powers, it's nice to see a morality play chronicled with more probable human weapons--knives, slamming doors, guns, hammers, and electrical voltage liberally applied.

Apparently, the film is making more money than the producers thought it would.

Is it any wonder?

Breakfast in the Colonies

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:16:00 EST

I'm fast approaching, with any discipline today, a "10 Pound Loss" mark on Weight-Watchers. Actually, it's a little more complicated than that. I started an account with Weight-Watchers online about eighteen months ago, and lost ten pounds over about 12 weeks. The resulting increase in energy and the reduced blood pressure made me feel something like the Papa figure in The Incredibles and I entered a long Holiday eating binge that lasted from Thanksgiving of 2007 to about Labor Day of 2008. (The Holidays are always tough.) The shameful truth is that I charged right on past the original "panic weight," (the weight that made me say to myself 'you, Jim Riley, are a big fat DISGUSTING slob'), and proceeded to take on another ten pounds of ballast by way of celebrating my previous discipline. Well, my nephew, Quinn approached me one night at Sunday family dinner and said:

"Uh, Uncle Jim?"

"What is it, Quinn?"

"You need to get some exercise."

"Quinn," I said. "Thank you very much for that. I know you are mad at me for changing the channel, but there is a grain of truth in what you are saying to your dear old Uncle. Would you get me another one of those peanut butter cookies?"

What followed, over the next few months, was kind of a rolling ocean wave of up and down--peas and popcorn one week, triple lasagne and family sized jars of roasted almonds next week--followed by another period of steely resolve that now brings me back to the starting perch again--the platform, the weight base camp--where I can make the assault on that far away goal of my desired mass--which in truth is about 20 pounds more than the goggle-eyed, death-march dieticians would say is my ideal "healthy" weight. I am 6' 4" and by some weird calculus I'm supposed to be, like 190-200 pounds, but I would settle for five pounds less than my honeymoon, twenty-eight year old weight of 225 pounds. 'The Mighty 220' I call it.

The trouble is that we bake something like 150 apple pies a day, and we feature really good sausage and omelet breakfast platters, and it's not that you can't have that from time to time. You can. But taking just one or two sausages, for me, is something like giving yourself just a tiny little peak out the window at Yosemite, or allowing yourself five seconds of The High Kings' Parting Glass. If something is good, I mean you want to kind of indulge.

Those big one pound bricks of Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate. An entire box of Costco Croissants. A salty, buttery jar of Planter's Dry Roasted Peanuts.

Do I reach the Mighty 220 and then kind of pig-out for the Holidays, or can you make an indulgence out of discipline itself? Can moderation ever be as belly-rich as two plates of Penne Rustica at the Macaroni Grill? It must be part of our condition as humans.

Mother Eve would have something to say on the matter.

Fifes & Pianos & Music & Such...

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:05:00 EST

Sometime last year, during one of our dinners, I sat down with a guest and asked him his profession. He was the conductor of an orchestra, and his wife was a composer. Now, keep in mind, I'm very proud of our musicians here, but it's always a little intimidating knowing that the audience might hold a Carnegie Hall or a Feature Film type out there.

Rod Stewart once claimed you only needed to know three chords to be a rock star and I think a lot of well-packaged pop music is 70% charisma, 28% technical assistance, and 2% musical training, but even with all of that, in the era of shrink-wrapped, downloadable, "slick" entertainment, most people don't trust themselves to even dabble in music. Truth be told, I get a little annoyed with people who don't even want to try singing. Freeman House, our fiddler, will tell you that Jim Riley shouldn't even try singing either, not because I have pitch issues, but because I make up my own version of the tune--which of course makes the whole ensemble thing sort of difficult.

We started paying for piano and fiddle lessons a few years ago and I was worried that the kids were looking upon the whole thing as a chore, but then for some reason everything popped and they all wanted to join the family band (which in this case is headed by the musical mama and papa--Freeman and Kathy). It's been a real joy to hear them working on tunes, checking out Irish flutes on the internet, and coveting baby Grands down at Oak Valley Piano. (One of the few places you can actually go and play a piano before buying it. Highly recommended.)

Moral of the story: play good music around the house, keep paying for the lessons, and then let them play something well enough, in front of the public, to get a little praise--and they will be hooked.

The other issue is that Americans should really begin taking more responsibility for their own music. They should start turning off the radio, the Pod, the CD-Player and start buying sheet music. We need to start singing our own songs again!

The Hard Loving, Hard Living Fellowship

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:11:00 EST

After yesterday's post on branding criminals, I saw this video of a break-in "artist" caught on tape. Watch it to the end. I don't think you would have to brand this guy. He's self-branding. (He also seems to be very nearly indestructible.)

I also received a critique of my Bristol Palin lament the other day, and I was reminded that "only Jesus was without sin. Bristol Palin is not our role model; Jesus is our role model." I guess I find that sort of response a tad disorienting. It actually makes me a little dizzy. It would be something like finding out your house painter had completely paint-splattered your patio, your pool, your cactus garden, and your dog, but he isn't even trying to clean up. He is, in fact, pulling out of your driveway. He's saying, "see you tomorrow-maybe." When you ask him about the mess, he says, "heah. Only Jesus is perfect."

In another sense, it would be like hearing Jesus Himself tell the story of the Good Samaritan only to have someone in the crowd respond, "okay, okay, I get it, Lord. It's okay to ignore wounded people on the roadside because only you are perfect, right? The Samaritan was, like, doing the legalistic thing, trying to work his way to heaven, and.."

<<deep sigh>>

It all brings me back to the sort of faith community I would design if I were a playwright capable of speaking the "city on a hill" into existence. Here's my version of what a "real" Christian church would look like:

	The Perfect Church Community -- By Jim Riley
	1.	First of all: It probably wouldn't allow me as a member. If my Bristol critique made someone think I hold myself out as "not needing Jesus," then I should make it clear: I'm probably too selfish and impulsive to be a member of a community that really "took up its cross" daily. I say this to make clear what shouldn't need to be clarified: the speaker may sully the idea, but that doesn't make the idea any less important. Another way of putting it: just because we might not ever be Navy SEALs doesn't mean we don't need their services.
	2.	No wimps, no whiners: the guys who hung out with Christ were tough dudes--ready to lop off an ear at the sign of an insult. Yes, they were meek, but it was a meekness that came out of strength of spirit, not out of cowardice. Ideally, everyone in a real Christian church should know how to shoot; they should know how to put the hurt on wrong-doers, even if they know the value of restraint. Believe it or not, I once encountered two teenage Christian boys who swore they wouldn't even defend their own mother from a murderer. Lord save us from that sort of cowardice--and from the pastors who preach it. Christ turned the other cheek, but he also turned the tables--and braided the whip.
	3.	No False Holiness: Everyone in a real Christian church should be more or less who they are--not who they think they should be, unless that ideal really is scriptural. I've had it with people who pretend the joke isn't funny because it doesn't seem "grave enough" or "reverent." The same God who waxed sick of hungry complainers and threatened to give them meat until it came out their noses (Numbers 11), has a powerful sense of the comic. I don't trust anyone who doesn't have a sense of humor.
	4.	Be Political, Make it Relevant: John the Baptist got right in Herod's face. We should too. Paul makes it clear that any leader who isn't a terror unto evil and a rewarder of good, isn't really a leader by God's standards. Pastors who preach abject obedience to evil are evil, and any pastor who isn't political these days, really isn't a pastor. Shepherds feed the flock, but they fight off wolves too.
	5.	Have a Drink, Throw a Feast: You've heard me preach it before. The Wedding at Cana? The return of the Prodigal Son? Christians should have a good time. We have good news to celebrate. I'm not a very good dancer, but Christians should dance, play music, sing. King David made a few mistakes, but not while he was playing music. This is not, of course, an excuse for drunkenness or substance abuse; it is a recognition that Christ gave us wine to make our hearts glad. Don't make a gospel out of turning down His gift.
	6.	Live the real commandments--not the gospel hobbies: We should spend more time crucifying ourselves for dishonesty, murderous hatreds, covetousness, infidelity, casual sabbaths, dishonoring parents--and we should spend less time on rapture rumination, diet holiness, and weird fads like "Christian environmentalism." We should spend more time taking scripture to life and less time putting Christian labels on junior college curriculum.
	7.	Sex is not the enemy--infidelity is: Married Christian couples should have a Song of Solomon love life. They should get married young and have a lot of kids. Love is not a feeling that settles down on you. It's a decision. It is not "fate." It is "will." Christian "singles" and Christian "youth" culture--with serial dating, serial sensuality, and, at its very worst, serial abortion--is an abomination. Don't wait for your education to get married. Get married and educate each other. Don't spend your youth slumming through one heart-break after the next. Try to earn what a papa owns when his little boys run through the front door to give him a hug at night.
	8.	Covenant is Everything: Why are we tithing to these mega-church audio-visual ministries when we could be tithing to each other, in real Christian communities, that would be unafraid to speak the truth? When a church gets too large, it starts operating like a franchise, or a businesses, and the gospel suffers. Keep it small. Keep it covenantal. The burden of one should be the burden of all--and the rest of the world should learn from that relationship. We wouldn't have this monstrous, hideously inefficient welfare state if Christians really cared for each other.
	9.	Discipline the Remnant: the best and worst things about some "Christian Independents" is their very independence. Just because some of us pull ourselves out of the mainstream church, doesn't mean we've really replaced it until and unless we learn to submit to each other. I've seen a lot of the remnant claim, in effect, they are the "remnant of the remnant" because of their peculiarly keen collection of liturgical theories and domestic routines. It comes off as just plain nutty. Do not divide over non-essentials.
	10.	Be the best at what you do: John Winthrop effectively said this was his wish for the Bay Colony. "Let it be as in New England." Ideally, a community of believers should be so devoted to doing their work well that others say, "those guys are the best doctors, the best lawyers, the best film-makers, the best brick-layers you can find."

Okay, so who wants to join up? Show of hands?

The Swift Economy of Colonial Justice

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:23:00 EST

Here are just a few incidents of crime and punishment as they were administered throughout the colonies in the years 1768 through 1770 and chronicled by the Portsmouth New Hampshire Gazette. Contrary to what you might assume, crime was not a major feature of colonial newspapers. In this era, correspondents were far more interested in political intrigue and the ideas surrounding the rights of free men. You have to really look, in other words, for a crime blotter, and when crime was reported, unlike today, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. You read about the crime itself, the trial, and the punishment.

I would argue the speediness of this justice is good for the soul of any society. You aren't left, as a citizen, with the angst of hearing about the villainy of one barbarous act after the next, followed by years of procedural maneuvering and the prospect of a smug criminal laughing at the system after a few years of watching Jerry Springer in the can; you have the satisfaction of knowing that the enormity of the crime was met with the enormity of punishment. Attempted rapists were publicly shamed and whipped, burglars were branded with a "B" on the forehead, murderers were hanged, and even common criminals proposed their own punishment, administered by the victims, without the censure of the local magistrate.

Those of us outside today's criminal justice apparatus tend to see our own system as erring on the side of caution, mercy, and the rights of the accused, but the reality is much more cynical. What we call "criminal justice" today is primarily a jobs program. Every new rapist, every new burglar, every new murderer represents money to the system--new jobs for jailers, new jobs for prison builders, more billable hours for detectives, social workers, psychiatrists, more fund-raising letters for various silly sisters of mercy who put Berkeley post-grads to work, trying to make the world safe for arsonists and child-killers. Follow the money. What we are paying for today has nothing to do with either justice for the victim or mercy for the accused. It has everything to do with handing out more state pensions to people who have the gall to say they are "reforming" criminals. Our system, in the last analysis, at a time of budget constraint, certainly has no respect for the tax-payer.

Think of the sheer beauty and simplicity of burning a burglar with a brand-iron "B" on the forehead. This was done in public, before children, as an example of bad behavior. For the rest of his life, the burglar carried with him a very efficient background check and a collosal incentive to reform himself. Imagine the man who truly wanted to change, after a life of crime. He had to work harder to win his fellow citizens' trust, and in the faces of those who reacted to his branded flesh, he had a reminder--every day--to change his ways. If he did continue in a life of crime, the judge could see, immediately, without the benefit of a computerized rap-sheet, what sort of offender he had before him.

We have come very far, on many fronts, as a society, but we are fooling ourselves if we really think we have become more merciful, and more "progressive" in the arena of criminal justice.

To wit:

Boston, April 23, 1770 In the present Term of the..Court, one George White was convicted of Burglary, in breaking into the House of Mr. John Moffatt, and had the Benefit of the Clergy, being burnt in the Hand, he was also convicted of breaking into the Province House and stealing, for which he was sentenced to be branded in the Forehead with the Letter B and to pay Cost; he was also convicted upon other Indictments against him for stealing, on each of which he has been sentenced to be whipt 20 Stripes, to pay treble damages and Cost.

Portsmouth, August 11,(1769) Friday last came on at the Superior-Court then sitting, the Trial of one Arthur Meloy, of this Town, a Man near 60 Years old, for abusing and attempting a RAPE...last Wednesday being the Day appointed for him to make his public Appearance in this Character, at Eleven A.M. he was mounted on a Stage before the State-House, erected for the Purpose on which he was Pillory'd, and there remained one Hour, a Spectacle to a great Concourse of People, he was then taken down and conducted to the Whipping-Post, where after receiving 15 Lashes...

(Charleston, SC, May 1, 1769) On Wednesday Matthew Turner, late a Mariner on Board the Ship Bacchus of Liverpool, was arraigned...for the Murder of Wililam Harrop, late Master of the said Ship, ...On Friday the 28th after a long and full hearing, the Court unanimously found the said M. Turner Guilty, and sentenced him to be hanged....

New York, December 4, 1769: Last Tuesday one John Campbell, was indicted and convicted of Grand Larceney, and received sentence of death, and is ordered to be executed on Friday, the 22d inst. He is an old offender, and has been crop'd and branded in the Forehead; and said to have been whip'd in South-Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Boston.

HARTFORD, November 27, (1770) In the Evening preceeding the Thanksgiving, a strolling Vagabondly fellow in his way (as he pretended) to Boston, coming into a private House in the eastwardly Part of the Town, in the Habit and Character of a Beggar plausibly sought for Entertainment; calling himself a Native Subject of the King of Denmark, from whose Dominions about Ten years ago he came into this Country; since which among other misfortunes, he has that of losing all the Fingers on one Hand, and free use of those of the other by falling into the Fire in a convulsion-Fit. Being thus recommended to the Pity and Charity of the hospitable Family, commiserating his calamitous Circumstances they could do no other than receive him as their Guest. But as he preferr'd solitary Retirement to Company under a Pretence of not being troublesome to the Family, was introduced to a comfortable Fire in the Kitchen. But while the Family were busy in the other Room, confiding in the Simplicity and Honesty, as well as imbecility of their new guest, he, with several Articles of Value, was soon found to be missing; whereupon with all convenient Speed, the Thief was pursued, and overtaken at a Tavern about a Mile distant, where in merry Mood, he was offering his new Assortment upon Sail (sic) to the highest Bidder. This Merriment might have lasted longer, had it not been interrupted by the true Owner challenging his Property, who after some proper Diversion, bound the apprehended Criminal, for a more easy and convenient Escortment about seven Miles in a retrograde March to a civil Magistrate. But the reluctant Villain, choosing rather to make a present than a future Settlement, made the Proposal, to which, with the Advice of the Company, the indulgent Creditor consented; for the Receipt of which (Matters being thus amicably accomodated) he voluntarily stripping himself receive'd upon the Spot seven hearty Lashes, with a good sturdy Horse-Whip warmly apply'd, which he tamely submitted to and endured with all the Patience and fortitude which his own Circumstances and the Nature of the Thing would well admit of..

The Outlandish Expense of Justice

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:45:00 EST

Here's a routine story, unfortunately, from the local news about a home invasion robbery that took place ten days ago in Yucaipa. The assailants barged through the homeowners' door, at gunpoint, and duct-taped their victims mouths and eyes. One of the victims was kicked and struck--as their home was being ransacked. After 30 minutes of hearing their belongings removed from their home, and perhaps not knowing whether they would be killed, the home-invaders made off with the victims' car.

Apparently, in this case, the car had a tracking device, and they were captured in a relatively short span of time, but the real injustice is about to begin. The court and jail system will begin to move on this, and they will receive a trial, or perhaps a plea-bargain, as, of course they should. Due process is critical in any nation of laws, but whether you believe in deterrence or not, the sort of human scum that are found guilty of this kind of cruelty are just too expensive to house--and too expensive to let free once the existing jail system has turned them into even more thorough-going monsters than they were before they entered it. The most merciful thing that can be done for criminals of this sort, and for society, is to execute them--publicly, or at the very least, whip them, set them in the pillory, brand them, and cut off their ears--all punishments that were not considered "cruel and unusual" by the very men who wrote the words "cruel and unusual" into our constitution.

Of course, those familiar with our present system will respond, "wait; a death penalty would take forever and be far more expensive than a plea bargain and a few years in prison," but that of course makes the assumption that we should honor our existing body of legal precedent. It assumes we have actually made progress in criminal justice over the last century. We haven't. Lawyers tend to create work for other lawyers, and in the modern era, they make work for prison wardens, correctional officers, social workers, private detectives, police departments, and nurses, doctors, and psychologists. There's a whole constituency getting paid very well to make sure final justice is never rendered. Moreover, the prison system we currently maintain for violent offenders is far more "cruel and unusual" than anything an 18th century mind could possibly have conceived. Can anyone really doubt that a firing squad would be infinitely more merciful to a convicted murderer than a lifetime in solitary confinement? Can anyone really argue that 39 lashes across the bare back and a "Thief" branded on the right hand wouldn't be infinitely more merciful than sending a young lad into a maximum security prison?

It might even do something the monstrously expensive system we now maintain can't do: reform him.

A Little Patrick Henry in the Evening

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:49:00 EST

This year, we're starting in on our Saturday night public house program, featuring music, hearty food, 18th century sing-a-longs, and the oratory of Patrick Henry. One of the school tour dads, this week, after hearing my version of the son of thunder's speech, said, "we should do a documentary on this place. It's so close to the surface for you. You really live this conflict, as though the wound were still open."

I thought for a moment, and then I said: "I believe in the depravity of man; As they say about the holocaust, 'Never Forget.'"

I used the holocaust for a reason in my response because, the trend in human behavior is to make previous conflicts feel comic, improbable, forgotten--even if the scope of the evil is almost impossible to process in its enormity. That's why the pillaging Redcoats of yesteryear, who struck fear in the hearts of the colonists, have become today's red-woolen dandies. That's why Mel Brooks can get a laugh out of even "Spring Time For Hitler and Germany." As a defense mechanism, or perhaps because we are addicted to what Patrick Henry caled "that phantom of hope," we need to make the truly evil truly improbable. We can't stand the notion that we might have some complicity in it, or some call to oppose it. In another sense, it's why living history can sometimes appear neutral and bloodless--played out by academics and hobbyists who want to see so many different sides of an issue they can't ever settle on single truth of the matter. It was either right, or wrong, to tax the colonists without their consent. It was either right, or wrong, to march on their provincial arsenals and steal their ammunition from them. It was either right, or wrong, to shoot them dead for mustering on a village green.

If we settle on the truth, we have to do something about it, so the tendency is to pretend there is no question at all. It's easy to pretend there isn't a problem with encumbering our grandchildren right into economic long term slavery. It's easy to pretend we can kill off more than a million of our children in the womb every year without understanding that we are living in the middle of a holocaust. It's easy to pretend that our political parties really represent our ideals--when it is becoming more and more clear they are padding their pensions and paying off their donors. On a whole deafening roar of issues, it is easy to pretend there is really no question at all.

But as Patrick Henry said, "the question before the house is one of awful moment for this country."

Indeed.

Let us raise our glass to a man who didn't avoid the question.

Someone to Stand Up for the Bad Guys -- Is the Church Doing Anything, Anywhere?

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:37:00 EST

A year or two ago, I did a promotional email for St. Patrick's here and I merely re-counted ancient Irish folklore--extolling Patrick's victory over the "cruel, pagan kings of Ireland." If you can believe it, a few Wiccan types wrote back, scolding me for offending their religious sensitivities. Yesterday, pitching An Evening With Patrick Henry, I chose a subject line I thought was reasonably dramatic, but true to the spirit of Patrick Henry's lament, ("...is life so dear..as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?.."). My subject line? "Kick Slavery in the Teeth." Well, someone wrote back last night, calling that extremely offensive. I ridicule Hugo Chavez, Kim Jong-Il and Saudi Royalty quite a bit, so I imagine, someday, I'll get a dismissive email from someone protective of dictator self-esteem.

Sheesh. There are some folks so afraid of evil--the very concept of evil--that the reminder itself bothers them. Wickedness, by this way of thinking, goes away if it is never discussed--despite all the historical evidence to the contrary. I think all parents, on one occasion or another, are guilty of taking this position. A bully causes a problem, but pop yells louder at the victim, for seeking justice, than he does at the source of the problem itself. There's yet another brand of evil-aversion typified by that old Marxist, Vanessa Redgrave, who bailed terrorists out of Guantanamo. It goes something like this: no one is perfect, so anyone who seeks justice, by restraining evil, is evil. These people generally lack any sense of degree. Joseph Stalin could kill fifty million Russians, but Joe McCarthy is somehow just as bad, or worse, for making a few false accusations. Vanessa Redgrave--dramatic uber-genius and political village idiot--sees Palestinian casualties as somehow balancing the moral scale against world wide Jihad and the holocaust. (Picture a psychopathic thug responding to a finger-scratch by burning his victim alive; Vanessa would see equivalency here--and maybe even buy the matches.)

Fortunately, this weird attachment to falsehood is rare, if sometimes a bit virulent. If it catches on, it will be difficult to find any measuring cup for evil. You can almost imagine kids running around with Marxist murderers on their t-shirts.

Wait...

Is the Church Really Doing Anything? Anywhere?

Don't get me wrong. I like Sarah Palin. She's not afraid to tote a gun, raise a family, gut a deer, haul in lobster traps, keep her husband happy. She's a babe. She's pro-life. She believes in drilling for oil and making fun of leftist freaks. She believes in a God who gets behind causes, and she obviously has church life. If you have time, you can see some of it here. It's old news, but it shows that Sarah wasn't just doing the politician-in-the-congregation thing, dropping by to pick up votes and checks. She basically states that she grew up in the church, got saved in the church, and saw the church as a force for community--in her community. She had been attending church long enough to watch the pastor grow older. It doesn't seem like a casual relationship, but then take a look at this. How does a family attend a church for so long and then produce a teenager who doesn't even seem to have a rudimentary knowledge of even the basics?

A close friend gave me some insight the other day, when we discussed legalism. Legalism is a favorite dodge of pastors and parents who don't really want to teach God's immutable moral law. But legalism has nothing to do with God's actual commandments and everything to do with mankind's religious inventions. Legalism is making all the men wear dark blue slacks and starched white shirts. Legalism is claiming real Christians are only "alive" if they listen to rock-n-roll praise music, or, conversely, if they only worship using 500 year old hymns. Legalism is claiming you can only be born again if you're pre-millenial, or post-millenial for that matter. Legalism is claiming not even Christ would have a glass of wine. Legalism is pretending the Song of Solomon doesn't exist. Legalism is pretending the Bible has anything definitive to say about tobacco, or Vitamin C for that matter.

The Ten Commandments, however, are not legalisms. They are the very "law written on the heart" that God affirms as a proof of devotion, as the sign of someone who loves and follows Him. If Bernie Madoff had a keener sense of the Ten Commandments, he wouldn't have stolen 50 billion dollars. If Bristol Palin had a keener sense of God's law, she would try very hard to marry the father of her child.

I use this example a lot, but without the law written on the heart--on both believers and non-believers--it would be impossible to run a u-pick orchard. You really can't open an orchard for picking, or a store for buying, if a majority of the customers don't believe there is something deeply wrong with stealing.

It would seem, however, that if Sarah Palin's church life is any guide, America's spiritual leaders are more concerned with jumping straight to forgiveness and more or less squatting right there, on that theological spot, forever. No one is really taught what they need to be forgiven for, or after being forgiven, what standard they should follow.

Pastors, consider Bristol Palin.

How much ignorance can we produce--and still keep the orchard open for picking? Abstinence is not "realistic" today. Will honesty be next?

Blood Loyalty

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:35:00 EST

There's a rather small, back-water debate going on in conservative circles about the decision of Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston not to get married. Bristol, you will remember, is the teenage daughter of Governor Sarah Palin, who was lauded in pro-life circles for keeping her child and announcing that she would marry the baby's teenage father, Levi Johnston. I was among those applauding. It was a decision that showed respect for life, and for taking responsibility for that life, by giving the toddler a mother and a father. The two of them made a mistake, but they were taking responsibility for that mistake, by having the child, and starting a new family.

Well, it looks like the "new family" part of the deal is on hold. Bristol sold the pictures of her new child to People Magazine for $300,000, and she announced a "mutual" decision not to get married.

I feel something like a fan, rooting for an inglorious underdog on American Idol, only to find out her agent negotiated a big prize money deal, if she agreed to take a fall on stage.

There was a time, in America, when even a divorce meant you were finished in politics--even if the divorce was not your fault. Now, as Teddy Kennedy proves, you can even dump a girl in a river and get nighted for it by the Queen of England. We've gone from a fairly high standard of integrity for both politicians and their families to a sense that everyone screws up, so...whatever...move on people...nothing to see here.

Of course, conservative family-values politicians get raked over the coals far more vigorously for moral failure because they make the mistake of championing the ancient truths in the first place, but it seems that even the "values voters" are reconciled to accepting not just a little personal weakness--but a whole lot of it. When Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani last year, it was a signal that some values voters don't believe the political power of those values, or in the likelihood of any politician representing them.

In the instance of Bristol Palin, we are told, first of all, that Sarah Palin bears no blame for her adult daughter's actions--and certainly that is true, to an extent. We hope that Mom's values will influence her children, but Bristol's television admission that "abstinence" is "not realistic," either means Sarah shares her opinion, or Bristol wasn't listening. Since, Sarah, however is the public figure, the one selling conservative family values to the American public, we would expect--at the very least--to hear her response to her daughter's decisions.

It could take a lot of forms: "Maybe I should have spent a little more time teaching and less time governing," or "I gotta tell you, I taught my daughter well, but she made her own decisions, and I don't agree with them," or even "heah, at least she didn't kill her baby, even though I'd like her to take the next logical step and marry Levi." The American public is very forgiving--praise be--but forgiveness begins by admitting a mistake.

It would seem that some sort of public statement is in order, particularly for a politician whose commitment to pro-life values includes a huge personal and self-sacrificial commitment to life, and particularly a politician who advocates personal self-government over the welfare state. Small government is made possible by a people who rule over themselves, and govern themselves--starting with their own families. It's very difficult to argue against the state assuming responsibility for single mothers if you argue--by your actions, or by your failure to comment upon wrong-doing--that fathers aren't important to the raising of children. If Governor Palin doesn't say something, she will be talking up traditional families in the abstract, but living out a matriarchy in the flesh.

What is the argument, by conservatives, against this sort of a statement? Why is Sarah Palin being allowed this inconsistency? It involves her "family." Blood is thicker than water. Even conservatives are arguing that a politician shouldn't have to state what is good and bad behavior, if it means her children's feelings might get hurt. The results of that policy are clear: enter, stage left, the destruction of the very principle itself. No one can argue for a public standard if they won't allow that standard to be scrutinized in their own household. The American people can forgive a mistake, but they can't forgive an unwillingness to even discuss it.

Governor Palin: the little guy deserves a dad--and you should say so.

An Evening, at least, in the Colonies

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:26:00 EST

Mary took the kids swing dancing last night and I tried to do some cipherin' as to how I get you up here this Saturday night for An Evening in the Colonies with Patrick Henry. Let's see: great food, fresh rainbow trout, great music, a romantic, post & beam country tavern, and the oratory of Patrick Henry. You can even bring your own wine or hard cider, since we don't sell it. I'm in. Sounds good to me.

America is at war over competing mythologies. I will confess to being completely out of touch with the sort of America that signs onto a "global new deal." If the global economy has taught us anything, it's that a weakness in one spot replicates itself across the water and makes everyone, everywhere, suffer. Where would the world have been without a Churchill or a George S. Patton to check the global ambitions of a Hitler or a Tojo? Why do we pretend that America has anything at all in common with freedom-hating Yemen or slave-holding Mauritania? Global peace is not achieved by handing everyone a Diet Coke and passing out free back rubs. Harmony is not the result of holding inter-faith dialogues with religions and political systems that have absolutely no interest in either peace or compromise. The current administration wants $900 million of your tax dollars to re-build Gaza. What is the lesson for thinking people? It's very simple: if you need construction money, launch rockets against Israel.

Insanity. Get me back to the colonies--for at least for an evening.

St. Patrick's 2009

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:41:00 EST

"The BreastPlate of St. Patrick"

I arise today
Through God's strength to pilot me:
God's might to uphold me,
God's wisdom to guide me,
God's eye to look before me,
God's ear to hear me,
God's word to speak for me,
God's hand to guard me,
God's way to lie before me,
God's shield to protect me,
God's host to save me
From snares of devils,
From temptations of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.

Christ to shield me today
Against poison, against burning,
Against drowning, against wounding,
So that there may come to me abundance of reward.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
Through belief in the threeness,
Through confession of the oneness,
Of the Creator of Creation.

When A Dream is Waking...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 23:58:00 EST

Last night, a room full of very respectful fifth graders gave their rapt attention to my version of Patrick Henry's speech. This afternoon, one of the school tour moms told David Thomas, "Riley's Farm is magic." I couldn't quite hear what she said, so David repeated it: "She said what I believe--this place is blessed." About two hours later, I dropped in on the rehearsal for the "Near St. Patrick's Day Ball at the Old Packing Shed." Logan Creighton sang "Whiskey in the Jar" with a voice that perfectly matched his range. He might as well have been standing on a dry stone wall in County Cork, earning the brotherly laugh of a dozen Irish shepherds. My marine friend, Steve Klein, belted out Rosey O'Grady in a perfect baritone that made me think, "why haven't I put this guy on stage earlier?" Susan Usher put piano to the rhythm and the chords for Danny Boy, and David Thomas punched out the very soul of the tune with a clarity and strength of voice that made me think, "let's have a moment of silence for poor Danny's Da'." Angela Shaddix sang "The Parting Glass," very nearly a cappella, without a written score, and I wanted to hang my head and weep. (The staff sees me get emotional too much, so I held back.)

When I got back to the house my good friend, John Reilly, an Irishman who spent his youth as a bull rider, sent me a card in the mail about St. Patrick's day. I can't quite repeat the joke, but Mary and I had a good laugh. Brandon Ryder was excited about making retail work around here. Jon Harmon loves to see the kids catch a fish for the first time. The bakery--in a recession--sold more pies than ever. Jeff Hammond got in here at 5:00 AM to work on Courage, New Hampshire, and Maricella--fresh from wisdom tooth surgery--helped out working the windows. Jan Thiem--as always--troops on, through colds and storms and icy roads and the duties of a young grandmother, to help make this place work.

My son Samuel and my daughter Lizzy and my son Nicholas and my son Lockton have all discovered music. They beg me for a new piano, new Irish flutes, and they get geared up in their colonial clothes to join the orchestra downstairs. My daughter Mallory labors to bring you new issues of old news, and she is going to be marrying a man who loves history and drama and music.

My wife teaches Gabriel how to do his fractions, and listens to him read, and she stops to rub my neck as I write the farm journal.

How does one man ever deserve such heaven?

Sometimes paradise, sometimes the dream, is a waking affair.

I stand all amazed.

Let's Just See Already..and Operation Kill Market Garden

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:50:00 EST

This is a post for the video-technoids among ye. We're post-producing our Farm Television pilot--Courage, New Hampshire--and we're trying to settle on a "look" for the interior shots. This sequence had very little light on the original shoot (our first mistake), and our efforts to bring up the light and the contrast digitally resulted in a deep reddish cast, brought on by the burnt-cherry stain of the public house walls. Premiere CS3 gives you dozens of color correcting tools, each with dozens of controls like "input black level," "hue correction," "saturation," "pedestal," "gain", "gamma" and more. (Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.) If you add too many of them, or dial the controls too far, the results can be very grainy, and sometimes you don't even see that blow-out until you play it out on a big screen TV. Anyway, here's a little measure of modern color-correction option shock:

Jeff came up with a version of the last one that looks really nice even on big screen TVs. (This process is something like a family sitting around a TV and arguing over the controls. "Too yellow!" "Too red! Too blue!") I think we have it now--at least for that scene.

Kill Market Garden Update

My rant last night on H.R. 875--a bill that would require all market-bound small farmers and back yard gardeners to register with the federal government, and endure inspections--got me stewing about the very venal realities involved: it's absolutely essential to remember that most of our policy making has nothing whatsoever to do with safety or the public good. Sure, it's always sold that way. They call this stuff things like "The Produce Safety Act" or "The Healthy Families Act" or the "Safe Streets Act," and there may be a few policy wonks and legislators (the ones who have never run a business) who actually think they are doing good in the world, but what they are really doing is: 1) creating a procedural burden that ends up criminalizing small time family business 2) protecting inefficient, leviathan semi-monopolies who can afford lobbyists and compliance staff and 3) making us all poorer for spending more time filling out forms and less time producing a product.

The best politician, in other words, is the guy who says: "I'm not going to do anything good for you. I'm not going to sponsor any legislation--unless it's a bill to roll back the last fifty years of do-good idiocy. Got that?"

A guy can dream anyway..

HR 875 -- Operation Garden Kill

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 01:44:00 EST

Picture a guy named "Skip" out on the golf course. He's a tired looking corporate executive. The guy next to him is a congressman. He looks tired too. He carries around the weight of an old family surname -- Sandborne. That's not his only problem. He's facing an election against someone who has a reputation of telling it like it is. He's going to need a very hefty campaign war chest to make his own brand of falsehood seem something like the truth.

At the end of the last hole, Skip says: "I need a favor."

Sandborne: "Shoot."

"We sell more grain and produce than anybody in America."

"Right," Sandborne says.

"We're getting tired of doing it the honest way. These farmers markets are picking up steam around the country and we want them snuffed. Terminated. Diced and juiced with extreme prejudice. You understand?"

"How we gonna do that?"

"Make them apply for a federal permit and an inspection."

"C'mon now, Skip. They ain't ever gonna do that."

"Regulate Organic completely out of existence."

"Organic? Skip. My niece is like an organic nut."

"Who butters your bread, Sandy baby?"

"Dont' get touchy. I'm just sayin--"

"I don't care what you're saying. I want these backyard tomato turks shut down before they grab share. What's good for Ag-Dax is good for Sandborne Paxton of the seventh congressional. You get me?"

Of course it doesn't happen that way in practice. Now we have congress people who are very much in touch with their feminine side, and you don't really have to use bald force anymore because the policy people don't think. A corporate goon from a huge agricultural conglomerate can call it something like the "Food Safety Act," and everybody gets weepy-eyed about protecting the public.

Believe it or not, there is a bill being considered in Congress that would make it very difficult for any small farm to take their produce to market. Here on Riley's Farm, our ox is not being gored. We sell everything we grow right here, but agriculture is good for communities and anyone who wants to throttle it--on behalf of corporate oligarchies-- doesn't really have the best interest of America at heart.

The bill should be killed--and anyone who even considers it, sponsors it, or gives it more than 30 seconds worth of thought should be remembered as the treasonous, anti-American scum they have so manifestly proven themselves to be.

..and that's my measured opinion.

A Little Beef

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 13:44:00 EST

Saturday morning I went out to see some miniature Angus and Hereford cattle in a place called West Cajon Valley, on the road to Victorville. The nice people at Crossroads Ranch, run by the Coleman family, let me see, first hand, how docile and small these breeds really are. Their website--small world--was designed by Courtney Creighton, the older brother of farm dance-master and all around living historian, Logan Creighton.

I've never really done a spreadsheet on building a herd of cattle, miniature or otherwise, but I'm beginning to think a mini-herd would be worth considering. If there were a way to make sure the beef got a USDA inspection, I think our farm guests would enjoy corn-fed, Iowa style beef. (For a brief time, in another world, I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers workshop, and I still remember the way Iowa beef and pork sizzled its way, with coffee, across the Hamburg Inn.) If you've been watching the financial news (don't!), Jim Rogers says he is buying up farms. Wouldn't it be ironic if all these agritourism operations started "beefing up" their production operations again? And..if every front and back lawn in the Inland Empire were turned into a vegetable garden, I wonder if we could grow enough food to keep the southland from turning into a Mad Max movie. (Someone else do the spreadsheet on this; I'm tired of graphing commerce this morning, and I don't know how much backyard barley you have to grow to keep the squad cars in reasonably good repair.)

On the beef herd front, Scott says a friend of his is weighing the merits of staying a hobby rancher, or getting into real ranching. I think he has about 30 head of cattle--and that doesn't seem "hobby" to me, but industrial scale is the enemy of most small projects. When you're up against Con-Agra and AMD, you really have to have a pretty good "boutique beef" operation to encourage people pay a premium rate for the extra value. I think the spreadsheet might be different, however, in a restaurant operation, because that premium is more easily blurred into the extra value of the served-food price. (Incidentally, I just finished a turkey sausage sandwich. Incredible. You point-counters would do well to consider the lowly turkey sausage.)

What I really like, however, about a cattle operation is that it is deeply American--and very deeply Oak Glen. These apple farms are called "ranches" because most of the old time farmers ran cattle to make up for bad crop years. I have no problem with someone who wants to survive on carrots and tofu, but you tell me Americans don't deserve a hamburger if they want one--and you have a fight on your hands.

Searching for Courage

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 04:08:00 EST

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:26:00 EST

Generally, I think it's a good idea not to read too much in the way of financial news these days. If everyone in America spent more time selling and less time fretting, we could probably work our way out of this financial mess. I learned this here on the farm over the past few weeks; this market is something like selling peanuts at a baseball game where everyone in the stadium is fixated by the sight of two airplanes appearing to collide in the distant sky. Most of the stadium-hawkers are looking up at the spectacle, but a few keep pitching , and they find out most of the crowd is still hungry.

Nevertheless, completely avoiding what qualifies as "news of the century" is something like jumping in a sail boat without pondering the clouds on the horizon. CNBC put together a nice little slide show of "famous last words." It underscores a point I find fascinating: not even the people who claim to know what they are doing, know what they are doing. Why do I find that intriguing? Well, economics, really, is the study of sentient, communicative human beings attending to their rational self-interest. It's the study, in other words, of populations making financial decisions. The mal-functioning sub-structures of a kidney cell can't look up to the scientist peering through the electron microscope and scream: "heah, we're experiencing some surface membrane polarity down here brought on by ATP depletion!"

People, on the other hand, can talk. They buy. They sell. They balance check books, apply for unemployment, purchase insurance, deliberate over car warranties. They answer surveys. They make their financial decisions known by where they sign their names and when they pay their bills. They decide that a doctor's services are worth $300,000 a year and a file clerk's are worth $22,000. The stock market mirrors, over time, the collective sense of what everything is worth. I say, "over time," because this morning's good news can make something really worthless seem really valuable, and "over time," the market comes to know the broad, long-term truths. We've got LOTS of data on what people do financially and--unlike basolateral membrane domains--they can tell us why they do it.

So why can't we study the global financial system with the same accuracy a microbiologist studies proximal tubular cells?

Because people lie. We are gross, calculating, depraved sinners who--without fear of God--are willing to put any face necessary on the story of our financial affairs so as to maximize our take. Of course the lies can be as simple as embellishing the language on a resume or as baroque as conducting a mega-billion dollar swindle, but a failure to be honest about our intentions, and our actions, is at the root of what makes economics so inscrutable. If Kidney cells could lie, we might never have invented the dialysis machine.

The temptation, on the policy level, is to assume that only people directly involved in commerce are the potential liars, but ponder the Madoff mess: Madoff is accused of lying, but so are the regulators themselves; if you take taxpayer money to regulate the securities market, and you don't do your job, you're telling your employer one thing and doing another. If Congress complains about CEO salaries and hides their own automatic pay increases, and travel benefits, how can anyone really trust the dialogue going on between deceptive businessmen and deceptive politicians?

We keep talking about spending more money to "stimulate" the economy, but what we really need is a hell fire and damnation pastor scolding us, collectively and individually, for our sins.

Can you imagine what we could do, as a people, if we realized how much we need God?

Anniversaries

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:25:00 EST

I wasn't going to mention the Boston Massacre, but this morning a "history site" gave Elvis Presley milestones higher billing than the Boston Massacre, so I'm reminding all of you Americans, out of protest, that this was the day, 239 years ago, when the city fathers of Boston were proven sadly right in their objection to standing armies in a time of peace. It has become common place to misconstrue John Adam's defense of the British soldiers, in court, as a sign that this affair was not really an atrocity, but the patriots who gave the annual Boston Massacre oration, for years afterwards, didn't' take that view--and they were the ones who had to live under military occupation. Here is the way the event was reported in New Hampshire in the March 9th, 1770 edition of the Gazette.

P O R T S M O U T H. March 9, 1770. Bloody Work in Boston. By a Person from Boston since the Post, we hear, that about Eight O'Clock last Monday Evening there happened another Difference with the Inhabitants of that Town and some Soldiers of the 29th Regiment, in which both Sides received several Blows, and would have been very fatal, if Mr. Maul, an Officer, had not obliged the Soldiers to retire to their barracks, the Inhabitants gathering very thick in King-Street, the commanding officer of the main guard ordered a File of Men to draw up before the Custom-House, and whether any Words passed between him and the People is not certainly known, but he gave Orders to the Men to fire upon the People, which immediately killed three on the Spot, and wounded four others extremely bad, one of which was dying when our Informer left the Town....we impatiently wait to hear the Result relating to this horrid Affair, as from the Temper of the People something too serious would take Place.

The reality, as the founders knew, is that placing soldiers among a people who valued their charter rights, and their institutions of representative government, is a disservice to both the soldiers and the citizens. A professional army is a clumsy vehicle for enforcing the peace. There were routine fights between two different sets of authority in the town--the night watchmen and patrolling bands of sometimes drunken British soldiers. Soldiers and citizens fought for part time work. Church meetings were interrupted by the fifes and drums of British troops--who didn't like the politics of the pulpit. Finally, no deliberative body is free to engage in free expression with gun barrels pointing at the meeting hall.

The massacre was, indeed, a massacre, but not because every British soldier was a brute. The arrogant ministers of King George had sent them on a mission no fighting man could honorably fulfill--that of making tyranny "peaceful" and "orderly."

The "Near" St. Patrick's Day Ball

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:34:00 EST

The band is rehearsing brand new (but very old) numbers for our celebration of the "Near" St. Patrick's Day Ball at the Old Packing Shed. (St. Patrick's Day falls on the 17th, a Tuesday, but we're not brave enough to try to get you up here into Oak Glen on a Tuesday night.) This way you can have a family night honoring the great Irish saint, and then celebrate with your office buddies Tuesday night as well. We're just doing our part to increase the sum total of celebration, you might say.

Bea and Jim Romano and their group of Celtic Musicians will join our own Kathy von Arx, Freeman House, David Thomas, and Angela Shaddix for great music, Irish cheer, and an excellent feast provided by the Irish-for-a-night Packing Shed cooking crew.

After you've celebrated the Irish-American tradition, on March 21st, you can celebrate the Scottish-American freedom fighters who constituted the heritage of one of America's clear thinkers: Patrick Henry.

An Evening in the Colonies with Patrick Henry is held at the Hawk's Head Public House and features great food and immortal political rhetoric: give me liberty, or give me death!

Let no one say there's nothing to do in the country this month!

..So Start clicking!

Camp Revolution 2009

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:42:00 EST

Brandon Ryder and Jeff Hammond are putting the finishing touches on this summer's Camp Revolution Itinerary, but you can sign up and pay for the camp now. A Family of four (2 adults & 2 kids) gets a bargain, local living history camping vacation, with all meals provided, and period clothing (rented) for less than $3600. I don't want to tell you what I spent to fly the family to Williamsburg a few years ago, but let's just say it cost a great deal more than Camp Revolution--and although there's nothing like visiting the shrines of freedom in person, this vacation will be a lot closer to living in the 18th century than you can find at most history vacation destinations. There are group and big family discounts too, so call Jan for details. (909-797-7534 ext. 201)

Up Early, Thinking About the War...

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 10:10:00 EST


"George Washington" will visit the Hawk's Head Public House Today from 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM. Have a meal and converse with his excellency!

One of the happy side-effects of losing weight (6 lbs in the last 4 weeks) is that you have more energy to parcel out across the range of your various life pursuits. My normal need for about three hours of sleep a day has been reduced to about ninety minutes. (Not exactly true, but I do find that I have trouble trying to get more than six hours of sleep a day. The difference diet and exercise seems to make is that your waking hours seem to be more focused.) Normally, this early in the morning I would drift from internet headline to headline, vaguely absorbing the chronicled chaos of modern life, but this morning I actually feel motivated to do a little chronicling myself.

The War at the heart of the matter, this morning, is the one at the very, very heart of the matter--the war between the sexes. A few days ago, we watched a Greg Kinnear movie called "Flash of Genius," which told the story of an independent inventor who perfected the interval windshield wiper--the sort of wiper setting we all take for granted now, where the blades stroke across the glass, clearing away light shower sprinkle every few seconds, instead of constantly.

Greg's character, the real life Robert Kearns, paid a price for his obsession by losing his wife to the ensuing struggle Kearns had with the major automakers--or at least that's the way the movie-makers tell the story. This template for domestic story-telling has become a certifiable cliché: man has dream to build empire for his family, wife wants family time, man loses wife and family building empire for family. You see some version of this in nearly every chick-flick produced in the last thirty years.

My sense is that the Almighty built the prospect for tension into the human condition. Men feel a need, right down in their knuckles, to provide for their families--to fill up the barn with grain. We measure ourselves, really, by how well we can fill the pantry. Women tend to see life more in terms of how well that pantry is applied to the rituals of family life: is everyone here for dinner? Who is coming to the wedding? Where should we go on vacation? Can you make it home, dear, a little early to help me get Zack ready for his recital? It's not as simple as papa making the money and mama spending it, because, today, sometimes it's the other way around, but the financial machine itself, for mothers, is really just the means by which she nurtures up her primary creation and the source of her primary sense of self--her children.

Dad may see a phone call from the office, after hours, as the way he nurtures his kids, the way he feeds them. Mom is more likely to see that phone call as a violation of what she holds sacred--her family time. In the most extreme instances, some women manifest these priorities in an absurdly unfair way: they want the bills to be paid, the pantry to be full, and their mates to be there for every diaper change.

If American family cinema is any guide, and the effeminite pulpit is any indicator, men aren't really good fathers unless they're better mothers than most mothers.

When you compare the domestic life of John and Abigail Adams--full of separation between both man and wife and separation of parents from children--to the nest-centric matriarchy of the present, where a man only meets the chick-flick standard of his mate by putting in as much nose-wipe time as she does, you understand a little something about the current downturn in American economic productivity. Men aren't really free to pursue their dreams, and their cosmic calling anymore. They can't build dynasties for the next generation because they face domestic insurrection if they don't play nanny to the present generation; they aren't considered loving mates if they don't take an active interest in scrap-booking. If they don't leave work two hours early, to avoid traffic, they get blamed for putting career over Johnny and Susie. If American family cinema is any guide, and the effeminite pulpit is any indicator, men aren't really good fathers unless they're better mothers than most mothers.

That's one of the reasons I praise God, and thank him every day, for the wife He found me.

Whatever I've managed to make of myself, and my family, has a lot to do with the fact that Mary gave me the freedom to be a father.

So...Why don't they make movies like that anymore?

George Washington Will Dine HERE February 28th

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 08:40:00 EST

Dramatic Intelligence Just Arrived by a correspondent in Williamsburg: George Washington will be dining in the Hawk's Head Public House tomorrow from 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM.

Those guests who choose to give the public house its trade, will have the opportunity of speaking with his excellency regarding the events of this momentous time--as he proceeds north to Boston, to take command of the Massachussetts army.

Random Riley Research

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:45:00 EST

Eclectic reading these last few days:

Colonial New Hampshire: John Wentworth was appointed governor of New Hampshire and "surveyor of the King's woods" in 1767. He enjoyed a connection with all the "first families" of New Hampshire and he had the advantage of taking over from a fellow Wentworth (his uncle Benning) who had been accused of exacting exorbitant fees for grants of land. (He was said to favor Massachusetts and Connecticut settlers, on the basis of their paying more for real estate and being better farmers than native New Hampshire men. Our own Snow family, settlers of Chesterfield, may have benefited from that prejudice.) He was also on the right side of the crown revenue crisis and received his commission from a Whig hero, Charles Watson-Wentworth, second Marquis of Rockingham--repealer of the Stamp Act. The previous Wentworth was a staunch Church of England man and he refused establishment of what would later become Dartmouth College, unless it fell under the direction of the Bishop of London. That was bound to rattle congregationalist sensibilities.

The new governor, John Wentworth, enjoyed a popularity that actually helped suppress revolutionary sentiment in New Hampshire. With the exception of the 1770 Boston Massacre, which left New Hampshire freemen feeling guilty about their tepid contributions to the cause, Wentworth's early years were mostly well received. Some of the governor's landed gentry friends were even reported to give type-scattering, press-burning threats to the printer of the New Hampshire Gazette, by way of keeping his Whig sentiments in check.

During the early part of his administration, Dartmouth College was established in the wilds of the frontier--Hanover--with about 18 English and six Indian scholars. The colony was also divided into five counties--in answer to the complaints of western townships, Chesterfield among them, that traveling to Portsmouth, "Strawberry Banks," was cumbersome and a source of tidy revenue for the seaboard justices of the peace and superior court judges. In 1771, paper money was abolished in the colony of New Hampshire, it having been "called in" in favor of silver and gold. (This last detail, along with others found in Jeremy Belknap's 1790, "History of New Hampshire" raises more questions. Where were the gold and silver coins minted? If only in England, was their resentment on not being able to issue currency. What did this coinage look like?)

Samuel Adams, The James K. Hosmer Biography: This is a small detail but worthy of repeating. Hosmer reminds us that every town in New England, in many respects, was like a city-state, a republic of its own. The selectmen could call for a warrant for a town meeting and only the items listed on the warrant could be voted upon at the meeting. No quorum was necessary, so if you wanted to weigh in, you had better attend. In many respects, the Revolutionary War began as a fight between one of these city-states, Boston, and the English empire. The fierce localism of the American tradition begins in New England.

They liked governing themselves, taking care of their own roads, their own education, and their own poor.

Peter D. Schiff: In "Crash Proof," Peter predicted the real estate crash of 2007 and the stock market crash of 2008, but equally interesting is his concise summary of how our federal government deceives us, in reporting economic reality. Take the "Consumer Price Index." The CPI tries to let us know how much our dollars are worth, and it is supposed to be an objective measure of how much it costs to purchase various necessary commodities. One component of that statistic is how much it costs to put a roof over our heads, but the value of housing is not an average of monthly mortgage or rent payments (which would be actual numbers) but "equivalent rent," a subjective number government economists are allowed to come up with on their own. How can we really say we have an objective replacement for the gold standard if federal economists are allowed to define the cost of rent however they choose?

Or consider "Gross Domestic Product." This is the sum total of all goods and services bought or traded within the borders of the United States--regardless of origin. The old "Gross National Product" was the measure of what we produced, and since that was getting more and more dismal, they began replacing that with GDP to mask the fact that we have become a nation of consumers, not producers.

I've never been a "gold standard only" amateur economist. I figured that if an objective collection of actualy commodities we purchase were included in the CPI, we had a fairly good picture of what our money is worth. Silly me. The government can make up their own definitions whenever they like. If CPI doesn't look good, they can just switch a commodity and make it look like they aren't printing too much of the green stuff. Bottom line: your dollars aren't worth so many sacks of potatoes. Your dollar is worth what the federal reserves says it is worth.

Home Church

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 20:20:00 EST

I had the assignment of tackling John 13 today, the story of a Jesus who--knowing the sacrifice He must soon make--washes the disciples' feet as a way of showing that leaders, masters, and teachers in the Kingdom of God must also be servants.

...Suburban Inland Empire feet probably don't compare to the kind of feet that were stomping around the Holy Land 2,000 years ago.

I once saw this ritual re-enacted in a Catholic church, nearly twenty years ago. A few parishioners took off their shoes and socks, near the altar, and the priest washed their bare feet. It was a good object lesson, I suppose, but suburban Inland Empire feet probably don't compare to the kind of feet that were stomping around the Holy Land 2000 years ago. Think about it: donkeys and sheep and goats and cows being tethered around Jerusalem, outbreaks of leprosy, chamber pots being thrown out second floor tenements. Open toed sandals. Ancient feet were probably pretty intimidating.

Peter wasn't going to have any part of that. He wasn't going to make his teacher and Lord wash his dirty dogs. No way. That sort of thing is humbling not just for the washer, but the washee. I know I wouldn't be very proud to have my feet, and particularly my toenails, examined. Disgusting. And then Jesus tells him--and by extension us: "If I wash thee not, thou has no part with me."

The master goes on, of course, to say that we must love each other as He loved us. And He loves us enough to be, in effect, our nurse, our caretaker. He loves us the way a mother loves a child. He washes our feet. But it isn't just a sanitized ritual: It's tough love too. He makes an ultimatum, "..unless I wash you--son, daughter--you aren't mine."

Whenever I ask Lizzy, my daughter, for toast in the morning, she says, "I'll get it, Dad, but no guilt trips." Even though I'm turning the example of service on its head, I don't feel so bad anymore. Jesus is the essence of ultimatum. He doesn't say, "suit yourself, Peter. Let me wash your feet or not. You're still part of me whatever you decide."

No. He says, "If I wash thee not, thou has no part with me."

Jesus loves by rebuking too. Peter claims he would lay down his life for Jesus, and Jesus doesn't just smile patiently and ignore his boast. He sets the big fisherman straight: Peter is told that he will deny Jesus three times before morning comes. We re-read those lines, calloused to how harsh they must have sounded, but it's important to know that patient flattery, and false indulgence, constitute no part of Christ's love. He tells the truth.

The picture Jesus paints of "Love," then, isn't just as simple as being a silent chamber maid in the meek service of dirty travelers. It's more of a father, who wipes the grime from our brow, giving instruction and rebuke at the same time, even as he prepares to defend us--to the death.

That's family. That's covenant. That is church--or at least a picture of what it might be.

The Weary Warrior Returns

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:08:00 EST

Never play airsoft with your employees--especially if they are suited up in full camo and sniper ghilli gear. I don't think the camo is really very effective at hiding you, as a shooter, when you are holding a dayglo orange barrel-tip that can be seen from here to Lake Elsinore, but wearing all that gear is a good guard against feeling a "hit." I only played one round of "defend the mine" and I took a hit in the head and one in the trigger finger and one in the donkey cart. The head hit was the most jarring.

"Get down, Dad, Brandon's got a sniper rifle."
"He can't hit me from there. Ouch. Yes, I guess he can. I'm dead. Hear me? Dead! Hold your--ouch--fire."

Earlier in the week, we visited a premium internet airsoft warehouse--Evike.com in Rosemead--and these people were loading up the UPS truck with what looked like four or five cubic yards of gear, to be shipped all over the country. They may talk of nationalizing the banks and bailing out General Motors, but it looks to me as though the airsoft industry is doing very well. (Don't tell anyone; someone will figure out how to tax what works in order to pay for what doesn't.)

Over the course of this nation-wide financial crisis, I have developed a mild addiction to CNBC, and I was one of the first to see Rick Santelli call for a "tea party" on the floor of the Chicago exchange. I was gratified to see that Americans, overwhelmingly, still have the sense to call President Obama's mortgage relief plan what it is: grossly unjust. It rewards people who took unreasonable risks by taking money from people who saved enough to put something down on their homes. As the plan is commonly understood, the only people eligible for relief will be those who helped cause the problem in the first place by over-leveraging themselves. In the same sense, it also rewards the very bankers who made these kinds of loans, and the wall street people who re-packaged and sold them to investors who didn't do their research. In one sense, it is exactly what you would expect from a president who wouldn't even release his transcripts at Columbia and Harvard: a plan to help failures, authored by someone afraid of being accused of failure.

A few folks rightly observe that we bailed out Wall Street CEOs; why not a few of America's under-class, trying to stay in their homes? The answer is that two wrongs don't make a right. We simply don't have the resources to protect every square inch of the status quo. At some point, we have to realize what Davey Crocket realized nearly two centuries ago: you cannot use the public purse to benefit private individuals, just because you have the votes to do so.

This ethical moral lapse--this corruption in the White House itself--is not quite as disturbing as the sense I am getting that an entire generation of Americans could care less about what is right and what is wrong. Cliff Mason, a young, Harvard educated moral dim-wit, who helps Jim Cramer write copy for CNBC, wrote this week that it doesn't matter what is "fair" and what is "unfair." The only thing that matters is shoring up the banks. We've been hearing that a lot lately. Stop worrying about "ideology." Stop worrying about taking the moral high ground. Just do anything to keep the system rolling, no matter what the moral hazard. This is an emergency people: throw out the truth if you can't handle it.

As one of the traders on the exchange put it, "why don't we all just stop paying our mortgages?"

Think about it, Cliffy. It's not the banks that keep America rolling, or Washington, or Wall Street. It's people doing the right thing. The only thing that keeps a bigger man from dashing Cliffy's brains on the sidewalk and emptying his wallet is his sense of what is fair, what is just, what is true--that divine spark called "conscience."

Here's to hoping America rediscovers what Cliff didn't find at Harvard.

Let us Hope 'Ideology' Keeps Getting in the Way

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 13:39:00 EST

"California residents owe Cogdill a huge thank you for his willingness to set aside his political ideology..."
-- Merced Sun Star Editorial

Picture a candle-lit room above the Edes & Gill print shop of Boston, on a cold, clear Boston December night in 1773. A group of New England men are painting their faces soot-black and cranberry-red, in their version of Huron war paint. One of them pauses, and thinks out loud before sticking a trio of hawk feathers into his hair.

"Just wait," he says. "I know the British parliament is taxing us without our consent, but this protest we're taking tonight. Are we allowing ideology to trump a more practical solution?"

It isn't a likely scenario, and not just because the Sons of Liberty didn't care too much, by this point, about their conflict-resolution skills: the word 'ideology' had not yet come into use. Karl Marx used it to describe the way the ruling class justifies its assumptions about economics and culture. Napoleon used the term ideologues to ridicule anyone who disagreed with him politically. Its most pejorative use has been in describing someone who won't accept new facts, or new methods, because they don't fit a pre-conceived ideology. Michael Dukakis boldly declared his quest for the presidency would be about "competence, not ideology." President Obama has similarly warned that practical solutions must not be obstructed by ideology.

The trouble with such declarations is that it begs the question: what form will this competence or this practicality take? What will it cost? What surpassing truths will be violated just to meet the needs of the moment? Are we really criticizing narrow-mindedness, or are we looking for a way to outrun the truth?

I talked about Clint Eastwood's film "The Changeling" yesterday, but I didn't mention that the film graphically depicts the death by hanging of a remorseless killer. The families of his victims watch the murder climb the steps, receive the black hood, and suffer the noose.

Mary and I were talking about the movie, and she observed that Grandma Bea's 20th century life span has included a stretch of years that saw murderers go from being despicable villains, worthy of execution, to misunderstood victims of some childhood slight, and thus deserving of "rehabilitation." The rise of Freud and the social sciences and the endless clamor for state-sponsored study of the criminal mind--along with lifetime care of sociopaths--has created a political patronage system for everything from elementary school psychologists to social workers to paralegals to prison guards. The 20th century assumption--ideology in the negative sense--is that we simply must incarcerate and treat the violent. A former age would have simply executed them.

The whole criminal care superstructure is extremely expensive, but it came about because a "brave new world" of pseudo "social scientists" ridiculed old school "ideologues," who were merely affirming that the truths of ancient scripture were incontrovertible. We were told only "hide-bound ideology" could object to the untested notion that prisons could actually rehabilitate rapists and murderers. On another but arguably related front, the ancient truth was that care for the poor should be an individual or a village obligation--not the work of a monstrous state or federal monolith. Similarly, law enforcement was supposed to be an individual obligation, with every man armed and ready to conduct citizen's arrests, and even fight for timeless constitutional principles--as the tea party brigade did in 1773. Now, it's all replaced with a standing army of specialists in every conceivable branch of law enforcement, education, mental health, and criminal justice. The timeless ideology of "swift, local, and accountible" has been replaced by the new-fangled "competence" of "centralized, scientific, and professional."

So, how's that all working, people?

Is it "ideology" to keep the expensive incarceration and "rehabilitation" facilities at full-staff, or would it be "ideology" to return to ancient, and less expensive, truths?

What is "competence" and what is "ideology?"

I suppose it depends on who is getting paid for it--and who is doing the paying.

The Changling as Bible College

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:24:00 EST

I imagine men of faith, church builders, modern day Pharisees, and hen-pecked ministry types of all sorts will have an uncomfortable moment or two if they ever sit down to watch Clint Eastwood's The Changeling. Granted, Clint Eastwood's moral compass isn't always pointing to true north. (You have to wonder about someone who can't even find moral clarity in the Old West or World War II.) Still, Eastwood's depiction of Presbyterian Pastor Gustav Briegleb, played by John Malkovich, will raise the hackles of the pastoral crowd who believe Jesus should be locked away in chains until the fund-raising and the church-growth effort is complete.

Sit down, folks; you might find this disturbing: Pastor Briegleb believes in a Jesus who "hungers and thirsts after righteousness." When a corrupt Los Angeles Police Department won't admit its mistake in returning the wrong boy to a distressed mother--and locks her away with a trumped up charge of insanity--the pastor comes to her aid. Eastwood's version of Breigleb even takes the case to the radio waves, naming names and demanding the termination of police officials who have abused their authority.

Granted, Hollywood ignores the historical record in other respects. The living Briegleb was also a campaigner against licentiousness, both on the streets and in film, but the boldness of taking a Christian gospel to the very gates of power is a disturbing one to the Rick Warren generation of Christian sycophants--who believe, above all, we need to be "civil." The sanctuary full of hoppin', rockin' Christian praise-bangers calls for a "smooth things" kind of sermon that tickles ears and empties wallets. How are they supposed to feel the glow if the pastor is calling corrupt officials "corrupt?"

That's not very civil, or friendly. That seems something like an affront.

..sort of like the gospel itself.

Rainy Day Present

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:12:00 EST

Even though I think our public house is the best of all places to be on a rainy day, I don't expect guests to walk out of the fog and start buying pie--but yesterday that's precisely what happened. We had visitors all day, both for our public house and for our Adventures in the Old World program. (I was about to give the staff off early in the morning, but Presidents' Day brought the wandering adventurers in--despite the downpour.) In business, as in life, you need to have faith.

In the afternoon, we taped a promotion for summer day camp. We also debated whether my script was too high brow. You will have to imagine all sorts of compelling 18th century visuals, merging into pictures of living history on the farm, but it goes something like this:

            Summer Day Camp Web Promotion

                 
                 ANGELA SHADDIX
       At a time when most Americans lived
       on country farms, Thomas Jefferson
       penned this advice to his nephew,
       Peter Carr: "..Walking is the best
       possible exercise. Habituate
       yourself to walk very far...There
       is no habit you will value so much
       as that of walking far without
       fatigue..."

                 BRANDON RYDER
       Childhood, with every passing year,
       has become more and more virtual.  
       Trees are screen-savers.  Meadows
       are flash animations.  Games are
       point and click. At Riley's Farm
       Summer Day Camp, your children will
       take long, guided walks across our
       760 acres of country terrain. 
       Thomas Jefferson would be proud!

                 JON HARMON
       "..Let your Conversation be without
       Malice or Envy, for 'tis a Sign of
       a Tractable and Commendable Nature:
       And in all Causes of Passion admit
       Reason to Govern..."  -George
       Washington's Rules of Civility #58

                 BRANDON RYDER
       Believe it or not, even for kids,
       the rules of polite behavior  in
       society remains one of our most
       popular workshops.  Children learn
       an historic, and a practical,
       introduction to good manners...

The older I get, the more respect I have for good advertising. It's tougher work than any of the staid old professions and certainly harder than any government service, shy of actual combat duty. When you think about it, you are trying to get people to voluntarily change their behavior.

Perhaps another sketch will illustrate:

       The 60 Second Business Plan


 Two men in their early thirties--Peter Finch and
 Brad Bullock--sit, facing an investment banker,
 Owen Clyde, in his office.  


              OWEN CLYDE
       Now, uh, each of you--give me your 
       business plan.  In sixty seconds. 
       Peter. You first.

              PETER FINCH
       Thank you.  We want to import
       and sell a Southeast-Asian grape
       like fruit that has not yet seen
       the American market.     

              OWEN CLYDE
       A new fruit?  Will people buy a
       new fruit?

              PETER FINCH
       It's a beautiful deep red color
       and we have already lined up a
       very major pop star who loves
       these little guys.  Dibreeza we
       call it--after the DEE-BREEZA
       berry.

              OWEN CLYDE
       New berry.  Check.  New fruit. 
       New fruit.   Very good.  Mr.
       Bullock.  What do you have for
       me?

              BRAD BULLOCK
       I represent the Consolidated
       Federal Taxing Authority,
       provisionally positioned under
       Treasury for the moment.  We
       need to float three or four
       billion in bonds to create a
       credit card processing facility
       that will collect a new consumer
       tax, whenever a citizen makes a
       purchase.   

              OWEN CLYDE
       Do people want that?  

              BRAD BULLOCK
       Well--uh--it doesn't really
       matter if they want it or not. 
       They're going to get it, if you
       catch my drift.


  Brad opens his coat to show a gun holster.
  He pulls out a set of hand-cuffs.


              BRAD BULLOCK (CONT'D)
       These things come in handy.

              OWEN CLYDE
                (Turning to Peter)
       These new fruit people. 
       Can they do that?

Saturday & Valentines

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 11:30:00 EST

We had quite a breakfast and lunch run yesterday, as families came up to play in the snow and take in hot cider. David Thomas drove up to do a little rehearsing for Valentines and he got pressed into lunch service, as did Mary, Jeff, and Heather. I was worried about the mud coming in through the grape arbor and I said to Jeff Hammond, a little later, "you might want to get some straw down there on the walkway for the guests tonight."

"Already taken care of," he said.

That's team work. That's a New England Township.

Valentines last night was a tribute to our guests, since they braved the snow and cold to have a good time. The winners of the Romeo & Juliet contest gave a hilarious version of the "glove upon that hand" speech in a Tennessee twang, and there were at least five takers for the poetry contest--probably more.

Our music last night--with Caitlyn Chenault, Freeman House, Kathy von Arx, Susan Usher, Angela Shaddix and David Leslie Thomas--was something grand. They braved it and went completely accoustic. In a crowded public house, across a span of wood and dinner-din, it's not quite the same as that "bathed in sound" feeling you have when the players are mic'd up, but it was certainly more authentic, and the music was melt-your-heart-and-soul beautiful.

Good work, everyone!

Valentines

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:17:00 EST

We had a nice dusting of snow last night, perhaps two or three inches, with bright clear skies this morning--so with the boys and the staff digging out the pathways, we should have a nice toasty, snowy Valentines tonight.

On this Valentines Day, I would like to land as hard as possible, with both feet, for the hundredth time, on the romantic myth, not because love's a bad thing, but because love has almost nothing to do with the insipid, superficial, idiotic way it is packaged by Hollywood low-lifes. Warning: there will be an ending give-away for NBC's "The Office" in this rant, so be aware.

As Office fans know, Jim and Pam are the producer's "normal" people, who look at life with the same balanced set of assumptions you might find in, say, a sound-stage production brat, fresh out of college, English lit major, between her ninety-third and ninety-fourth romantic-hormonal entanglement. If she has a faith life, this "normal audience member" is distinctly pluralistic in her approach, and if she worships anything, it's either art or progressive politics or the pursuit of "cool." Like Jim and Pam, she is largely reactive. She lives for someone else to do something stupid, or outlandish, so that she can roll her eyes. Not believing in anything, really, is her religion. Like the rest of us, she sees most of the Office characters as absurdly drawn comic extensions of contemporary work-a-day people. Dwight is the nerdy, vigilante, wannabe peace officer. (And agritourism farmer!) Angela is the tightly-coiled, cat-loving Christian hypocrite. Kevin is the pudgy adolescent with adult responsibilities and a flare for the obvious.

In a recent episode, Pam's parents are having marital problems, and this rocks Pam's sense of stability--as it would for most of us. Most baby boomers and Gen-Xers want to shop for love but they want their parents to be living in the same house forever. Pam's dad goes to Jim for advice and for some unknown reason, the relationship problem gets even worse. Pam is alarmed. What did Jim say? Well, it turns out Jim gave advice to Pam's Dad by reporting that he had never met anyone like Pam, someone who made him lose his balance when she walked into the room. Pam's Dad confessed that he never had that earth-shattering cosmic love tingle when Pam's mom walked into the room. Pam gets misty. She loves Jim. Jim loves her. Oh isn't it wonderful to be struck deaf, dumb and blind by love?

They don't want to work for love; they want love to smack them down onto the carpet and make them cry for mercy.

Well, of course this lost generation of the Runaway Brides needs to have that kind of experience. They have been receiving free birth control since seventh grade. They have been served up a dose of cynicism about middle-class, suburban values with literally every television show and movie they watch. They don't want to work for love; they want love to smack them down onto the carpet and make them cry for mercy, as though to say, from on high "this is the one, stupid!" Anything less would be sort of, well, Dwight Schrutish.

The Office production team is a good example of intelligent people who are keen social observers, witty writers, inventive comedians and, in the last analysis, utter fools.

Snow Kids II

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:40:00 EST

Talk about hearty, Valley Forge-appreciating farm friends! Not one of our tour guests cancelled yesterday, and hundreds of students, teachers, and parents endured living history in the snow for more than three hours. The morning began with predictions of very little precipitation, and then a knot of moisture hung over our corner of the San Bernardino Mountains more or less all morning--delivering a misty ice-fall that never really disbursed much ground cover. (One of the weather sites has a neat "total precipitation" map that lets you see how much has fallen in your area; all morning there were green and yellow pixels indicating snow on the "current" map, but never enough to change the colors on the "total" map.)

I actually called Nancy Pelosi's office today, to see if it's true that she's leading a delegation to Europe tonight--so she's got to hurry up and get 800 billion dollars spent, pronto.

I'm not a fan of the titan bankers in Wall Street, who wield more federal power than they deserve, but I got a kick out of the Banking Committee grilling the big bankers the other day. Congress wants the bankers to abandon their perks--private jets, expensive retreats, lavish bonuses, etc.--and no one would disagree that belt-tightening is in order if they benefit by federal loans. But Congress has been running a trillion dollar Ponzi scheme for years, with the Social Security fund--not to mention giving themselves automatic raises, lavish pensions, franking priviliges, weight rooms, and lots of world-wide travel. In the face of an economic catastrophe, Speaker Pelosi is planning on a trip to Rome. (Her district office didn't know, or wouldn't admit to knowing, her schedule.)

Get me back to the 18th century. It's too crazy around here...

Snow Kids

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 18:23:00 EST

Mallory (right) and Eric shot this promo-snow walk yesterday. The farm is looking beautiful these days, though you will need to prepare for your visit by wearing lots of layered clothing, thermal underwear, hats, parkas, sun-glasses, blankets, gloves, mitts, and walking boots. It's gorgeous, but it takes a little preparation. We recommend our directions, since we've heard that the approach to the farm from Cherry Valley/Beaumont is a bit less icy than coming in from the Yucaipa side.

Colonial Wrath

..In the 18th century, they didn't go easy on the outrage. When someone did something wrong, they said so--in the very boldest of terms...

We now have in our possession--just off the printing press--our facsimile edition of the December 23, 1768 New Hampshire Gazette. You can buy one for yourself here. (For those of you have subscribed, it's being mailed today.)

The very lead article begins with a jeremiad against gossip and falsehood--the practitioners of which are called, literally, the followers of Satan. The writer is so convinced of his cause that he uses the Valley of Tophet, an allusion I had to look up, to describe the practice of libeling and engaging in false detraction. (This "Tophet" is a valley near Jerusalem where ancient Molech-worshippers burned children alive and used drums to drown out their cries.)

In the 18th century, they didn't go easy on the outrage. When someone did something wrong, they said so--in the very boldest of terms. I've often wondered whether we've really learned anything in this age of "anger management," and "conflict-resolution." In the first place, the very people who might benefit from a "kinder, gentler" approach to problem solving, are the very ones likely to have the most contempt for "talking it out." In the second place, some moral truths don't benefit by give-and-take. There is no room for a dialogue between a Stalinist who keeps a political concentration camp and a victim of the camp itself. Does anyone seriously believe a devout jihadist, for example, would benefit from a counselor telling him, "you can't do anything about the person who ridicules Mohammed; you can only do something about your reaction to that ridicule?"

The reality of a false certainty fueling outrage doesn't necessarily detract from the social value of outrage itself. Just because PETA activists absurdly wear Klan sheets to protest a dog show doesn't mean that we shouldn't consider the value of anger turned righteously against an objective evil. You might even say that the PETAs and the Code Pinks and the Greenpeaces of the world give "shaming" a bad name.

Consider the monstrous cruelty of the 18th century allusion itself: Tophet--the valley where the screams of burning infants had to be muffled by the sound of drums. The 18th century writer was willing to compare public liars and detractors to the hideous Molech worshippers of old. Our generation, on the other hand, can't even decide whether any comparison to any evil is appropriate on any front. If anything, in fact, we have it backward in our age. We wax indignant about trans-fatty acids or insensitivity to nut allergies, and we ignore the slaughter of infants in the Planned Parenthood Clinics of America. We work up a sweat over polar bears hopping ice flows and we allow hideous murderers to languish, at state expense, in our prisons. We chide Judeo-Christians for allowing faith to influence legislation and we ignore jihadists who would destroy the state entirely, in favor of their version of faith. Within the broad context of the Christian faith, we divide over end-times minutia and happily take communion with idolaters and fornicators--in the name of being "seeker friendly." We pretend that "conflict resolution" can resolve what is unresolvable--and we rob ourselves of the best tools any family, any church, any society has for identifying and limiting objective evil: scorn, scolding, and ultimately shunning.

There was a time when you didn't need an expensive state bureaucracy to teach sex education. You just called loose girls bad names. There was a time when you didn't need massive prison systems, and hefty state payrolls to warehouse violent criminals. You just executed them on the town square--in front of young and old, as an example. There was a time when shoplifting and graft and stock fraud was not rampant, because you heaped Molech-level scorn on anyone who broke the rules.

Today, America faces a demographic nightmare as the society ages and not enough children are being born to care for the elderly--either directly or by contributing to the tax base. Something like forty-three million children have been aborted since the Roe V Wade decision made us the savage heirs of Molech as a nation. When a courageous Catholic priest sees a Teddy Kennedy or a Nancy Pelosi coming down the aisle for eucharist, and withholds it, there is a giant act of virtue taking place. On the surface, it might look like an act of intolerance, but it's the act of a loving shepherd who is tired of hearing the screams of the innocent and is brave enough to identify the wolf in the midst of the flock.

Can you imagine the different course America might have taken, and might still take, if we shamed the cheerleaders of death? In our churches? At our dinner-tables?

Tricky Tom

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:56:00 EST

Tax-cheat Tom Daschle didn't last long in his bid to become the secretary of health and human services, but apparently he was around long enough to sneak a few despicable provisions into the Income Confiscation Act of 2009, otherwise known as the "Economic Stimulus" Act. I keep hearing what a nice guy Barack Obama is, but telling the country we desperately need this trillion dollar spending bill or economic "catastrophe" will result, and then adding a provision that would require doctors to de-emphasize care for the elderly and force medical professionals to follow federal care guidelines--or face unspecified penalties, just seems like dirty pool. (Call it what you want; It certainly doesn't sound like "change we can believe in.") As Bloomberg quotes Daschle, the goal is to get doctors to give up their autonomy and "learn to operate less like solo practitioners." Daschle wants Americans to expect less from their health care providers, and die, if necessary, to keep health care costs down.

..kindly, mis-guided half-wits insist on a "fairness for everyone" that produces competence for no one..

That's what happens when you promise everyone free national health care. Instead of letting people decide for themselves what procedures they want to pay for, the "fair minded" Tom Daschles of the world conclude that since we can't give innovative drugs to everyone, we will give them to no one. There is less incentive to innovate, and the groundbreaking research that eventually benefits everyone grinds to a halt, because kindly, mis-guided half-wits insist on a "fairness for everyone" that produces competence for no one.

More and more, Americans are electing politicians on the basis of the way they are packaged. (Even if we acknowledge that even the smartest ad men couldn't figure out a way to keep selling Tom to South Dakotans.) Someone within my own circle, whose personal beliefs are violated by nearly every policy position Barack Obama has taken, recently changed his mind on the basis that "he seemed like such a nice guy." The shallowing of the American mind cuts across party lines too. A free-market conservative friend of mine once spent a half hour telling me how "stupid" I was for having concerns that our congressman was bragging about pork brought back to the district.

We don't think anymore. We don't read. We don't argue. Apparently, we have become so utterly witless, as a people, that we can be told "sign this check for nine trillion dollars, or we will never recover!"

Lord Help Us!

Community

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 02:16:00 EST

Sam, Diane, Norm, Cliff
Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Phineas
Jonas Clarke, John Parker, Sylvanus Wood
William Bradford, John Robinson, Alice Southworh
Peter, James, John, Mary, Matthew, Luke, Martha...

I suppose communities are bound together by different kinds of glue. Some of them are held together by romance, or the vicarious experience of romance, or by beer, or by blood, or by sports, or by music, or politics, or faith, or even--in this age of the ubiquitous computer screen--by a common love of 18th century military orderly books. Communities are profane and sometimes sublime. They are ephemeral and eternal, ridiculous and heroic, completely superficial and cold-dead, write-it-in-blood serious.

There was a time, in the Christian world, where you "stepped into" the community. You met a standard, in other words. You weren't just sprinkled at birth, or confirmed at twelve, or debutatanted at sixteen. It wasn't a matter of chronology, or tradition, or religious bureaucracy rubber-stamping you on your way to another blue-punch and cookies reception. It wasn't just a Christian fern bar, where all you had to do was walk through the door and keep it nice and superficial. It wasn't just a tearful trip up to the altar--it was an agreement to be subject to others. Paul wrote that this covenant between believers was so important that the believer essentially had two worlds--"this world" which is full of fornicators, idolaters, and the covetous. But there was also a separate community, the believer's "company," the people, essentially, he hangs with, he eats with. Paul makes it very clear--believers aren't even supposed to eat with someone who is a gross sinner and who calls himself a brother. (1 Cor 5).

Matthew talks about the demarcation between mere heathens and a covenant community when he records the words of Jesus, with respect to someone who will not take the rebuke of the church, "let him be unto thee as an heathen and a publican." (Matthew 18:17). Jesus also makes it clear that this authority, "this church," doesn't come from synods, or arch-bishops, or elders, or this year's approved geriatrics in the denominational pyramid scheme. In the very next verses he says that wherever "two or three" are gathered in His name, their actions shall bind on earth and in heaven.

It was this sort of small, meaningful covenant that inspired William Bradford to joint a separatist Pilgrim church--as a twelve year old. He paid a high price for community: he was already on the run from the King, for his religious beliefs, by the time he was nineteen. Before another dozen years had passed by, he was getting his boots wet, off the coast of New England, settling a new covenant community in the howling wilderness of the new world. Talk about high purpose. This was ice-cold serious stuff, with each man bearing a musket to the rude meeting house, and the entire community burying half of their congregation in the ground, the first winter.

In our age--our "this world"--we're happy if we have a community that's something like the gang from Cheers. "A place where everybody knows your name." We are so community-impoverished we'll settle for this superficial version of the Bradford community. (Ironic--isn't it?--that the Cheers Bunch and the Plymouth bunch occupied roughly the same geography, but no where near the same spiritual territory.)

Community isn't just a longing for good conversation anymore. It's getting very serious. In Iran, Muslims just found out that execution will await them if they convert to Christianity. (You read that right. Execution.) In our own country, as resources dwindle, there could be a very ugly fight for who gets health care, who gets pensions, who gets benefits, who controls credit, who gets to raise their own children. (Barbara Boxer just decided she wants the senate to affirm the U.N.'s anti-parent "rights of the child" convention.) Yesterday, I lamented that the entire political establishment has gone stark raving mad. Their answer to national insolvency is to print more funny money and put our grandchildren into even greater debt. In the face of a political establishment that has clearly lost its mind, small "Bradford style" spiritual communities should be our sanctuaries.

But where are they?

Can anyone really say their eternal community (the one they like to think is "eternal") is really anything like the Mathew or the Corinthians or the Bradford fellowship? When was the last time your church "rebuked" you? When was the last time your church "provoked" you to good works? When was the last time your church called those of our political leaders who claim to be "brothers" to repentance?

It's time to start real fellowships. Corinthian fellowships.

Let him who has ears to hear, hear.

Insanity

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:15:00 EST

A few numbers to begin with:

The Size of the National Debt: $10,728,600,293,949.76

The Number of American Households: 105,480,101

National Debt Per American Household: $101,704.66

Non-Interest Federal Expenditures 2008: $2,641,000,000,000

Avg. Yearly Federal Obligation Per Household: $25,037.90

Let's assume, as a nation, we actually wanted to reduced the national debt to $0, over 30 years. At an interest rate of 5%, that would mean payments of $6,616.03 per year, per household. When you add that to our $25,037.90 per family federal budget obligation, that would mean every American family would have to come up with an average of:

$31,653.93--Annually.

Of course, the averages are a little bit more depressing--if that is possible--when you consider that the federal income tax burden falls differently on different families. Most families pay social security withholding tax through their paychecks, but as many as 38% of American families pay no federal income tax at all.

Well, if we don't want to create an international economic catastrophe, we have to pay the debt, interest and principle, but the other figure--the $25,037.90 per family per year--consists of $10,807 which is called "discretionary." The Federal Workers at the Security and Exchange Commission, for example, got about a billion of that last year. (You remember the S.E.C.? They were the well-paid federal civil servants who couldn't stop a $50 billion dollar bandit? Bernard Madoff?) $324 billion dollars went to welfare and unemployment programs, but, wait that's not even included in the "discretionary" category. That is considered "mandatory" spending.

The bottom line is that both Republicans and Democrats have presided over a system that transfers money from net tax-payers to net tax-takers, and now, our elected representatives have the gall to say that another trillion dollars of this will "stimulate" the economy.

Another way of putting it: the private sector--which foots this entire bill--is having financial trouble, so..naturally..increasing its debt service will--what?-- "stimulate it" to work harder? Picture two working parents--dad runs a family business and mom cuts hair at a beauty salon. They take home $75,000 a year. The federal government is saying, "heah--folks--between you and me--Barney Frank and his Freddie MAC purchased votes on the banking committee have crashed the real estate market and created world-wide financial havoc. We want to solve that by obligating you to pay for more federal salaries and entitlement payments. Does that work for you? It works for us. You have just two votes between you and these ACORN guys (another Federal subsidy) can register as many as 100 dead people to vote--just in your precinct, so no hard feelings, okay? It's just a numbers issue."

At the root of this--very simply--is human greed, but it's not the human greed of well-paid corporate CEOs. (I'm not talking about the ones who took a bonus with TARP money.) Getting mad at talented, and well-compensated corporate executives is something like getting mad at Kobe Bryant for being good at basketball. If we don't pay talented people well, they will take their talents elsewhere. International corporations have already begun to poach Wall Street talent. The redistributive "economic justice" of demagogues promising to put a chicken in every pot is the real culprit, and the slothful greed of the American people is the root disease.

SIN, in other words, is the problem. If we look to our political leaders to "sock it to someone else," so that we can have the goodies, we are announcing, in effect, that we are too lazy, and too ignorant, to provide for ourselves.

It's a spiritual issue, but did you hear a sermon on that today?

Probably not--unless you're still reading.

Americans--get out of your comfortable

Shooting from the Woods

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 10:53:00 EST

Samuel, Lockton and I drove out to Moreno Valley, in a misty rain, to see "Defiance" tonight--an Ed Zwick production ("Glory"), starring Liev Schreiber and Daniel Craig, playing the part of the Bielski brothers of Navahrudak, or more broadly, Belarus. This was a wooded country east of Poland that felt the Nazi boot in 1941. Somehow, twelve hundred Jews gathered together under their leadership and survived the Slavic winters in the forest--fending off cold, hunger, and internal bickering; they killed Nazis, and Nazi sympathisers, in the process. I particularly liked one partisan scene where a Nazi motorcycle rider is gulleted by a rope strung across the highway.

My Greek father-in-law told me stories about resistance fighters taking over an Nazi ammuntion dump, with flintlock muskets, so the odds of beating "insurmountable" opposition rang true. Victory goes to those who want to win--not necessarily those who have the best toys.

Normally, Hollywood paints Russian partisans as friendly Reds, but the record is just too obvious to ignore anymore. Russian communists were no better than their Tzarist ancestors. They were willing participants in the pograms, and they are depicted here as drunken brutes, who accept Jewish soldiers by way of expediency. Communist culture, no matter how collectivist it seemed on the surface, was just another means of disbursing Tsarist goodies to the party faithful, and "Defiance" doesn't blink on this front.

Good for Mr. Zwick.

But Zwick is a coward on the greater, more tangible canvas of life in this mercilessly current and immediate world. When Debbie Schlussel asked him why he hasn't depicted modern Israelis as the victims of Nazi jihadists, he punted--big time.

History is, most certainly, an antidote against evil...but pity the poor truth-seeker who wants to learn something from it.

It takes a real man to apply precedent where it is appropriate, and we have very few real men in Hollywood anymore.

Fires of the Mind

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 03:54:00 EST

Steven Chu, President Obama's Secretary of Energy, worried, out loud, to the press, that California farms and vineyards are in peril from global "warming."

Keep in mind, this was not the leaked transcript of a counseling session. We have it on good authority that Chu was sober when he made this observation, and close friends are certain he is not joking. He gives every appearance of being hallucinogen-free, even earnest, when he whispers, with child-like sincerity, "we're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California."

We repeat, this was not recorded at any federal mental health-care facility. There is no need to adjust your set.

But if you see a little pod fall down from the sky, and rock gently before sending out its little tentacles--and you sense close kin start seeming humorless, glassy-eyed, distant, be careful. If you see them staring soulfully at Chu's image on the television set, nodding in feverish agreement to the weird notion that ten years of cooling is really ten years of warming, then watch out..

..the invasion is under way.

In Times of Crisis, I need a Movie..

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:32:00 EST

Speaking of Netflix, here's their performance (blue line) against the Dow 30's performance (gold line) for the last three months. By way of disclosure, I don't own any Netflix stock, though I did recommend it years ago to a retired postal worker who has made himself comfortably prosperous by doing his own research. In fairness, I haven't checked in with him over the last year, and I should probably compare this chart for Netflix to a couple of major motion picture studios. I suspect the distributors of entertainment are doing slightly better than its producers, these days, since they benefit by variety and the studio can only afford to produce so much of it.

This may seem overly poetic, but people need story-telling to beat back the fear. Think about it: we all grew up in Southern California. Real Estate prices never go down, right? That was a known. That was, like, a bedrock truth.

"No? You're kidding! Okay, listen. Let's just take a break here. Let's take in a movie. Let's talk about this tomorrow morning. I need a little 'beginning, middle, and end' epiphany here to be able to handle this."

Our sales here on the farm for the last 90 days, are up by double digit percentages over the same period last year, and I suspect it has something to do with the fact that we are unrepentant story-tellers. Jon Harmon cannot resist telling a new joke. (If you gagged him, the joke would work its way out of his shoes somehow.) Logan Creighton is always telling our guests something he read last night. We used to have one guy, who invented his own farm mythology everywhere he went, making up new Riley family legends with every hayride. I miss having David Leslie Thomas around, too, because he was full of story-telling bravado.

My dad, and my Uncle Blaine, and my Uncle Don were all absolutely full of the blarney. Uncle Don could tell you a story while he was juggling flaming torches. My dad could tell you a story, and if you closed your eyes, you would swear you were in an English pub somewhere. On one occasion, Dad was hiking my older brothers and sisters up a dusty trail in the Sierras. The girls were complaining about thirst. Dad told them a story about a clear mountain spring that was just around the corner. He waxed refreshing on the subject of the ice, the clear blue water, the daisies growing wild around the eddying pools of a clear, crashing-cool, mountain stream.

He had no idea if there was a spring in the distance, but he kept elaborating, kept cooling the water, kept lavishing size and color on the picture of the pond, until, in the distance...

...the story became truth.

The Humanist Exposed

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:57:00 EST

I share a Netflix account with my boys and Samuel has a sneaky way of moving his movies to the top of the que, so when I saw the email message "We have recieved..." I panicked and took the first recommendation I could find. The result was this AMC production called "Mad Men," which, as the show tells us on screen 1, is a term coined by Madison Avenue Advertising executives to describe themselves.

Although the production standards, and the writing, are quite simply beyond belief, I don't recommend this show for families. The world view is vile. The morality is beyond contempt. It doesn't appear to descend to the Sopranos brand of epidermis and blood, but it's no less evil in its own way.

The odd thing is that it makes an argument for God without appearing to know it--at least if the first three episodes are any guide.

Normally I absolutely cannot stand story lines which depend on a shared presumption about our collective take on cultural and political events. When "Mr. Holland's Opus" urged me to get weepy about John Lennon's death, I thought, "oh, please, why ruin a perfectly good story by hitching it to a pop icon?" Nabakov called this sort of thing "topical trash," and it's an easy trap. On one level, it's as simple as telling an old joke instead of a new one. Story-tellers have an urge to use known material, but however much we want to succeed as raconteurs, we can't do it by using old material. It always has to be, on some level, new.

Mad Men does have a topical angle--the response of the advertising world to the nation's realization that smoking tobacco could be dangerous to your health, but it makes the dilemma real by creating a credible character--(M)ad Man Don Draper--who has to figure out how to keep selling cigarettes to a world that knows better.

Don's real problem, however, is more sinister, and more revealing of the humanist's blind, arrogant, and ultimately childish rage.

Don senses there is something false about a 1960s American gentry that appears to worship suburban homes and suburban routines. The occasion of a neighborhood party has Don drinking beer all morning as he builds a playhouse for his daughter's birthday. The divorcee invited to the celebration is made to appear more "centered" than the married housewives gossiping about her inside the kitchen. Don, a shameless lothario, is made to appear more wise even though, and perhaps because, he doesn't believe in anything.

The reality here, of course, is that the very blessings God doles out, across generations, to those who believe in His word can be the very source of the soul-sickness thinking people sometimes feel when they sense the white picket fence isn't worth worshipping. The God who made the white picket fence is worth adoration, not the other way around. When suburban respectability becomes worshipped for its own sake, it becomes both a farce to the moral degenerates who ridicule it, and to the unthinking traditionalists who live it out of form's sake. I've always cringed when people make fun of the "Ozzy and Harriet mentality." I like Ozzy and Harriet. I wish there were more Ozzy and Harriets around today. The world would be more civil. I do think, however, that Ozzy and Harriet would have had greater dimension, and a more certain defense against the reviling of Hollywood low-lifes and tenured cynics, if we had come to understood the Nelsons' spiritual world-view. Ozzy spent a great deal of time giving basketball advice, and making fun of himself, but I can't recall him ever praying. The root of their family's basic decency was never explored. God was the silent, and un-credited, accomplice.

The Bible-illiterate, the latch-key child of Western Civilization is represented well in Mad Men's Don Draper. He doesn't like the rules, and so he breaks them, but when he sees his children, asleep in their beds at night, there is something about home, hearth, wife, and child that provides him peace in a way he can't understand, because he spends so much time ridiculing the world's rituals, he doesn't have any time to look up towards the heavens.

It is Finished! (Well, sorta...)

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:20:00 EST

Even Grandma Riley has watched a sneak preview of "Courage, New Hampshire." It's actually rough cut right down to the final scene, and it looks pretty good in my over-exposed way of thinking about these things. This editing process has re-affirmed a new lesson over and over again. Yes, I hate Hollywood. You can certainly deposit a great deal of our society's cynicism right at its doorstep, but I do have to give credit to the art directors. When you watch a major motion picture, in one sense you're seeing a rolling montage of stunning post-cards. Every frame of the movie has that lush, complex simplicity of a dramatic photograph. Think of the backgrounds in the hobbit's lair in "Lord of the Rings" or the flock of sheep grazing on the English country estates in "The Duchess." Sometimes, the beauty of the images hold you, even when the dialogue is just unloading freight and moving the story from here to there.

Of course, art direction is just one of the many hats a film wears. I have new respect for sound men, lighting crews, hair-dressers and casting directors. The question before the story-telling world, as I see it, is whether the new technology will make it possible to break the hide-bound largesse of the average film production. I believe even small film these days is defined as something that costs less than $3 million. Could a dramatic TV show, worth watching, be made for $50,000 an episode?

Dunno. I guess we'll find out. Years ago, the "desktop publishing" promise seemed to hold that everyone would be able to publish their own books and newspapers--and of course they can, but much of it isn't worth reading. John Updike correctly predicted that the "information highway" would be mostly roadkill. Quite a bit of YouTube, and even Cable television, bears this out. In an age where literally anyone can create their own daily news show, the world is still subscribing to the shrill preening of Keith Olberman and the school girl posturing of Rachel Maddow. Why? Because it's slick. There's good theme music, studio lighting, writing-teams, and the weight of network legitimacy behind it. The key will be mastering budget-lean versions of those production assets if we are really to see a content-rich transformation of programming. Certainly, there are departments (lighting & sound) that can't really be cut, but years ago I was watching a commercial film shoot here on the farm. There was a dolly-grip assigned for the day, with no dolly-shots planned, and no dolly on site. In some European countries, you have to hire a native cinematographer, even if you don't use him, to please the unions. (People wonder why we're having a global economic crisis?)

Most industries that become wildly profitable during the firsts, second, and third generations wind up accumulating fat. The American auto, steel, and film industry come to mind. Whole systems will need to be re-thought in order to keep making products that really meet human needs, without making consumers pay a ransom for jobs that are no longer (and perhaps never were) required. I hope the starry-eyed kids in the Obama Administration learn that lesson: it's not about protecting "jobs."

It's about making something worthwhile. Our economy, and our story-telling, will recover when we start thinking more about serving the needs of the market, and less about protecting our careers.

At the Movies, Over and Over and Over Again

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 13:12:00 EST

We have been making steady progress on our pilot television/film festival version of life on the New Hampshire colonial frontier. We have a few final scenes to edit, a fair amount of color-balancing and sound work, and then a few transitions to engineer. I mean to make a systematic study of the "flash-back," since I haven't settled on any match of color and/or sound filtering that give it a fresh look. Even flashbacks inside a historical film still have to flash "back" somehow. We also need music, and we need some way of making up for something I didn't learn on the set. Movies need to give a character a chance to just look out across the valley and think. You need to show the militia captain polishing his musket and saying nothing. This movie has a lot of talkers. We need to show them working up to their speeches, so to, er, "speak."

I can say there is some genuinely good entertainment, and education, throughout, and I remain excited about where we might sell this. It has an adventurous, frolicsome, and yet dramatic and redeeming tone, which is more or less the target at which I was aiming.

I have come to realize that the way we watch movies is very dependent on the way in which we've been conditioned to watch movies. MTV changed our expectations abut the number of cuts-per-minute. The steady-cam made it possible to walk and talk with the characters, so we expect a camera that can glide in and out of a crowd, taking in everything the character sees. Stanley Kubrick, when he made Barry Lyndon, forever changed what we hope to see in the way of period lighting. If you watch old Hollywood epics, the 18th century is brightly, lavishly lit up like a car-dealership showroom. And even though we rarely have this perspective in life, for some reason we even want to see the top-down God-view of the action, with a camera pointing straight down from the sky by way of establishing shot.

Without having a Hollywood budget, we acknowledged some of this, but we didn't dumb down the story either. We use period language, and we focus on period realities. We hope teenage boys and girls watch this, but it wasn't made for them either. Frankly, I worry that the story's straight-forwardness, and its more or less transparent moral contours will violate another assumption we have about watching film: cynicism and nihilism snuck into our movie-going experience along with the steady-cam and the three-cut-per-second edit. We have a generation idolizing a Johnny Depp femme-pirate, instead of the royal navy that is purposely made to fail in his capture. Audiences don't expect any clear virtue anymore. Even a film I enjoyed very much--The Patriot--began with a war hero's tortured memory of his combat experience. Try as I might, I have yet to read any 18th century warrior regret at anything other than cowardice. Valor was coveted, not shamed, and the urge to disbelieve-at-any-cost would be more symptomatic of a post-Sartre film-grunt than a South Carolina militia colonel.

The American heart, and spirit, is bruised. That might explain why we fall for political snake oil so easily--and why we expect less from the characters on the big and the small screen.

Weather-Watching & Prayer as Musical Theater

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:19:00 EST

I get up early on potentially rainy days to keep the web site updated, and this means trying to watch the storm from the various doppler sites on the internet. This system looks like most of the moisture is heading to the west of us, along the coast, in a more or less straight, south-to-north line. We'll probably have light misty rain most of the day, since the weather alerts don't include any flood watches or warnings. That seems to be a downgraded report from yesterday.

Climate change groupies like to remind us there is a difference between weather and climate, but it still stands to reason that if short term weather is difficult to predict, long term climate would be even more difficult to model. Columnist John Tomlinson reminds us that it might be time to start praying for global warming, since the earth has been cooling down, in reality, since 1998. From his column:

At December's U.N. Global Warming conference in Poznan, Poland, 650 of the world's top climatologists stood up and said man-made global warming is a media generated myth without basis. Said climatologist Dr. David Gee, Chairman of the International Geological Congress, "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?" I asked myself, why would such obviously smart guy say such a ridiculous thing? But it turns out he's right. The earth's temperature peaked in 1998. It's been falling ever since; it dropped dramatically in 2007 and got worse in 2008, when temperatures touched 1980 levels. Read more...

Will this put an end to the forlorn, money-raising images of mama polar bears leaving their cubs stranded on melting bergs? Probably not--even though the polar bear population is on the increase. New religions like climate-change inspire Inquisitorial zeal, especially when you get to wrap up class warfare along with a little old fashioned earth-worship. I'm a person of faith myself, but mine is rooted in the ancient texts, boasts George Frideric Handel, gothic cathedrals, nation-building, civil liberties, and eternal life to boot. Climate change, as a religious choice, is just...tacky.

Prayer without Specificity

..is something like a diet without a menu.

In times of crisis, even the atheists know that Americans are going to pray, and there is precious little they can do about it. Barack Obama pulled an absolute master-stroke in asking Rick Warren, the mega-church marketing genius to offer up an inaugural prayer, and Rick's invocation was a marvel of focus-group mastery. Rick's prayer offered up something for everybody. It mentioned Jesus for the evangelicals, Isa for the Muslims, and Dr. King for the civil rights crowd. It held up the Obama family for divine guidance and protection, pleasing the left-center faithful. It mentioned the planet for globalists, the earth for environmentalists, scripture for traditionalists, and even civility for the bi-partisan. It even intimated "accountability" before God for, well, everybody, because Rick never mentioned any of the sins we might be accountable for, except for the naughty practice of "fighting with each other." It was a prayer that looked out to America and said, "heah, kids, let's all show good sportsmanship and play ball!"

Here's the problem. We're not talking about a baseball game, and, even if we were, at least a coach would have something specific to say about where we were weak on the field. You might argue, "heah, lighten up, it's a chance for everyone to feel good about each other and the moment."

Okay, let's just go with that for a minute. Pastors, under this model, "make us feel good about ourselves"--happy, magnanimous, bi-partisan. They spray jolly-juice on the audience. Everyone walks back out to the parking lot, humming "Hello, Dolly, well Hello Dolly," and you leave the church occasion (or the state-church occasion) with a joyous, musical theater glow. I'll be the first to admit that I appreciate this sort of "can-you-feel-the-love" moment, where everyone gets weepy and forgiving and charitable en masse. I would even argue, it's absolutely necessary to keep everyone feeling some semblance of national identity, but at some point, someone has to play the grown-up. After the last chorus of "luck be a lady tonight," someone has to address the national moral failings that have brought us to our present crisis.

Theoretically, that's the pastor, the guardian of the ancient texts, the guy who actually purports to be familiar with the writings of Moses, David, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul.

Let me illustrate this by descending into absurdity. If you went to a car mechanic with bad brakes, would you expect him to consult the manuals and fix the car--or would you expect him to sing a few tunes from A Chorus Line and tell you not to sweat it?

America may be on the verge of a regulatory binge and a federal make-work spending spree to solve national problems that really have more to do with our souls than they do our infrastructure. Is it any wonder that millions of children are womb-killed in America, when corporate executives care more for their bonus pay than they do the good of the company? Is it any wonder that we have regulators who can't find a $50 billion fraud, when we take "thou shalt not steal" off the court room walls? Is it any wonder we're becoming lazy when newbie Christians can quote "judge not," but appear puzzled by "if your brother sins, rebuke him?"

Rick Warren made a sly bow to these realities, when he prayed "..all nations and all people will stand accountable before [God].." but he left the definition of that accountability up to the audience. This is something like a football coach telling martians they need to make touchdowns without even showing them what the ball looks like, much less the rules of the game. Pastors are supposed to teach, to encourage, and to rebuke.

You've got the "encourage" part down, Rick. You need to start rebuking and teaching now.

Chop, Chop

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:26:00 EST

In the digital age, you can cut a movie, send it to your friends, endure a little electronic work-shopping, and get back at post-production--all without setting up a projector in a screening room at MGM, without, in fact, even sitting up out of your tilt-back office chair in remote Oak Glen.

That's pretty much what I'm doing these days--making a movie, or a television pilot. (There's a thin line between the two.) To me, it looks bully good--even after hearing the same dialogue over and over and over again. Parts of it still make me laugh out loud. One part got me weeping, but if you know me, that's pretty easy to do. (The same scene got Mallory crying, and that's not quite as easy to achieve.)

I've learned a few things: never cut a scene so that a character laughs at his, or anyone else's, funny line. If you let a character laugh, on screen, that cues the audience to laugh, and it's not really honest. I know that sit-coms depend on a laugh track, but that's something like taking aspirin when you don't really need it. It mutes the senses. To be honest, I violated this rule a few times, but only when the available material demanded it. I still have one painfully long, five minute talk-talk-talk scene in the dreary cavern cage, which is very authentic looking but still in need of art direction (lesson #2). I have to figure some way of chopping it, but the rest of the production--if you're even remotely curious--looks like it has at least as much potential as the standard network pilot-season mock-up. (lesson #3: never compare yourself to Hollywood; the big studios have enough money to put out some really boring stuff and still sell it: if you want to make it as an independent, it's got to be so great no one would dare reject it.)

Lesson #4: the exterior world, even in the country, is not quiet. It's full of wind, airplanes overhead, screaming u-pickers, and delivery trucks on the highway. Just film it and do the dialogue later. Hollywood calls this ADR (automated dialogue replacement) or looping. The actor comes back into the studio and re-speaks his lines, a phrase at a time, until they match the original production. They say Marlon Brando preferred looping, and would even mumble during the original shoot, so that he would get a chance to perfect his performance voice later. When you're filming out in the hot sun, waiting for a plane to pass by, you can understand its merits.

Lesson #5: telling a story is its own best reward. Take up the fiddle. Learn the piano. Memorize a few lines of Byron. Sing your own song. Otherwise, you'll just be out in the cold, in a crowd somewhere, buying political souvenirs, and hoping for a glimpse of the latest false-prophet.

And that is just too depressing to contemplate.

Cult-Like Devotion...

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 17:24:00 EST

True religion, in one sense, has never really been "respectable." If twelve or thirteen men, with no visible means of subsistence, followed by thousands of hungry followers, took up residence in your community center, or in your church courtyard, or in the hills just outside of town, some people would be tempted to call code enforcement. If their leader was in the habit of calling the town's pastors and spiritual leaders, "vipers" and "hypocrites," others would conclude they were all heretics and renegades. If they all shared each others burdens and took care of each other, they would be labeled, very quickly, a "cult."

To be certain, there are dangerous cults in the history of the world, or else the accusation wouldn't have any sting. The word "extremist" is used the same way, not because it necessarily applies, but because it has a way of ending the conversation. People worship the middle. The cows like to make sure they are at the center of the herd, even if the herd is walking right into the slaughter house.

Martin Luther King, in his letter from the Birmingham Jail wrote these lines, about the modern American church:

"If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust."

King was lamenting the failure of the established church to be confrontational in the face of evil. After all, if a black Christian woman couldn't sit next to her white Christian sister on the same bus, wouldn't we expect the church to speak up? The Bible tells us in Amos 5:15, "Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate.." Dr. King specifically applauded the evil-hating, confrontational spirit of the early church, whose followers, according to King, "brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide..." (DNC, are you listening?)

Well that same modern church--the one King lamented--has indeed become "an irrelevant social club," because "confrontational" pastors are few and far between. We don't "hate" evil anymore, because hate--no matter how well directed--is too alarming for the cud-chewing middle. If a church speaks the truth, if it takes care of its flock, if it reads scripture as honestly as it can, if it preaches against sin among the congregation and in public office, someone will be hell-bound, literally, to call it a cult, and the resulting emasculation of the church makes for a happy hour in hell. Nothing pleases evil more than a limp-wristed, consensus-seeking "man of God."

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine was having some real trouble. He was literally asking friends for financial help. We both came to the same conclusion at the same time. I said, "wouldn't it be nice to be able to have nine or ten families gathered together in house churches across the land--real churches, that tithed to each other and preached the truth without bothering to build a seeker-friendly semi-fellowship of semi-Christians?"

"Amen," he said.

If you're tired of taking little dips into the pond of spiritual nothingness on Sundays, ponder this: House church, anyone?

A Sense of Urgency

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:11:00 EST

Years ago, prior to my present incarnation as an 18th century farmer, I watched one of my colleagues (we'll call him "Chad") shut a computer system down in the middle of the day--to tinker with it. Upwards of 40 people in that office had very little to do while they waited, through lunch, and the next morning, as "Chad" doodled around with their system software. He even left early on the day in question, "to avoid traffic." I watched the business owner pacing and I looked on, helplessly, as Chad took personal calls, played with system settings, ordered lunch and appeared to give every indication that he didn't know what sort of havoc he was causing.

A few months later a supplier in that industry took me into his office, closed the door, and and tried to take a breath to control himself before blurting out a necessary truth about my colleague "Chad."

"Here's the problem," the man said, "that little snot has no sense of urgency."

Among the world's various kinds of villainy, a delayed sense of obligation can be the most irritating. It's not as though you are dealing with a profane crank or price gouger or an utter incompetent. They might even be pleasant. Heck, they are likely to be very pleasant people, because, frankly, nothing bothers them. The work always gets done. Someday. But the pain isn't just the procrastination with these sorts of people; it's the sense your very pressing problems, deadline problems, don't really matter to them. It's something like people who stop their car in the middle of a parking lot, blocking traffic, just to talk to friends. There's no real emergency for them, ever, and so if their own emergencies mean nothing to them, yours mean even less.

You can't imagine theses sorts of people ever looking in the rear view mirror. They wouldn't even look out the front window if there were a way to avoid it. They just don't care about anything but the turns and stops they need to make, when they need to make them, because the rest of the world--for them--just doesn't exist.

About the same time I was contending with "Chad," I heard a very, very prominent Southern California evangelical minister giving a sermon about a scratch he found on a brand new car. He was annoyed that he hadn't even owned the car for two hours without it being damaged, but then he remembered that, at the great and terrible day of the Lord, "it would all burn." He proceeded to tell the congregation that, essentially, nothing on earth mattered. "It will all burn." He proceeded to talk about the roof he worried about. "It will all burn," he said. The congregation laughed. He worried about his new lawn's watering system. "It will all burn," he said, "even the sprinklers." And everyone laughed.

Certainly, there is great virtue in calming down, and looking at the long-term, eternal picture, but there's a difference between doing that and checking out entirely. If the Lord gave a sermon, explaining the vast importance of the one lost sheep, it would seem weirdly disconnected to respond, "yeah, but it's all going to burn. Why even look for the sheep?"

I run into this phenomenon with phone companies a lot lately. The "business Sermons" I have to give them seem weirdly comical, and utterly obvious, but I might as well be preaching to a square block of pure rubber:

"Do you understand that we have no voice mail system?"
"Yes, I get that."
"And do you understand that we're in business? We actually advertise our phone number?"
"Yes. I understand."
"And do you understand that if we pay a lot of money to put a phone number up on a freeway billboard, it's a little weird having a voice mail system that doesn't work?"
"I understand."
"And do you understand that if we can't capture the customers' messages, we can't make sales?"
"I understand."
"And if we can't make sales, we can't pay you?"
"I understand."
"Really? So you don't mind fixing it right now--tonight?"
"Well..."

I've made this point before, but I'll make it again. The more America "checks out," the less care and love it shows the "here and now," the fewer talents we are going to have to show the Master upon His return.

A nd we won't be able to say "heah, it's all going to burn, right?"

Correspondence & Survival

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:59:00 EST

Correspondence

First a few very generous letters of support & praise for our wonderful staff, then a little survival news:

Hi, I just wanted to send you a note and tell how much fun my son Johnny and I had on Friday. We always love coming to the farm on field trips. We did the "Gold Rush" for the first time. It was so great. Johnny loved listening to Logan play his jaw harp so much, he had to buy one. He hardly put it down all weekend. I also want to thank Angela, at the Inn, for her wonderful service. Johnny ordered a hot dog and wanted potato chips with it. When Angela found out they were all out she had them make up some special chip/fries just for him. He loved them so much he called the "Angela's Fries" and thinks you should put them on the menu. Always a delight,

-- Ilene and Johnny

Jim, Just a quick note of encouragement for all the wonderful new things happening at Riley's Farm! I so enjoy reading your journal - some days rather heavy and dark; others quite light and witty!! Never a dull page any way you look at it! Andy & I and our friends had a wonderful time at Christmas in the Colonies. We know several other couples who would love to attend, but because of the distance from their homes, they're not as inclined to participate - hopefully, that will change when there are overnight accommodations available - would be wonderful to continue in the Colonial mode into the next morning (not sure I could get Andy to wear a nightshirt and cap, though!) One of the couples at our table came from QUITE a distance - Pappy from Venice Beach and his lady-friend flew in from Sacramento to attend the evening! I'm SO bad with names, but the gentleman who served us was also one of the key players at the Girl Scout event that we held at the Farm last May. I couldn't believe that he recognized me and even remembered my name! He made the evening very special (As EVERY ONE of your staff does!) You can tell they really enjoy their work! The music ensemble was especially enjoyable - wish there had been a little longer time period for dancing - maybe without the very young ones, who were getting rather rambunctious! Andy & I also come up earlier in the year (Aug.) for the raspberry picking date night (to celebrate our anniversary). What a relaxing, enjoyable evening - the berry-picking gave us the opportunity to enjoy the silence together in the out-of-doors - just the sound of the breeze and the birds! Dinner was unhurried and DELICIOUS! Plan on doing it again this year! (And I've been telling LOTS of people about it, too). Wish I was available to attend the apple class next weekend - sounds like he's got some hints that would be right up our alley. Our couple of apple trees have been struggling for several years - we just aren't educated in the ways of growing them in the heat of SO. CAL. Anyway, keep up the good work - you've created a safe haven for families to learn about the real America! God bless you!

--Barbara

Our family enjoyed “Christmas in the Colonies” this year. It was our first dinner on the farm. I am excited about the future development of your “New England Village.” I was thinking you may want to incorporate a school house in the future. It would be a good experience for the children, of all ages, as it was in the days, to sit for 15 or 20 minutes with instruction from a teacher of the times. I am sure they would see and compare the change our country has gone through, good and bad. Thank you for making a difference. May God bless you and your family.

--Laura

Survival

If some of you think I talk about survival & the economy too much, just bear with me. Me dear old mother, Bea Riley, was a depression baby, and the images of a whole town full of men out of work spook me more now that I'm one of those grown men, providing for a family. As some of you know, I watch television one night a week, on Sunday, and I believe CNBC had a story on all the Florida socialites put out of the clover by Bernard Madoff. At one point, a Palm Beach pawn broker is interviewed, and he reported the trade in Rolex watches has never been more brisk--that he's never seen so many luxury items turned in for cash during his decades in the business.

"What do you think that means?" the reporter asked.
"Stock up on canned goods," the man replied.

Okay, okay, I know we're supposed to trust the learned heads--those wise men and women who provide counsel in economic matters, (the same ones who were outraged, a few years ago, anyone would criticize Sally Mae and Freddie Mac.) Seriously, if Leslie Stahl calls Barney Frank "one smart guy," who am I to question her judgment? Truly, if there is even a small chance that "tinkering" with the free market (trillion dollar, "classified" capital injections, bank bailouts, auto-company nationalization--you know--"tinkering.") If "tinkering" will work, and Dr. Bernanke really knows how to stave off a major depression without creating hyper-inflation, then I will be the first one to breath a sigh of relief.

It's easy to stand on the sidelines and rant. I genuinely do hope someone knows what they're doing. The trouble is that some very smart people disagree very mightily on the present economic crisis. Some say that government intervention actually extended and aggravated the great depression; others say we should have had more government involvement in the markets sooner. If we don't have any perspective on that crisis, after seventy years, I doubt we're going to have consensus on this crisis, as we endure it without the benefit of hindsight.

So far, here on the farm, our business is up. We may be benefitting from Southern Californians who don't want to travel as far for a day off in the country, but I think it behooves all Americans to begin having a "Plan B."

For those of you have thought about "Plan B," I probably don't need to remind you what happens when things break down, but I will anyway. One of our long time farm friends, Richard Hanna, told me a story about growing up in depression era Pennsylvania. Some days, he would literally go without food, and he would wait for the potato harvesting rigs to drive by in the fields, and then dig around for spuds that were thrown up and cut in half. These days, Americans don't go digging for root vegetables; they wait for FEMA to drop corn flakes from the sky. If FEMA does that, great, but what happens when FEMA runs out?

The "measured" version of a major economic crisis, the "best of the worst scenario" is that widespread economic deterioration leads to soup lines, massive unemployment, and homelessness. Not very fun, but not absolute stone-age chaos either. If greater Los Angeles could manage to keep the power lines charged and the water working, and central valley farms could still deliver food, it wouldn't be the high life, but there would be some form of order. Think, however, of what happened during the Rodney King riots. That "merely" represented outrage over a jury verdict. Imagine what happens when people are hungry. Or don't imagine it. At some point, order would be restored, but do you really want to be downtown, or even in the suburbs when there's a water or food shortage and the new order is being debated?

This is still very much "thinking out loud" material, but it seems to me one version of our long term capital program on the farm could include "survival limited partnerships." In the best case, we raise money to build a New England village, to build a place where Americans can learn from their past. In the worst case, the farm's overnight capacity becomes a survival escape for the investors who would rather have a bunk in the country, and a cow to milk, than a gangland group hug and a resource-sharing conversation with roving, urban youth.

I'll be the first to admit there is something outlandish about it, but the curse of reading history is the knowledge that the story of man is just chock full of the outlandish and the dramatic and the un-heard of and the un-expected. As the boys at Monty Python put it, "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." For some reason, our most cutting, dismissive satire is heaped on people who remind us of previous disaster. "Springtime for Hitler" in the musical The Producers reminds us that evil always has a touch of the ridiculous about it, and because evil is ridiculous, it's difficult to take seriously. No one really believes the messenger. Poor Peter Schiff, when he was predicting the real estate crash and the stock market crash was being laughed off the set by people like Ben Stein, and I suppose if I hint "survival shares" to our corporate attorney, I will get laughed out of the building, but....

Bea Riley, and that pawn broker in Florida, take the present economic crisis seriously. Should you?

Vain Repetitions

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:36:00 EST

I believe it was C.S. Lewis who wrote, with respect to the supernatural, "seeing is not believing." As Dickens affirmed, when he fashioned the quivering, ghost-riddled Ebeneezer Scrooge, we are apt to chalk up what we can't explain to an "undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard.." We are more comfortable, generally, fitting the world into a pattern we find internally reasonable, no matter how much the perceived facts run contrary to our hypothesis.

Nowhere is this more apparent to me than in the way the modern church has adopted a pattern of accepted "Christianese," a set of vain repetitions to use in discussing our experience of God, and His Word.

Picture a men's prayer meeting. One man prays, "I just thank you, Lord, that I can let it all go on you, that I don't have to care about any of these problems, that YOU are my master, and YOU have taken care of everything and I just have to get out of the way, Lord."

And the group mumbles assent, and affirmation and amens.

.. churches would claim to follow God's word, but, in reality, they serve an approved extraction from the whole; they dish up a special denominational sauce that only mixes well with certain parts of the Word.

Then picture the next man praying, "..Lord, wicked men have opened their mouths against me...they repay me evil for good and hatred for my friendship... Lord, may their days be few, may their children be fatherless and their wives widows..may they be closed with disgrace..may their sins always be before the Lord, that He may cut off their memory.."

And the group pauses, chairs shift, and an awkward silence announces that this prayer doesn't fit somehow. It's not approved. Perhaps there is even a little awkward conversation afterwards. The second man is rebuked. He is just too angry. "God is about love," he is told, and "forgiveness."

The second man asserts, "I was just quoting the 109th Psalm."

"But we don't think you're interpreting it correctly," someone says.

"I wasn't interpreting it," the man says. "I was just quoting it."

Back to the prayer meeting:

First man: "I want to thank you Lord for taking away my desire for beer."

Second man: "I want to thank you Lord for giving us wine to make our hearts glad."

First man: "Thank you Lord for your kindness and mercy."

Second man: "..and Thank you, Lord, for your justice, for calling hypocrites 'vipers' and 'white washed tombs.'"

First man: ".. help me to understand and serve my wife..."

Second man: "..and, Lord, please encourage my wife to obey me..."

The point here is that most reasonably Biblical churches would claim to follow God's word, but, in reality, they serve an approved extraction from the whole; they dish up a special denominational sauce that only mixes well with certain parts of the Word. It's almost as if the Bibles of America have dim gray type indicating passages that are to be read but not pondered.

In John 12, we are told "...then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment..."

We read this passage, but we keep it at a safe distance--in the Holy Land, two thousand years away. Can you imagine a Baptist pastor having his shoes removed by a woman in the church, that she might anoint his feet with ointment, and wipe them with her hair?

It's a loving image, in the abstract, but in reality, if it were staged in a contemporary living room, it would seem beautiful to some, strange to others, and vaguely scandalous to quite a few. I think we understand much of the Word, refracted through a Victorian prism that falsely shades away an intimacy, and an honest affection, that is improperly called sin. In an age full of abortion, divorce, and sexual indiscretion of every sort, the faithful need to be on guard, but not to the point of preaching a false purity. We have heard tell of some Christian families who have decided their daughters will not even hold hands with the opposite sex until they are married. Not even hold hands.

I suppose my question would be: would washing the house guests' feet with their hair be allowed?

There is a real danger in creating our own gospel, in formulating a code of behavior that has no support in the Word, that strives to demonstrate a holiness that was never called for by God, and that--indeed--makes a mockery of true holiness.

It's difficult enough, in other words, to know and ponder and follow His law, without inventing crazy requirements of our own.

Approved Deceptions

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 15:12:00 EST

So you walk into a movie theater and you pay $9.00 for the flick and then $9.50 for a medium bag of popcorn and a bottled water. One admission gets you all the rides in a theme park, but a very small tube of sunscreen is $9.95. The cable TV pitchman is willing to sell you the juicer-of-all-time in 3 easy payments of $29.95 a piece. You price merchandise in your own store, and no one will ever let you sell it for an even buck multiple. It's got to be $x.95 or $x.99.

Let's take the movie flick phenomenon. The conventional wisdom is that you have no where else to buy food--you are a captive--so you have to pay through the nose for snacks. Well, first of all, I tend to look at things from the perspective of the business owner. I respect profit--and I like seeing first run movies on the big screen. It's exciting. You catch up with old friends at the show. I do believe--despite my love/hate relationship with what Hollywood produces--that the big old 14 screen luxury theaters are a service to the community, but I'm curious as to why there has to be a pricing con game built into the system. I think it's because people just won't pay $14 for a movie and market rate for snacks. They will pay $9 for a movie and then grudgingly pay more for snacks than they would pay anywhere else. It might have something to with how much people will allow to slip out of their wallet at any one time, or it may be the leverage movie producers have over the theaters that screen them. Whatever the cause, payments over time are easier to swallow--even if that balloon payment is a doozey. That explains the $9.95 sunscreen and the "three easy payment" and the penny-off-the dollar pricing convention. When we buy things, there is a delicate line between feeling served, and feeling mugged.

The strange thing about life is that this systemic, approved dishonesty is built right into the fabric of our existence. Everyone knows--Republican, Democrat, Liberal, Conservative--that the Social Security system is facing insolvency soon, that it is--in fact--a Ponzi scheme without enough new "investors" to satisfy the old ones. But there are so many retirees in this country who vote that no politician in his right mind would ever propose serious reform, if it involved sacrifice across the board. Two opposing ideas--"old people should be get what is coming to them" and "there isn't enough money"--just can't be reconciled. The reckoning is delayed, put on the installment plan, and the eventual disaster looms larger and larger. Politicians who actually want to solve the problem, like theater owners who want to make a profit, have to coax the electorate into giving them authority by pretending the price won't be very high.

Or take education: You are sitting in a class at the community college--taught by an utter buffoon whose principles you detest--but he has the power to certify you, flunk you, write recommendations, move you on or keep you back. Do you write papers which honestly state your claims or do you tow the party line and move on, fake your way into tenure, and eventually speak the hard truths after accepting so many falsehoods you don't know what you believe anymore?

And what about love? There's a field full of deception if ever there were one. You get the guy, ladies, by playing "hard to get." As my old daddy used to say "the boy chases the girl until she catches him." There's a part of our souls that wants what we can't have, so we have to pretend that we're unavailable to make certain our availability is achieved. Consider Genesis 24:

[Isaac] went out to the field one evening to meditate, and as he looked up, he saw camels approaching. Rebekah also looked up and saw Isaac. She got down from her camel and asked the servant, "Who is that man in the field coming to meet us?" "He is my master," the servant answered. So she took her veil and covered herself.

Rebecca's veil wasn't general--not a shield against every man--just the one she had agreed to marry. I imagine several thousand books have been written on the concept of the veiled, or the semi-veiled, female, but the reality is that we always value what we cover up and hide--whether it's the woman behind the dress or the secret that can't be shared or the birthday present that can't be opened yet, or the glowing joy of movie popcorn and compelling cinema, hidden behind the $7.00 matinee teaser price.

A few years ago, I was a real bear about charging for parking on busy fall harvest days. In my mind, it was an utterly reasonable charge. We have to keep the place safe; we have to keep the traffic moving, make sure an ambulance could have access in the event of an emergency; we also needed to save up for eventual hard surfacing of our roads and parking lots. It made sense to charge for parking, but lots of newcomers to the farm had no idea what they were getting. Why should they pay for parking in a farm field? We stopped charging for parking and our food business went way up. Conventional wisdom would indicate we charge more for food to make up for the parking loss, but the idea of a $12.95 hamburger turns my stomach. The $12.95 hamburger, in our case, pays for the guy who won't pay for parking, no matter how reasonable the charge, and the family that won't buy food from our restaurants--and who picnic on the farm, using our bathrooms and trash containers along the way. I think one of the reasons I hate price-gouging on food is that it seems to be a different version of what our federal and state government does: they penalize those who work, to pay extortion, and give make-work jobs, to those who won't.

But who, really, wants to be the picnic-Scrooge? Who wants to stand around and read farm journal entries to customers who don't--or won't--understand? If a theater owner wanted to give honest, market-priced snacks and have his customers pay $15 for the movie, would an empty parking lot console him for being truthful? Imagine if he stood out on the sidewalk and said, "look folks, it's Brad Pitt who charges $5 million an appearance, not the farmer who raised the pop-corn; we're just trying to be honest about what you're paying for." Would that work?

Probably not. I'm not a saint on this score, by the way. There's a part of me that would rather not know what it costs to take six children to a movie--with snacks.

"Please," my inner voice counsels. "Don't add it up. Just enjoy the show."

I'm still not going to charge $12.95 for a hamburger, but if you picnic on Riley's Farm, without buying anything else, I will throw in a farm journal entry, read out loud, absolutely free.

Farm Forecasting II

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:51:00 EST


Jeff Hammond's first draft of our craft building design. These structures will house, in the "City on a Hill" a potter, a weaver, a woodwright, and a printer.

My recent out loud musings about our focus inspired these comments from Sharon of Victorville: "...Thank you for your true insight into the state of our nation, both morally and financially. If only the people who need to hear this could. I keep asking myself, where did all the intelligent, moral people in our government / country go?.."

Thanks, Sharon. I wonder too--and I'm even bipartisan about it. The other day I saw the press pictures of five past, present, or future presidents of the United States, and it looked to me more like a crime lineup than a gathering of the great.

I don't just blame this on the men in question, or even the people who elected them. I blame it on bad mythology, bad spirituality, and poor leadership in our churches. With respect to mythology, just consider our transition as Americans from the Horatio Alger novels ("Strive and Succeed" stories of poor boys who work hard to educate and improve themselves) to the "mind" of Stan Lee comic books and movies, about ordinary people who "mutate" into cob-web and fire-spitting freaks. On the spirituality front, we have gone from a nation who repents before prayer to a nation that prays without ever asking for forgiveness--a nation offended by the very notion of seeking forgiveness. On the church leadership front, even the most devoted of American church leaders have turned the church into a kind of drug and emotional recovery center. Jesus came to heal the sick, it is true, but not to chain them to their hospital beds.

When General Washington inspired his men to cross the Delaware and achieve a needed victory over the Hessians. he didn't get bitten, Stan Lee style, by a radioactive rodent and develop super-human scratching skills.

Where this leads me, with respect to our focus, is to remember that redemptive drama and mythology need to be part of everything we do here. It's not really enough just to buy raspberry preserves off the shelf. The story of how they got there is just as important, if not more so. I believe all of our staff, from farming to living history, need to be willing to tell the story of how the harvest came about, and how America came about. It wasn't by accident. It wasn't by mutation. It wasn't by entitlement either.

When General Washington inspired his men to cross the Delaware and achieve a needed victory over the Hessians. he didn't get bitten, Stan Lee style, by a radioactive rodent and develop super-human scratching skills. There is a cancer growing on the American soul when we shift from a generation of boy scouts seeking to "be prepared" over to a gaggle of creepy boy-warlocks, hoping to be Harry Potter. The story of America is really much more about Horatio Alger than it is about Peter Parker. That may sound like an outlandish comparison, but it sums up the primary differences between America's foundational principles and our present sickness: we were once willing to work for super-powers, now we want them spliced into our DNA by cosmic accident. We were once willing to help our own poor; now we want the Federal government to do it. We were once willing to pay for a doctor's visit; now we want free medicine to fall from the sky.

Of course that's only one of many principles that can come through in the human drama of living historians playing the part of the "former America." Another is simple virtue--politeness, a smile, encouragement, hospitality. When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I stopped in at a university style shop to get my hair cut. The young woman who cut my hair was winsome, friendly, beautiful. I told a friend, afterwards, "heah, I think she likes me." My friend responded, "Be careful. You're in Iowa now. Everyone's friendly."

One of my proudest achievements, running Riley's Farm, has been the extraordinary level of genuinely demonstrated kindness shown by our staff towards the guests. I tell our people, "I don't want you to be 'corporate customer-friendly kind.' I want you to love our customers. They put the food on our table. While I can't say that we always live up to this virtue, the letter I received just the other day about Logan Creighton is a case in point:

I just wanted to let you know that my daughter, Tara and I came up from Redondo Beach, for a half day at Riley’s Farm on 12-31-08 and had a great time. We signed up for the archery, tomahawk throwing, apple pie baking, quill ink writing, and the music. There were only a few other couples on the farm that we saw and so we were not used to be one of the few. However, we were assigned with “Logan” (not sure if this is his real name) and found that he was so informative and passionate about what he was doing that we forgot we were the only ones around. We had a blast with all of the activities we did and although are last session was supposed to end by 4:00, I think we actually left close to 5:00. Everything we did, Logan was sure to give us the historical context surrounding the activity and had a wealth of information to impart to us. We’ve come to many events- the Civil and Revolutionary War events, Sleepy Hallow, Civil War Ball, and countless others but this was a new experience for us as we’ve never had such personal one on one at Riley’s. I just wanted you to know that you’ve got a wonderfully talented, personable, and historical asset with Logan and we so appreciated all of his talents and passions. Thanks for making this day a grand day indeed! We hope to see you real soon. My daughter keeps talking about our day at Riley’s.

We put a lot into our buildings, and the grounds, and I genuinely like the food in our restaurant better than all my favorite down-the-hill eateries,but it's the connection people make with other human souls that they remember. It's the drama, the smile, the laughter.

I believe that the experience will be more keen, and exciting, and educational, and memorable if we give the staff--on public days--a set of historical realities to solve, in front of, and with, the guests. Suppose a Quaker comes into town that morning and there's a bit of a theological tiff with the local Congregationalist. Imagine a peddler/ itinerant cobbler stumbles into town and a fight breaks out over who gets to entertain and feed him. (There is some basis for this; when news was slow, travelers were sometimes "fought" over.) Suppose the day begins with one of the local selectmen entering the public house, a little bruised and beaten from highwaymen outside of town. Perhaps the independent spirit of shared law enforcement could be demonstrated in the response of the staff, and the guests. (I know, I know; we can't hang anyone, but the drama of remembering swift, reasonable justice might be soul-satisfying in this era of the 10 year death penalty appeal.)

Ideally, the premise would come from an actual incident that was known well enough to have included a beginning, a middle, and an end--after the manner of good drama. The staff could be given motivation, and a few lines to remember throughout the day, and the guests could be given premise, and hints as how to help, but the final re-cap, and the lessons learned, would be hashed out at the 4:00 PM closing bell, with comparisons to the way the incident played out in history itself. We could have a slightly different drama every day.

What say ye?

Farm Forecasting, Your Thoughts

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:44:00 EST

I'm thinking out loud today about the future of the farm. I do this quite a bit, but I'm actually hoping to benefit from the "multitude of counselors" that our guests represent. So, weigh in, by all means, if you have the inclination.

We're always pondering slogans around here because a slogan has the value of encouraging a fairly simple story, or "hook" that describes the place, and might even make it easy for a potential guest to sell the experience to his or her friends and family. Right now, we pitch "The Past is Just a Moment Away," but we've also used lines like "ninety minutes from Los Angeles and 200 years away" and "You're never too old to grow up in the past."

I know that Americans like to make fun of marketing, but I love it. Isn't there something cheery about the memory of all those Chevys lined up on the streets of Virginia City, near the Ponderosa, and someone singing "see the USA in your Chevrolet?" I think the reason we like advertising--when we like it--is that it makes us feel better about ourselves and our choices. If you consider the "I'm a PC" ads, those spots made Mac users or potential buyers, feel "hip", "sensible," "smart," "artistic," and perhaps even smug that, if nothing else, they weren't the fat, stodgy, backward PC types. Volvo ads make potential buyers feel not just like good parents, but the very best of parents. The Target Christmas ads made you feel like the proud parent of the most adorable child in the school play. (Somehow, they managed to do that and still make them feel as swanky as Beyoncé at the same time.)

A few months ago, I proposed an alteration of our theme, not "the past is a moment away," but "America is just a moment away."

No one seemed to get it on our staff. "What are you telling them? They don't live in America?"

Well, yes, in a way. No one lives in America anymore. We're losing more and more of the idea of America everyday. A friend sent me this youtube today--featuring a bunch of Palestinian zealots calling for Sharia, not in Paris, or London, but in our own Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. You could argue that America has always been about protest, and well it should be, but the range of ideas we're being asked to assimilate is not just diverse anymore; it's violently contradictory. You can't enjoy both political liberty and Islamo-Stalinism at the same time. You can't guarantee 0% unemployment and still enjoy the wealth created by the free market at the same time. Freedom brings with it some pain, but less pain than totalitarianism, and, as that great American, Ben Franklin put it, "you can't have gain without pain." You can't put a totalitarian murderer like Che Guevara on teenage sweatshirts and then expect them to encourage each other to good, thinking citizenship. You can't have Southern California high school kids hoisting a Mexican flag over a public high school without having an honest conversation about what that means: do you want a culture that gives extraordinary freedom to all sorts of citizens of every conceivable race, creed, and religion--or do you want a bribe-poxed oligarchy and a government by drug-lords? You don't have to scan the financial news for very long to know that the old, Judeo-Christian notions of fair play, integrity, and a balanced scale are not in vogue among either the management or labor or governing class in America. Indeed, when a "respected" business titan like Warren Buffett waxes passionate about the "good work" of Planned Parenthood and the need for higher property taxes, we are in trouble. America may not yet have lost its moral and intellectual compass, but the spindle is certainly bent.

How does this relate to the farm? My sense is that Americans want to be able to sing Christmas Carols--without apology. They want to be able to celebrate a devotion to political and economic liberty--without apology. They want a place where a little boy can buy a sling-shot and a girl a prairie dress, without some hairy feminist lamenting gender roles. They want to see where the food is grown and the value of the work it takes to grow it. They want music that has stood the test of time. They want to explore the unifying ideas that have sustained America--and not the divided petty interests that are beginning to destroy us.

Why does that image of that steeple in the montage above stir us? Why do we pause when we see the sight of a New England church, pristine and bright among the deepening Maple trees?

The mere building, to be certain, is little more than a memory of what it once represented. It was once "the meeting house" for a people who came to America, in the very first instance, to build a "city upon a hill." Certainly, America has never been a theocracy. Heaven forbid we should be ruled by a Rick Warren or a Jeremiah Wright, but America has always been morally informed by the Word. We protect the innocent, we seek justice for rich and poor equally, we help widows, we don't covet each others wealth, we have not (historically) had a culture of bribe and graft because we loved and feared a just and merciful God, and because we wrote His reality into our law. It was, moreover, not just on paper. It was a law "written on our hearts." This was not the law of Sharia, the merciless invention of a war-lord who converted at the tip of a spear, but a law that didn't require faith alone to prove its merits. For hundreds of years, the ten commandments produced order, liberty, peace, and wealth.

A friend of mine, who served in Vietnam, told me that his 1960s era officer's training course included the 10 Commandments. American officers may have not matched the ideal, but they were supposed to distinguish themselves by a Western standard. Ten years later, my 1970s high school psychology class was asking us who we would kill to eat in a lifeboat running out of rations.

If I had presence of mind, I would have said, "we kill no one. It is better that we all die than that any of us cheapen life."

But I didn't have that presence of mind, and our teacher, who should have been teaching virtue was a kindly dolt who didn't think about the consequences of her actions. We were all intimidated by a generation of teachers who were seeking the "Brave New" agnostic paradise fueled by a science that was 10% honest inquiry and 90% political agenda. (Any honest sociologist, for example, will tell you that a faith-based abstinence program, and a culture favoring youthful marriage and shaming promiscuity, will reduce SDTs faster than a semester of birth control classes.) Even today, a whole sorry strata of Americans find more soul-solace in worshipping that whore--Mother Earth--than they do in seeking our merciful and just father in heaven.

Well, we are beginning to pay the price for a generation of financial and political leaders who couldn't bring themselves to read the western canon, let alone the Bible. Ignoring his Word, and ignoring history, just isn't working in America. Depending on whom you believe, America may be in for a bit of a trial this year. Some money managers say "buy American stocks" now, because they will sky-rocket. Others--the ones who predicted the present dire circumstances--say we may be giving food for Christmas presents next year, not Ipods.

Who knows, but if we are to be humbled, and even if we are not, I see the farm and other like minded venues, serving as places where American lessons are re-learned, not in the stand-offish, dismissive manner of some museum docents, but as living, walking parables of a former age. It would be liberating to hear a real sermon given in a New England meeting house--not some survey-driven, seeker-friendly piece of feminist pyscho-pap. It would be liberating to see a real sergeant of colonial militia training the young men on the green, or a real "Titus" woman advising the young girls. It would be instructive to see a dramatization of the way American trade (business) was once conducted--not to make short term profits, but to build long term empires. It would be good to have a glass of hard cider with the selectmen of the town and hear how the work of a small township was conducted. It would be good to see the old Republic, the way it once looked, not because it was perfect, but because it hadn't abandoned the idea of truth entirely.

And, who knows, perhaps we could help, in some small way, turn our failing culture around.

Riley's Farm: Americans Made Here.

Valkyrie

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:41:00 EST

Valkyrie

A little market insight before I get started: Applebee's was lean on customers tonight but the theater had a respectable showing for a Monday night. This must mean that people are more soul-hungry than food hungry. It fits in with my thinking about our own business; you can get reasonably good food in lots of places, but the needs of the human heart can't be served up on a paper plate.

Nine dollars and fifty cents for a little larger than life heroism?

I'll pay, even if it involves Tom Cruise. The director, Bryan Singer, admirably kept "Scientology Tom" buried very deeply under the contours of his character--Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who lost his life trying to assassinate Hitler. Indeed, the entire film doesn't feel dependent on any one celebrity presence, though there are certainly quite a unmistakably big film faces here (Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp). On the contrary, this was an ensemble effort, beginning to finish, and it explored that fascinating moment in time, repeated throughout the centuries, when a small band of honorable men and women realize--collectively if furtively--that they must confront, and destroy, a confederacy of evil.

When that evil has the rest of the nation in fear, when the most obvious of realities cannot even be stated, much less acted upon, when an honorable action must pay ransom to an entire nation's mis-placed trust in a man the inner circle knows to be a lunatic, it's a deliciously complex stew. Add in human cowardice, political maneuvering, abject fear, and it's all bully good theater.

It is also ennobling. It makes us pause to remember: Patriots don't always need to win. Their actions give a nation heart, even in loss, and they remind us that evil only succeeds in the short term. The executioners in this drama, the sorry Nazis who put Stauffenberg's friends to death, seemed to paint this on the screen, masterfully, in their performance. You can kill a patriot, but you cannot kill the truth.

God is watching, in other words.

And God laughs last.

The Church is Too Important for Theologians

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:48:00 EST

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Heah--we don't get this CRAZY this often!
Save on Riley's Farm Dinner Events.

The Deal ends in a little
less than
40 hours!

New Year -- Lights On

There's a strange, but very effective, sort of evasion available to people who emphasize "the basics."

A lot of reformed theologians--rightly concerned that mega-churches are teaching a "make me happy" gospel--turn our attention to the basics of the faith, and remind us that Christians have less and less Biblical literacy.

So far so good. However much you might like the advice, or the entertainment value, of Joel Osteen, Robert Schuller, or Oprah Winfrey, we do well to remind ourselves that they are not really preaching--much less emphasizing--the basics of the historic Christian faith. That strikes me as so obvious a reality that it doesn't warrant much attention.

What does warrant our attention is a peculiar kind of laziness, and evasion, going on even among the "reformers" in response to this danger. When you can't count on the reformers, you're in a LOT of trouble. Take a gander at W. Robert Godfrey's cap-stoning message at the White Horse Inn:

"...we have to be crystal clear that the gospel is not about making our families better, it's not about being happy and self-fulfilled, it's not about signs and wonders; the gospel is about Jesus, about the work that the God-man did 2,000 years ago in His life, in His death on the cross, in His resurrection; if we don't preach Christ and Him Crucified, if we don't make clear that Jesus Christ has fulfilled all righteousness in his life, has born fully the punishment of our sin on the cross in His death, and is our glorious Savior in His resurrection than we haven't preached the gospel, and there is no message more necessary and more vital in our time than that gospel truth about Jesus..."

Sounds pretty dang central, doesn't it? It sounds very much "back to basics." Unfortunately, it's lazy--in the extreme, and intellectually dishonest.

Imagine an apprentice builder and a journeyman engaged in the following dialogue:



                   APPRENTICE
         I'm having trouble getting this
         window installed.

                   JOURNEYMAN
         Wait a minute.  Do you even know
         how important the FOUNDATION is?

                   APPRENTICE
             (confused)
         Without the foundation, we don't 
         have anything?

                   JOURNEYMAN
         Exactly.  

                   APPRENTICE
         But.... I'm still having trouble with
         this window.

                   JOURNEYMAN
             (Irritated)
         Don't you get it, man?  The
         foundation is EVERYTHING.

                   APPRENTICE
         I get it.   The Foundation is
         first, but--

                   JOURNEYMAN
         The foundation is IT.  It's not 
         about your little window!  That's
         petty and materialistic and very
         American.  

                   APPRENTICE
         So...um...

The two are interrupted by a powerful, dusty wind blowing
through a gaping hole in the building.

                   APPRENTICE
             (choking)
         Just tell me what you want me to do with
         this thing.

�

The reality, unfortunately, is that the church is too important to be left to theologians--even good ones. They have their creeds and their orthodoxies and their heresies identified, but they are not very good at putting windows, or a roof on the building. Very often, if a Jim Dobson comes along and puts walls on the barn--so the flock will be protected from the enemy--hireling pastors like John MacArthur make fun of Christian political activists for not obsessing--24/7--on the cornerstone. This is precisely the sort of pharisaical near-sightedness that Jesus lamented when he called the Samaritan, with his different temple and different "theology", "good," and the Priest and the Levite not worthy of imitation.
�
�The facts are that the historic Christian church has always been concerned about bringing us to a point of what can only be called "happiness." It has always been concerned about strong families and good government. Why would Paul spend so much time counseling married couples in Ephesians or advocating good rulership in Romans? Why would Christ tell us that he comes to bring us "life" that we might have it (life) "more abundantly?" Yes, the gospel is not about us, but it is certainly for us.

�

Years ago, I noticed a peculiar sort of cop-out going on among Christians, and it would announce itself whenever we actually followed the admonition of Hebrews 10--to exhort each other to good works.

�

"Man," the anemic Christian would respond, "I just really want to do what God wants me to do. That has to be first."

�

Well, Duh. That's a bit like telling the linebacker to take down the quarterback and hearing him respond, "I really just want to make sure I have my helmet on."

�

Get your helmet on, then, man, and when God kicks some sense into you, get to work!

The Year in Review

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:35:00 EST

Don't Miss Out!

Heah--we don't get this stupid this often! Save on Riley's Farm Dinner Events. The Deal ends in a little
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Heah--Mr. California Business Man (or Woman): is there anything more prestigious than saying to your clients and customers, "see, it's like this: I have several season passes to Riley's Farm Events."

What, pray tell, could be a more weighty sign of your affection for your customers?

The Year in Review
(Big Flash)

I threw together a few images from 2008, and the hard part was culling it down to a few good pictures. I have a prediliction for taking shots of scenery and buildings, but I always value, long term, the pictures I take of people most. (There's a life lesson in that, lad.)

More on yesterday's sermon about good Christian men and women needing to find the value in celebration: about twelve years ago, most of the Rileys attended a political rally, wearing Revolutionary War clothing, sporting bagpipes, drums, fifes, and 18th century long-hair and wigs of course. The largely conservative crowd--who revere the founders and the faith-life of the colonial era--were a little uncomfortable seeing their contemporary representations. The crowd didn't quite know what to do with bagpipes, fife and drum, and a re-enactor (not me) performing the "Give Me Liberty" speech. With a few exceptions, the crowd seemed to regard us as hippies in breeches.

On the flip side, Mary and I have seen "ladies and gentlemen" from the Renaissance Faire who would have made Nero's court look like a Concerned Women for America revival conference. On one occasion, when ordering refreshments at a Renaissance Faire beer court, I was nearly prompted to say to the maiden bringing the stein, "really. I just wanted an ale, not a dance." This may sound a little prude for someone advocating more, not less celebration, but I don't go to the beach with the kids either. I'm not sure how many American Christian men feel the same way, but--let's be honest--the beach is pure torture for real men.

The point I'm trying to make is that the extremes of a pagan age provoke a kind of over re-action that make Christians look as though they don't appreciate God's creation, as though the very wine God gave to gladden our hearts, and the romance that delighted God's wisest monarch (Song of Solomon) is somehow the enemy. (Continued...)

I've even met Christians who didn't know how to process a joke. One fellow assured me God had taken the thirst for beer away from him when he became born again. I wanted to respond, "when is He going to give it back to you? You're a pain in the neck without it." Old J. Vernon McGhie, and lots of other Christian bible teachers, have had to turn Song of Solomon into a metaphor for the love affair between Christ and the Church because they can't quite bring themselves to remember that God created sex.

Another story on that score: we knew a beautiful, very devout girl, growing up. All the boys loved her, but the rumor was she kicked her husband out of the bedroom on their honeymoon night, because the idea of sex had become so traumatic for her, so wrapped up in sin that she had no idea how to visualize a healthy version of the same reality. I see Christian marriages like this, that are wrapped up in a less dramatic version of the same weird trap. They see their "ministry" work as more important than their relationships; some of the women see their children as more important than their husbands--and eventually they lose those husbands. (News for you Christian ladies: your husband is more important than your children. If you love your children, make more time for your husband.)

The reason all of this is so important, both for redeeming the church and for redeeming our culture, is that no one really appreciates the "lite" version of anything. You don't drink lite beer because you like it. You drink it because you're being rationed. If Christians present a life that looks "rationed," that is a "lite" "reverent" "false" version of the real thing, they will have no currency with themselves or anyone else. I've never really liked most contemporary Christian music because it sounds like a derivative version of the pagan music around us. You can't slap a few scripture verses on Eminem and make it Christian. You need to get at the life source itself. Christian artists: go back to Handel and then work forward. Stop settling for three chords on the guitar and learn how to write a symphony.

Christians should be funnier, more articulate, more alive, more attractive, more intellectual, more martial, more peaceful, more joyful, more content than the morass of divorced, abortion-addicted pagans around us--not because we hate life, but because He came that we might have it "more abundantly."<

The God of the Feast

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:04:00 EST

I'm trying to sell my customers on a little plan-ahead feasting this year, so theology and commerce will be mixed up in a bag today--a combination, indeed, I've been arguing has quite some merit anyway.

Two quick, purely hypothetical stories:

#1. A young man grows up in a hyper-legalistic church community with all sorts of rules, some of them Biblical, some of them pure gospel hobby invention. There is very little real celebration in his life. Even Birthday parties feel reverent--and false. He tries to live by the rules he's given, but his nature is at war with them, and he rebels. He leaves his wife and kids and goes out on the road and does his Easy Rider Impression. The stage is set for a new generation feeling abandoned, squabbles over child support, teenage rebellion, and pure misery.

#2. A young mother has a feeling her daughter's social life needs a little guidance, but she's too afraid to venture an opinion. She can't put a finger on the objection, except to say that her daughter's new crowd seems devoted to partying, and to little else. To cut to the chase, what follows, over the years, are two abortions, followed by unwed motherhood, followed by a drug addiction and eventually domestic violence. Again, the stage is set for a new generation feeling abandoned, squabbles over child support, teenage rebellion, and pure misery.

The stories are a little uni-dimensional but they are meant to represent two extremes in our social and religious response to the concept of "the feast."

Pagans, first of all, don't need to be told to feast, to party, to let go. "Letting go," after all, is really what the feast, in some measure, is really all about, for both believers and heathens. You "let go" of work, of obligations, of worry, of even propriety. (Dad wouldn't wear the New Year's hat and the polyester grass Hawaiian skirt to work, for example.) My wife recalls a story about Sandra Day O'Connor being invited to a Washington D.C. dinner party and being seated next to a professional athlete. After not striking up much of a conversation, the athlete handed Justice O'Connor a beer and said, "C'mon! Loosen up, Sandy, Baby."

A party is about letting go, about "loosening up." Unfortunately, this reality is reacted to in the extremes, and sometimes the extremes themselves reveal the virtue of balance and moderation. The #2 girl in the story above may find something liberating in a life of parties, but if she sees her boyfriend shacked up with another girl, down the hallway, the extremes are tested, and the party girl becomes the Puritan, insisting that she never intended to "loosen up" the reins on her mate. (And the Puritan, by the way, never was the puritan we have been taught to mock. The Bradfords and the Winthrops set out to brew beer very promptly, upon entering the New World.) On the other hand, there are some falsely devout believers who don't believe in any celebration at all, or in painfully dry re-creations of purely Biblical feast days. We knew a woman like this. Not even birthdays were celebrated in her home--and her children, by and large, left her--to go celebrate elsewhere.

The Bible tells us not to "be drunk" with wine, but it also has Jesus turning water into wine as His very first miracle. The Prodigal Son is seen to be chided for giving over his money for harlots, but when he returns, penitent, he is given a feast. The Bible says "wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging," but also "Bless the LORD, O my soul...He.. causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth; And wine that maketh glad the heart of man.." (Psalm 104).

They say that C.S. Lewis would gather with his fellow believers ("The Inklings") at a pub, where they would workshop their literary creations over an ale. You see so many instances of virtues in balance there--fellowship, work, creation, celebration. It strikes me as the sort of place more Christian men ought to be--hard working, creative, but celebratory as well. It also reminds me of another C.S. Lewis quote that I'll have to paraphrase for now: "if you were to see a saint, an actual saint, you would be both awe-struck by his holiness and scandalized by his humanity."

If I were to fashion a congregation of believers, it would be full of men true to their wives, and wives who loved their husbands enough to be unashamed in their love for them--on every level, from spiritual to erotic. It would be full of men who loved the Bible, but who loved music as well, and engineering, and cars, and sports, and intellectual inquiry of every sort. They would know how to worship and they would know how to vote. They would know how to be gentle, but they would know how to fight. They would know how to pray, and they would know how to drink.

It's quite a tall request, but that's okay. It's my birthday.

Embracing the Paradox Between Emails

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 11:00:00 EST


Heah--we don't get this stupid this often! Save on Riley's Farm Dinner Events. The Deal ends in a little less than 104 hours!

I have a bad habit of sending off a bulk email and then compulsively checking my incoming mail every ten minutes for the next two hours or so. It's a good way to catch up with people, but it's also a bit like being nine years old again--and checking the Christmas tree every hour. It's also a bit flattering to read the names on our email list. You have to be a real geek to scan through an email list, but there are some big time muckety-mucks on there--academics, lawyers, industry titans and--if you're star struck--lots of people who work in the bowels of the entertainment industry. I used to apologize for emails once a week, and then I realized that some of the internet magazines I read, send me an email almost every two hours. Frankly, I don't mind commercial speech. I'd rather have speech than no speech, and I've never found that the DEL key was very tiring. If you're too tired to hit the DELETE key, you should probably check into assisted living somewhere.

Our little home church is actually starting to get some numbers and a little discipline lately. We meet at the same time. One of three fathers gives the message. Our hymn singing is getting, um.... a little better. We really cipher out the passage and try to get at the bottom of the riddle--because, let me tell you, the master and the lord of the universe didn't tell parables to make the gospel easier. He's very much like a good professor: He wants to see who really wants to learn and who wants to cruise along in cheap, mystic overdrive. I've learned to embrace the paradoxes, to wrestle with them. (Try "Choose Ye This Day" and "The Lord made all things, even the wicked for the day of destruction." You could spend a lifetime on that one.)

Frankly, I like a manly Christianity--the tables turned over, the whip braided, the unapologetic way in which vipers get called vipers and white-washed tombs get called white washed tombs. At the same, time, I like the "burden is light" message. (Another paradox). There's a lot I haven't figured out--but the older I get, the more I realize that's the sign of a maturing Christian.

Excuse me now. I have to check my email.

Pondering the New Year

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 15:54:00 EST

I haven't been writing much lately because I've been rather tediously engaged in making sure all of our dinner programs are ready to go for 2009. You Riley's Farm regulars (and big families) can save big by purchasing a 2009 10 Dinner Pass. If you apply it to events like Christmas in the Colonies you can save more than $100. This is a totally irresponsible offer on my part, so please don't take advantage of it. It ends January 2, 2009 at midnight.

We did well in the public house yesterday, for being open for the first time over the Christmas break.

Jeff Hammond and I had a friendly disagreement about this line in a previous farm journal entry:

The simple truth is that businesses provide for far more real human needs--spiritual and physical--than any church or government could ever hope to provide.

Perhaps this claim warrants more time. The truth is, of course, that we have no less an authority than The Master Himself when He tells us in Matthew 6:20: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.. And Jeff reminds me to read Ecclesiastes, where we find wise Solomon, sated with many wives and uncountable wealth, telling us "...What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?.."

Of course no one gets to take any of it away. The Bible, and much of the modern church, (ignoring much of the Old Testament's moral law but teaching tithing scrupulously), remind us that life is, indeed, ephemeral. We are dust. All is vanity.

That much is not in dispute, and to the extent that the church reminds us of where we really need to place our investment, the church is doing its job. Unfortunately, most of the church is not really doing its job, because it hasn't paused to consider what the Master was really saying. Consider it carefully. How can you "lay up" treasures in a different realm, if this life, and its routines, are without meaning? In the quoted verse, Jesus tells us some of our earthly actions "laying up" have eternal consequences. Clearly this physical life (the way we pray, the way we "take up our cross," the way we teach, the way we raise families, the way we conduct business) steps into that eternal life in significant ways. Our physical life, our wealth, our homes don't pass into the next life, but the memory of what we do here does. This doesn't mean we work our way to heaven, but the work we do here reflects whether we really believe in heaven or not. "Faith," as James tells us, "without works is dead."

The church would do well, moreover, to really consider the full measure of Matthew 6, because Jesus tells us that praying to "be seen of men" is an investment in this life, not the next--and yet we have this peculiar prejudice, among the faith community, that a corporate spiritual life--prayer meetings, Sunday school, "spiritual" retreats--are somehow more "holy" than the work we do everyday.

Perhaps an example will help make it more clear. We have a plumber who recently installed a "no scald" valve in our shower. When water pressure is being demanded by various appliances, before the valve was installed, you couldn't really trust the water temperature. Now, with the new valve, I praise the plumber (and God) every time I take a shower. Praise God for hot water. Praise the plumber for making it happen. On the other hand, years ago, a very evangelical house painter told me about his conversion and then proceeded to over spray white paint all over a brand new roof. He claimed the first rain would wash it off, but he was just too lazy to do good work. The stain remained for years. Mind you, both the plumber and the painter claimed to be Christians, but who, really, was "laying up" treasures above? The one who did great work or the one who talked about his conversion?

..And yet we see people of faith thinking their "church life" is somehow more holy, by virtue of--what?--it taking place inside a church? On Sunday? On a Biblical Sabbath? In the name of a "non-profit" ministry?

Hebrews 10 tells us "...And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another..." Plainly, it tells us the role of fellowship is to "provoke unto love and to good works," but I don't see anything about Sunday, about pews, about choirs, or anything prohibiting this work from being done at the office, in the classroom, at the building site. It's not that the conventional fellowship isn't appropriate, but the artificial division of a holy, eternal life pursued on Sunday and a life of vanity pursued the rest of the week seems like the height of falsehood to me. You have far more opportunities for seeking holiness, for "laying up treasure above," in the work you do everyday, in your business, than in the rest you take on Sunday.

Merry Christmas!

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 17:48:00 EST

Well, we opened Christmas presents this morning, and the boys milked the cow and fed all the far-flung farm animals. Then we drove over the river (brook) in our sleigh (GMC Yukon) and through the woods (orchards) up to Grandmother's house, where we ate a hearty breakfast of sausage, bacon, french toast, and scrambled eggs--followed by the orange Grandpa had always dictated we eat after handfuls of See's candy.

I'm feeling powerfully fatigued right now, because I stayed up far too late and watched HBO's Rome II. I don't recommend HBO to anyone, really, except that--for a bunch of decadent, loin-centric heathens--they seem to have the art of storytelling down cold, and they also know more than a bit about set production. I'm never quite sure what their agenda is, but the picture of a cold, remorseless, sensual Roman empire seems to heighten the Biblical message of human depravity, and the need for Christ. There are very few human beings in this production by the standards of a Christian age. They are either sniveling cowards, cold-eyed killers, bribe-seeking politicians, porridge-poisoning kitchen knaves, or abject whore-mongers of every persuasion and gender. The faint glimmer of virtue is always snuffed out, whenever it flares up, and we are left with a picture of human beings as reptiles, with slivering, forked tongues. They pray to their pagan gods, and we see a lost people--the seed of righteousness--here and there, but it's all smothered up by a dead pantheon of useless idolatry. Their Roman gods don't answer prayers. They mock. They participate in the debauchery itself.

One of the reasons Christians don't really understand Christianity is that they don't understand history. The very fruits of Christianity--political liberty, tolerance, a sense of fair play, the equality of rich and poor before the law--are all taken for granted in an age that can't imagine human beings sacrificed in the arena for sport. Rome, after all, represented high civilization for the era and yet, by the standards of an age that has known Christ, it looks like a stinking hell with some imposing architecture. HBO, if nothing else, should be thanked for showing us what life was like before the era of Immanuel--God with us.

And we, in turn, should thank God for redeeming us, even if HBO won't.

Business as Ministry

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:48:00 EST

A few years ago, I got into a bit of a spat with a family member who didn't think God's work could be done, essentially, in crass "commerce." She saw the work of the spirit going on in churches, non-profit ministries, and some branches of the government. She saw business people as motivated solely by "profit" and "greed." Pastors and social workers, on the other hand, were motivated by compassion. Furthermore, the message of "ministry" had to be focused on something overtly spiritual and couldn't take place in the mere provision of products and services.

Most of the faith world thinks the same thing. There's even a secular version of this going on when corporate America gives away free discounts to policemen and firemen. The world sees certain categories of work as noble, and well they may be, but I rise this morning, Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the noble small businessman--who will never get a government bailout, who will never own a corporate jet, who will never be given a "small businessman's day at Disneyland," but who, according to the U.S. Department of Labor provide 67 percent of American's first jobs and account for 55 percent of the country's innovations.

The simple truth is that businesses provide for far more real human needs--spiritual and physical--than any church or government could ever hope to provide. Businesses generate the profit that make government possible in the first place, and, generally, we are either employed, or patronizing businesses five days a week, as opposed to the one day a week we spend in church, or the one day in a hundred we have direct contact with the government. In church, we hear a sermon and we hear virtue described theoretically, in the third person, but if we sit down for dinner in our local favorite Mexican restaurant we see virtue--real service--first hand, in the flesh. My wife says there is a sermon being preached every time she goes to Dinosaur Tire, because everyone smiles, the work is done well, and she leaves knowing they tried their best to make our car safe--at a reasonable price. You are apt to learn more about human nature, and witness more virtue and sin on display, in the actions of your fellow workers than you are in a hundred Sundays of polished piety in the sanctuary.

The fact is that commerce can only exist, long term, if it provides for a real human need. If it isn't providing a real human need, it might be around because it's a state sanctioned monopoly or a corporate oligarchy propped up by lobbyists. We just agreed to pay $700 billion in bailouts to financial firms, not because those of us on main street are being helped, but because the power-brokers at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley convinced congress their billion dollar executives were essential to the body politic. That may, weirdly, be true, but only, again, long term, if those investment bankers help new "businesses" spring into existence and old businesses provide new products--products that meet human needs.

The current debate about tinkering with the economy focuses on preserving jobs at all costs, but it isn't "jobs" that make America. Jobs in industries that don't really serve the public are doomed to destruction, and if a business is not, in the last analysis, a "ministry," it really isn't a business either.

Christmas...

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 03:48:00 EST

Well, this last Friday and Saturday night represented one of the iciest, coldest, crunchiest Christmas dinner seasons on record for us. I gave our guests advanced warning, and an unusual offer to apply their admission to other events, but very few took us up on it. (Two or three out of hundreds). The pull of the season is fairly strong, but if you've ever felt that sudden, horrific air-launch of a shoe hitting the wet ice, there are times, particularly as the party host, where you are tempted to think the snow scenes are better enjoyed on post cards. We have a very odd mandate here, in some ways: re-create the simplicity and the pastoral glory of the past, without any of the danger. I told Brandon and Jeff to keep a crew on in the parking lot, with tractor and chain ready, to help people with their cars and I instructed all of the gallant young men and women on our staff to lend an arm, always, when a guest looked unsure of their footing, but after you've taken all the pre-cautions, the best thing you can do is pray. And I did a lot of that.

Being open to the public over the winter is new for us, and at times, it feels sort of theoretical, but we had a very busy Saturday, with lots of friends and customers. One of our friends, a police lieutenant and his wife, brought up their girls' softball team, and we let his boys catch a few trout at cost. One young couple on their anniversary had attended the Christmas Carol event and they chose to come up and hang out on Saturday. That's always a good sign, and, in this case, it was intriguing for me, because one of them had an MBA, with experience in raising capital. I have a feeling, with longer term vacations being out of the budget for many people, a short day trip, or an overnight trip will be an attractive break from the monotony of budgeting. Riley's Farm Journal readers: are you game?

Rant ahead: in the era of Bernard Madoff (pronounced "made off") Ponzi schemes, it is beyond belief that we are hearing calls for "more regulation." Listen up, everyone: We've already GOT regulators. IN 2008, the Securities Exchange Commission had a budget of $913,000,000 (that's right, nearly a billion dollars). SEC employees enjoy fitness centers, education benefits, health plans, child care, and transit subsidies, in addition to the typical federal pension system that dwarfs the average citizen's mandated social security benefit. As a result of this bureaucracy, the average small business who seeks to court investors faces a minimum hurdle of $60,000-$100,000 if they choose to raise capital by going out to the open market, avoiding the bankers. (I know; I've done the shopping.) Because of this hyper-regulation, we have less innovation, fewer jobs, and, ultimately, less wealth. The regulation itself, moreover, favors the industry titans, who can afford dedicated compliance staff, and who have the money to schmooze public officials. (Bernard Madoff was a big supporter of that timeless friend of the Constitution, Senator Charles Schumer.)

Madoff and his employees contributed at least $267,000 at the federal level from 2001 to the present, according to campaign finance records. A member of the Senate Banking Committee, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., was the top congressional recipient...(details)

There's a reason, in other words, why we don't have any new car companies. There's a reason why we spend our time giving bail outs to old, failed operations like Detroit. The people who have made it to the top of industry, and the regulators who are their chums, don't really like change, and they cannot stand competition. The good old boys in the civil service are too busy protecting the devil they know to be bothered getting to know the angels they don't.

And yet, our president-elect, smoothly and shamelessly observed that he would be taking over from people who thought regulation was the enemy. Barack: a reality check, please. The SEC's budget has grown from $422 million to $913 million under the eight years of the Bush administration, more than doubling in size and easily tripling the rate of inflation for the same period. If that is anti-regulatory, what, pray, would be "regulatory?"

The answer isn't in more red tape. The answer-- if there really is a federal answer--is in demanding that civil servants do their jobs, or abandon the pretext they are serving any useful function whatsoever.

Roses in December

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:46:00 EST

Roses in December..

Click the picture above for a much larger version of winter in Oak Glen.

I'm thinking about adding a "u-pick rose field" out there, since five or six years of growing roses has led me to believe we can still have a rose crop fairly late in the year. We had beautiful clusters of deep red roses out there as late as last Friday--December 12th for future reference. Contrary to common belief, there are a lot of plants that like the cold--peas, strawberries, apples, and roses.

As usual, the crowds for Christmas in the Colonies and Christmas Carol have been nothing short of glowing in their warmth and appreciation for the farm, the family, and our fantastic staff. Here's an example, from Denise, who brings her family and friends all the way from Las Vegas to enjoy A Christmas Carol at the Old Packing Shed:

"..Good morning! After finally reaching home in Las Vegas last night after a weekend full of family and friends – I fell asleep again with a big smile on my face and a full heart! On behalf of our entire clan, that took up most of your first table this past Saturday night – THANK YOU for being here! Thank you for bringing back so many of the wonderful traditions that seem to fade from our lives without most people noticing. Thank you for the camaraderie (and not stopping our completely out of tune carol singing on the first hayride!) that envelopes everyone when we gather to enjoy the festivities that you all provide! From the little ones who watched in rapt attention to the Christmas Carol – even though they were scared to death of Scrooge in between sets- to the adults who couldn’t help themselves from grinning ear to ear while dancing the “Snake” dance and sashaying down the middle of what at first was a group of strangers but by night’s end felt like one group! The carol singing brought tears to more than one set of eyes and not just because as a group we sounded great, but because everyone was so proud when we got the song right! We loved the hot cider, the wonderful atmosphere, the delicious food and the excellent employees and family who absolutely make the evening! On behalf of all of us – we thank you for another memorable tradition that I am sure will continue to grow in numbers every year!! With full hearts and superb memories, we thank all of you and wish you a very merry Christmas!!

That's the stuff joy is made out of. Thanks, Denise!

The Era of the Doctored Economy

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 16:14:00 EST

December 11, 2008 8:19 PM

The Era of the Doctored Economy

If this seems to be a weird farm journal entry, it might be because I am listening to CNBC on the internet as I write, and like almost all financial news, it is pretty hyperbolic stuff. The people who made fun of gold investing are telling people to buy gold stocks now. Globalists are wringing their hands that we aren't handing FIFTEEN BILLION DOLLARS to the auto industry, as though we were debating throwing a life preserver to Mother Teresa and not adding billions more to our grandchildren's debt.

What seems to be happening in America is that there is a vicious fight for resources, for salaries, for bonuses, for a standard of living that was once purchased by hard work and that is now heavily dependent on inertia. Everyone knows that the the auto industry can't survive unless both the management class and the unions agree to forego their sense of salary entitlement. Someone has to tell them it is not 1968 anymore. The cars they make are simply not the best in the world. My GMC Yukon features a cheap driver-side handle that peels off in finger-bleeding shards if it is exposed to the sun for more than few days.

... A few days go by, it is now...

December 13, 2008 11:25 AM

The Era of the Doctored Economy II

It turns out we can't even trust the chairman of one of the major stock exchanges in this country. Bernard Madoff, former chairman of Nasdaq and a huge contributor to Senator Charles Schumer, has been arrested and charged with a vast Ponzi scheme allegedly in excess of $50 billion dollars. One blogger this morning wondered if we would soon be hearing calls for an "investor bailout." (That sounds better than "wealthy Manhattan socialite bailout," I guess.)

Was it the Greeks who warned us that democracies begin to fail when the voters realize they can begin asking the public treasury to divide up the spoils?

Back to the title of this entry: the doctored economy. We have entered the era of such profound belief in the experts that we believe federal tinkering in the private sector can cure the seasonal economic flu. Did I just write "tinkering?" Seven hundred BILLION dollars is not tinkering, and a federal reserve that will not tell us where they put two TRILLION dollars is not just a case of fixing little holes in the roof with the petty cash fund. Our leaders aren't just putting a little alcohol swab on a scraped economic knee, they are willing to drag the patient into major surgery.

Business, I can tell you, just doesn't work that way. Even Barack Obama, this week, admitted that governments just aren't very good at running manufacturing plants. (Thank you, Lord! Perhaps there is a mind at the center of the hype we can believe in.)

What seems to be happening, really, is an instance of what you might call bleeding-heart conservatism, or hide-bound liberalism. When you think about it, the radical left is a lot more intent on preserving the status quo than traditional conservatives. There is nothing more radical than nature, for example. Ice ages come and go. Species flourish and then go extinct. Monsoons wipe out an Island paradise. But radical environmentalists insist on keeping "the environmental balance," even though Mother Nature has always been a little tipsy. Similarly, on the economic front, left-leaning Democrats want to preserve the Big 3 automakers, at all costs, to preserve those blue-collar manufacturing jobs. This is typical of a statist mentality. They want to be able to plan in a world that doesn't change. But the world changes. Good things happen, and so do bad things.

You might think that you could doctor up the economy they way old Doctor Nebeker used to doctor us up after the flu. You might even be tempted to think the economy is more simple than the human body, but imagine Doc Nebeker facing three hundred million of us at once in his waiting room. Even the kindly old doctor couldn't balance that many checkbooks and decide whose industry needed saving and whose special need warranted the printing of an extra trillion in fiat currency. If Doctor Nebeker couldn't do that, neither can Ben Bernanke.

The truth is that the Almighty gave us the free market as the best way to decide wages and prices this side of heaven. If you let the market work, it stops a lot of whining and fist-pounding and baby-brat screaming about who deserves what. If you want a lot of goodies, find a skill or craft a product that is in demand. If you don't want a lot of goodies, and you will settle for a box of Wheaties and a mini-fridge to hold your low-fat milk, get a job tearing down boxes at the liquor store--but DON'T call your congressman. He's not a very good doctor on that front.

The Constitution of the United States does not guarantee you a living. It promises to stay out of your way while you try to make one.

Theoretically, at least.

Just Stay Away from That Tree Right There...

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 21:03:00 EST

Eat Everything Else You Want,
Just Stay Away from That Tree Right There...

Yesterday's story of the run-away servant has me thinking about a cosmic, theological dilemma I've wrestled with, on and off, my whole life. This puzzle could be introduced in many ways, but let's take something topical: O.J. Simpson. I remember, as a teenager, seeing a wall-sized mural of O.J. Simpson--all Trojan Red and Gold--crashing through a line of defenders. There was no stopping him. He was half-man, half-mustang, and once he broke free, the idea of getting between him and a touchdown seemed laughable. Later, when he became a celebrity, there appeared to be an effortlessness about him, an ease, that seemed something like what you would imagine from a citizen of Eden. He had it all--fortune, beautiful women, golf, celebrity, friends. He didn't even have to pick the fruit; it fell into his hands. You might say he had it so easy that it became his curse: when things didn't go his way, when life presented to him the one apple he couldn't really eat, he wound up in chains.


Steve Klein's Hand-Forged Hoof-Pick. Email Us for a Price.

All of us experience this in a smaller way. Even the run-away servant with the six month old "man child" on her hip. On a December morning in the winter-killing months of Colonial Pennsylvania, would you steal away from the warmth of a tavern, and guaranteed board and food, to go find the errant rake that left you alone and in a family way?

The point here, of course, is that we're born with a hunger for precisely that portion of reality we don't control. "..Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.."

I can't pretend to unlock the mystery of this portion of God's reality, but I think the key to contentment must come from contemplating it in greater depth, since almost every story of misery in human history seems connected to it: David had it pretty good, but then he sees Bathsheba over there on the rooftop; Judas had the counsel of Jesus, but the thirty pieces of silver looked better. King George had a vast empire, but he couldn't abide even a small infringement upon his franchise. Napoleon could probably have retained the whole of Europe, if he didn't insist on Russia as well.

Not every instance of "reaching," is an infringement of God's law. Certain kinds of ambition, and zeal, are a good thing, but the route to the treasure has to be honorable. Think of Good King Boaz, waiting for Ruth, or Jesus, ignoring the Devil's temptation, and earning the kingdom by pleasing the Father.

Still, the older you get, the more you see this pattern of discontent everywhere and it leads to bad choices. You see people taking short-cuts--men dumping one wife for another, girls taking up with boyfriends they know will not care for them, businessmen promising one thing and delivering another. It's all a different version of what Adam and Eve fell for in the garden--taking something they shouldn't. U-pick farmers see this sort of thing all the time. The sweetest apple is the one you don't pay for.

So far, this is a reality we all understand: we want what we can't have, but I suppose my question is--why? Why is this dissatisfaction so squarely at the center of our existence? The primal story of mankind--Genesis--is about an act of disobedience so outrageous it would be something like setting a young pair of lovers down in Monte Carlo and saying "you can have everything you want, all the food, wine, music you can imagine; you can have a different room in the resort every night; you can have any limousine, any ballroom, any dessert you can name. Salma Hayek will make you pancakes every morning and Morgan Freeman will read you bedtime stories. It's all yours--everything. Just don't eat any of those strange little lemons on that tree in the courtyard."

What makes those little lemons tantalizing beyond description? And why would Jesus pray, to the Father, "lead us not into temptation?" Is there a secret cosmic test going on? Are we being tested to see how well we carry out the mission? Are we better off--as the Lord's prayer seems to imply--praying to avoid the mission altogether?

Sometimes we think that doing the right thing should feel attractive and doing the wrong thing should feel revolting, but, our existence is precisely the opposite. Doing the wrong thing can feel delicious and doing the right thing can be bitter beyond description. The wrong thing tastes good, and leaves a bad after-taste. The right thing can taste bad and makes you feel better. In either case, temptation seems to be part of the plan. "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil." (Sounds very much like a test, doesn't it?) Even more strangely, the plan--like a play requiring a villain--seems to include the absolute necessity that some temptations succeed: "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!"

Again, we see it all around us, in less Judas-style intensity: good people make bad decisions and they do it because those bad decisions "taste good." They waste time. They eat too much. They date the wrong people. They indulge malicious gossip. They eat the honey-comb of sin and then act as though they shouldn't be stung.

Back to the poor, runaway English bond servant: Fulfilling her bond to her master, apart from her lover, wouldn't be tempting. It would be bitter and lonely. It would even carry with it the pain of parenting a child without a partner, but there is little doubt that it would be the honorable, lawful course, but her story is already in the book of history--unalterable now, as perhaps it was before it was ever written?

I don't pretend to know for sure. Like I say, it's a p

This Day in the History of Common Folk

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:58:00 EST

I guess run-aways have the last laugh: their stories get recorded with more thoroughness than our more respectable ancestors. I'm always looking for some instance of the common life in the papers, and here's the brief story of Rachel Pickerin, who ran away from her master on this day 262 years ago:

Rachel's master, the keeper of a tavern in Concord (PA, not MA), some ten or fifteen miles west of Philadelphia, was like many masters of the era: they were irritated. They paid good money for bond servants, so as to serve out their seven year indenture, and then the scurvy nymphs run away, with lots of good clothing, and in this case looking for a papa who appeared to care less about Rachel and her child, than the keeper of the tavern. I've seen scores of run-away ads where the master describes the errant servant as having an "impudent look," a "low manner of speaking," as prone "to telling tales." Thomas Clemson even wrote a poem about all the vices of one Joseph Willard. ("..His Birth Bucks County did adorn, To all his Friends he is a Scorn..")

You also get to confirm use of the language when you read these papers. A "baby boy" in this era can be called "a fat man child." I found another instance of a curse in common use today ("S.O.B.") that was also in common use in 1746, except that the papers spelled it right out, when describing the language of a highway-robber.

So, this Christmas if you're a Kerlin and you happen to run into a Pickerin, see if you can find out what ever happened to that old rascal William Peters.

Cs the Thing...

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:45:00 EST

We've had two fine nights of carol singing, cidered ham, candied carots, creamy corn chowder and other festive treats that start with a "C" this week. That's Bill Blanchard's singers on the right, at a KVCR Dickens benefit on Thursday night, here at the Hawk's Head Public House. (photo courtesy of Richard Crow, husband to Beverly, third from left.)

If you could see the view out my window right now, you would think my home is plaster-wrapped with a technicolor billboard of Fall New England scenes. It's golden out there. Let's kick the recession in the pants today, people. Get up here and spend a little bargain time with your family.

I've been watching a lot of Peter Schiff these days. It's hard not to watch somebody who called the real estate bubble and the dot-com bubble and the equities bubble. He says we need to start building "real things" again, which fits in very well with my desire to have someone in the extended Riley clan start a full-scale fruit drying and processing facility up here. I want my dried pear snacks.

..but for now, I guess I'll just have to settle for Tina's scrumptilliumptious garden omelet downstairs.

See you there...

Confidence

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:28:00 EST

Mary has a weakness for nativity scenes. She bought a really nice one at Costco a few years ago. It met our standards: it looked "Old World" right out of the box, with muted alabaster and umber tones, and lifelike faces, and robes of pale rose and milky persimmon. It was solemn, and hopeful--and ceramic. The bottom line is that seven year old Gabriel broke one of the wise men last year. Mary harbors a little resentment for this, and I can tell it's an issue with them from time to time.

"We can just pretend one of the wise men is going to the bathroom," Gabriel said.

"That's not funny," Mary said.

I buried my face in a pillow, and out of support for Mary, I pretended I was laughing at something Nicholas said.

"What are you laughing at?" Gabriel said.
"Oh. Something Nicholas said earlier today."
Gabriel, with his ferret-like cunning, knew I was not telling the truth.
"I was the first one to say that," Gabriel insisted.
"Say what?" I asked.
"I was the first one to say, 'let's just pretend the wise man is--'"
"But let's just pretend Nicholas said it."
"No! I was the first one to say that!"

There are probably several homiletics to be had here, but, certainly, here's one: we spend a lot of our time worrying about our possessions--both real and intellectual. I know I have a Manfrotto monopod around here someplace, and a cherry-wood camp-desk full of brass quills, and the thought of replacing them fills me with fatigue and irritation.

We worry about what George Carlin called "our stuff" all the time.

The Master tells us not to "worry." (My mind turned the King James version into worry, though that word, "worry," doesn't appear there.) It goes like this:

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Matthew 6:28-34).

Close enough I guess. "Don't worry 'bout it." "Don't sweat the small stuff." "Be happy." "Have a positive attitude." "I've got it covered." More properly: "God is in control and He loves you."

Or, as George Bailey put it last night, after the bank run on the savings and loan, "just remember, this thing isn't as black as it appears."

And that is, of course, the truth. Nothing is ever as bad as it seems, particularly if you believe what Jesus says, "your heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of all these things." The startling reality, for contemporary minds, is that even the stock market confirms this reality. What is the difference between a $13,000 Dow Jones and an $8,400 Dow Jones?

Confidence. It's still hard getting your mind around it, but a Southern California man who thought he owned a $400,000 home two years ago, was really counting up a personal balance sheet that was built on optimism, confidence, and sheer faith that millions of young workers were certain they would be able to afford his home--should he ever want to sell it. Everything we buy, and everything we own, is a function of how much confidence we have in our ability to pay for it, and how much confidence we have in each other as members of a productive, growing economy. Even when the super-wealthy buy a $50,000 piece of jewelry, one way of looking it, aside from the extravagance of the thing itself, is to conclude that they have a lot of confidence in the value the rest of society puts in their other assets--the assets they use to pay for the basics. One of the critical differences between a healthy, vibrant capitalist economy and a dreary, ration-scrapping socialist nightmare is a daily dose of confidence. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

What we keep forgetting, in this confidence formula, however, is that God assures us that our real faith has to be in Him. The past two years have shown us that you can't really trust politicians. You can't really trust the financial rating companies. It's getting harder and harder to trust historic assumptions about real estate and the stock market. Our entire system of government was based on the notion that you can only muster up a little confidence in the system, if the foibles of human beings are throttled by "checks and balances." The legislature checks the judiciary. The executive appoints the judiciary. Why? Confidence. Nehemiah put four treasurers on the job of counting the money. Why four? It builds confidence in the accounting. Theoretically, our public business needs to be conducted before the public, in open meetings. Why? It builds confidence.


One of the Signs that "It's a Wonderful Life." "...Special Prayers as Requested by President Truman.."

The humanists would like us to believe we have to have faith in each other--sans God. Apparently, the new capitol visitor center in Washington DC is a kind of tribute to the hopes of mankind somehow being wrapped up in the great edifice of a magnanimous federal government. What utter, dreary rot and pure intellectual dreck. The founders--Patrick Henry especially--would have gagged on the notion that government is anything other than a necessary evil. The only people who really get misty at the thought of expanding federal power are the folks who get a little lucre to go with their pledge of allegiance. (I had an uncle who worked for the Feds; he seemed to get a big kick out of anyone fighting the IRS; he was, after all, on the receiving end of that struggle.)

It's not that our system's might and power can't be used to crush evil. I think it's great we brought fascism and the death camps to an end, but it wasn't just because we had faith in each other.

Look who Harry Truman had to thank for the matter.

Movie Making

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:06:00 EST

Listening to a story is something like being in the back seat of a station wagon as an eleven year old.

If you are on your way to Disneyland, and your friend's mother--Elanor Brayshaw--is driving, and she has three stops to make along the way, and they involve pricing five gallon tin containers for wheat storage, you get the feeling you will never arrive at the promised land. Let's say Mrs. Brayshaw actually gets you to the parking lot at Disneyland and then she has you all wait on the asphalt while she shuffles grain and stacks tin.

The point is that good storytelling does two things: it promises "Disneyland" and it gives you the feeling, all along the way, that you will actually get there. If you are in the back seat of the story-telling station wagon and the driver keeps making turns into dusty industrial parks and down desperately empty desert frontage roads, and the station wagon has that rotting banana smell, and three other kids keep asking "when will we get there," you get the feeling that you got in the wrong car. You should have gone with the older kids, in your brother's T-bird.

Years ago, in college, a writing teacher asked a fellow student, "what is that sentence doing there? You don't need that sentence at all."

I thought to myself, rebelliously, "it's there because he wrote it."

I was wrong. The point is that brevity is both the soul of wit--and storytelling. Cutting is the real art of the master artist. Most really great photographs have a way of simplifying life--cutting it down to the primary colors. There is a dazzling focus on just that reality the photographer wanted to emphasize--the wrinkled smile of a Russian peasant or the black foreground of a weathered bicycle, with moonlight shining through the spokes.

It is true that 19th century story-telling was more leisurely. Dickens wandered all over the place, but there were no industrial side roads or rotten bananas along the way. Every observation was fresh, even if it did represent a sideshow on the way to the theme park.

I keep reminding myself of this when I cut this movie/television pilot. Cut, cut, cut, cut. I'm about to edit a non-stop public house "talk" scene, which the writer (me) foolishly didn't break with any outdoor action.

Keep thinking about that poor eleven year old, Jim. You were there once.

Pipe us a Tune

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 12:32:00 EST

If Mr. Hanna--a World War II combat marine--is any guide to longevity, the first chapter in his book would have to read something like "Cultivate a Thousand Interests."

He brought up his newly acquired Calliope today and cranked out sweet circus pipe tunes all morning.

My dad had a weakness for calliope music. You don't think of a hard-charging businessman, pausing to purchase a collection of 1880s circus tunes, but he did just that one night, and told Scott and I to give it a listen. "Isn't that something?" he asked--and it was. It must have been about 1971.

Merry Christmas, Dad. You would have enjoyed today's concert.

Fall's Colorful Rancor

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:40:00 EST

We have a fine, wet, brass-and-mustard morning going here for Thanksgiving day. I've noticed that "Red" Oak leaves are actually a dusty chocolate color, and "Ash" trees look like burnt cinnamon in the fall. The Poplars are not acting in concert this year--some getting all sunrise-yellow and some insisting on their parsley green summer dresses. We heard a great breaking sound yesterday across the road, an explosion in the woods that sounded very much like lightning. A great 400 year old live oak, long dead, finally gave up its perch and fell into little San Gorgonio Creek, gracefully avoiding the power lines. (But creating a dam?)

The prettiest restrooms on any farm west of Nova Scotia are nearing completion. (Click the picture on the left for a larger view.) The Christmas Trees are all set up under the rose arbor and we're selling them fresh, green, and cheap, on the hopes that you'll join us for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Logan Creighton and the rest of our living history staff are ready to show you all how to bake pies and make Christmas wreaths as well.

More on yesterday's nutty professor: there's an odd, mean-spirited consequence to indulging the anti-Thanksgiving martyrs. It makes for a very weird children's ethnic-message. "Kids, you are all descended from genocidal predators. Have a good holiday tomorrow."

We should all be clear about what is going on here. It's called divide and conquer. There are really just two sorts of people who exist in the world--those who are seeking the truth, and those who aren't. Sometimes, we get distracted with other labels--black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Native American, capitalist, collectivist, Democrat, Republican--but those labels, at their worst, are just ways of keeping us divided and clawing holes in each other. There are two divisions in the world, and we should be clear about that division. But it's not as simple, and as trite, as "minority struggle" or "economic justice" or "glass ceiling." The division is between good and evil. The people who use the other labels are usually getting paid for it--directly or indirectly.

Who, after all, has the impulse to take a collective expression of thanks for the harvest, and a moment of inter-racial peace, and compare it to Nazi genocide? I'll tell you: it's someone given over to an evil heart, to division, to complaint, to strife for the sheer sake of strife. It's someone who wants to make headlines and sell books. The father of lies has a very artful strategy when you think about it. Who among us doesn't really want to blame our problems on someone else? ("The cigarette companies are forcing cancer on me." "I've built my home; now if everyone else would just become an environmentalist, I would have more nature around me." "My ancestors were unjustly treated, so pay me for their troubles.")

The hard work of mutual sacrifice, mutual compromise, balance, and "treating others as you would be treated," isn't as easy as holding an emotional pistol to someone's head and saying, "it's all your fault."

Does this mean we don't learn from history? Does this mean we don't seek justice? Does this mean we don't assign blame where blame should be assigned? Of course not. But it does mean giving up an emotional investment in contention just for contention's sake. It also means making a difficult investment in self reflection as well. Christ didn't tell us not to remove the speck from our brother's eye, just make sure you don't have any planks--or specks--in yours. We are supposed to rebuke each other, but only after we have rebuked ourselves first.

In the instance of Thanksgiving, Native Americans simply can't criticize the west without fessing up to some of their own sins. Even now, in Brazil, a group of missionaries is being slandered merely for attempting to bring an end to infanticide among primitive Amazonians. The story speaks for itself. There is a colossal absurdity in a western government protecting a native culture's practice of infanticide, merely because--what?--it doesn't want to appear judgmental? Did I just write that sentence? Did I just have to write that sentence? Here's how it works: a native culture kills "defective" children and the missionaries are "genocidal" for protecting them. At one point, some sort of British field worker, or anthropologist, says, "I don't' want to defend infanticide, but.." (And what follows, of course, is a defense of infanticide.) This is really nothing more than racism with an academic stamp. It's saying, effectively, "we have our central air homes and our inoculations up to date," but let's keep these native Amazonian's subject to disease, poor shelter, child-killing and illiteracy."

Why? As a human zoo? As a pool for more dissertations? To protect the tourism industry?

The pilgrims didn't believe there was one truth for an Algonquin and one truth for an Englishman. In that respect, they were less racist than their great grandchildren seeking tenure.

Dander Up..

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:05:00 EST

You all know how peace-loving and mellow I am most of the time, but this story, covering the shameless political extortion of an elementary school Thanksgiving feast, by an "academic" who sees genocide in a Land-o-Lakes butter logo, really got my Irish up. It seems the students of Condit Elementary have been dressing up as Pilgrims and Indians for forty years, and this year the tradition was nearly broken by an assistant professor with a cause. Michella Raheja, whose credits include "Pretending to Be Me: Ethnic Transvestism and Cross-Writing" was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as complaining to her child's teacher in the following terms:

"It's demeaning. I'm sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation's history."

So--keeping our outrage-ducks in order--Pilgrims can be reduced to Nazis and Slave-masters, but staging a heritage party for children, with construction paper costumes, is the real offense. It's difficult keeping things straight out here in blue country: In California, we not only get a daily dose of quackery, we actually pay for it. (Raheja is an assistant professor at UCR.) Is it any wonder more and more parents are finally beginning to realize a non-technical higher education just isn't worth the price? You can't get a liberal arts education at a liberal university, in other words. They are too busy teaching native cross-dressing to be bothered with Augustine or the Brontë Sisters.

Beyond the outrage, however, Americans should be saddened by this display of narcissistic martyrdom and Holocaust trivialization. Even the Los Angeles Times noted that Thanksgiving Celebrations really are a reminder that Americans should celebrate the best in all of our traditions, not to mention the moments where differences were forgotten in the enjoyment of a feast, and in common thanks to the Almighty, (even if the Times missed that last reality.)

There is certainly value in dissent, but the dissent has to be rooted in reality. The Claremont School district, for bowing to this lunacy, was properly scolded by the majority of parents who brought their children to school, wearing their Thanksgiving costumes--against the politically obsequious ruling that heritage was simply against policy.

And that is a victory for sanity.

The Bury-Your-Talent-in-the-Dirt Fellowship

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 14:56:00 EST

I was once told the story of a builder who asked his workers to measure the ceiling heights of a large new home that was being framed. Across the far corners of the house, they were off by a fraction of an inch. I'm not construction savvy enough to remember the size of the actual fraction, but my friend, who told me the story, was on the crew that day and he told me they were all sent home, while the framing contractor looked for their error. No one on the job could believe they were holding up work to look for a sliver of an inch, but that was the reputation of this builder. He wanted exactitude. He discovered the error, and corrected it, even though parts of the job had to be re-done.

Granted, most of the time we have to settle for some degree of imprecision in our lives. In the context of orthodox, historic Christianity, by definition, we are always falling short of the standard. Our righteousness is as as "filthy rags." Blessed little Joseph was a bit of a bragger, Noah had a drinking problem, and we all know King David's errors. Still, the same scriptures tell us to treat "as heathens" those who won't be corrected. They tell us not to give bread to those who won't work. They urge us on to "finish the race," and not just "enter" the race. We are told two seemingly different things: don't worry about your needs ("the lilies of the field") and get to work, ("...he that doth serve.") We are told to "judge not," but "hate the evil, love the Good.."

We are flawed creatures, paradoxically called to perfection. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect." Certainly, when we seat ourselves down in a jumbo-jet, we hope the pilot has an appreciation for perfection, and we hope the same thing for the aircraft mechanic, and the sky marshall, and the air traffic controller. When we buy a house, we hope the builder was troubled--deeply troubled--by imperfection.

Clearly, as a culture, we don't wrestle with this paradox of error and perfection enough. You might argue that Islamic culture errs on the side of a law that has no mercy, and so there is little innovation, and even very little discussion. Who feels like pitching new product ideas to a panel of ayatollahs? Who makes a film in a country where a bad review means losing your head? On the other hand, are American children really better off being the products of a rampant-divorce culture in the post-Christian age? Are we so broad in our standard that we want no standard at all? Do loving people really want kindergartners to learn to accept and embrace trans-genderism? Are American teenage girls really better served by laws that bar their parents from consenting to an abortion?

A Biblical culture, a truly Biblical culture, knows both the value of a standard, and the reality of man's nature. It balances justice and mercy. I keep seeing this reality in the old colonial courts. In cases of remorseless murder or rape, the trial and execution were swift, but in lesser instances where extenuating circumstances call for mercy, the accused was sometimes reprieved at the very last minute, with the very rope around his neck. The needs of justice, and of mercy, were balanced. There were laws on the books so harsh they were never enforced, but they were left there to remind us of our obligation to be "perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect."

A call for a more just, more merciful, more perfect, more covenantal society are branded "legalistic" today. Our churches are full of people grateful for a Christ who has freed them to be sloppy, lazy, inarticulate, and cowardly. Very plainly, the church has become what Paul warned against: churches that effectively celebrate vice so as to praise God for His mercy. They might as well be labeled the "Sin, that Grace May Abound Congregations," or the "Bury Your Talent In the Dirt Fellowships." How else, could pro-abortion sentiment be on the rise among young evangelicals? How else could a majority of Catholics have violated the pro-life teaching of their priests in the last election?

The churches, very simply, are full of pastoral leaders who engage in the false tolerance of treating their flocks as being too stupid to understand the paradox of mercy and judgment. Clearly they are not fit to shepherd their flocks, because they don't hate evil enough to preach against it, and if they don't hate evil enough to chastise sinners, are they really fit to preach a Christ who forgives sin?

Yes, we are sinners. Yes, we are forgiven.

And Yes, we need to get to work building the kingdom.

The Better, and Worse, Angels of our Nature

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:08:00 EST

I'm deep into stacking up video clips and fading in audio and toggling color-correction for our production of "Courage, New Hampshire," so I missed farm-journaling yesterday.

In any given day, our personal narratives are full of tedium, and I think the task of writing a blog has something to do with distilling the instructive moments. Here's one: yesterday, I caught a girl slinging rocks out into the parking lot, from behind the grape arbor. I told her, "you know, young lady, you really should have some idea about your target. You could hit someone out there, and you wouldn't even know it." She looked right back at me. "That's the point," she said, and then let go with another stone. (Can we hire a knuckle-wrapping nun?)

Just a few minutes later, I walked into the public house, and there was a young man picking up a pastry he had ordered.

"Thank you for visiting us," I said to him.

At first he was shy and didn't respond. He walked by me and and then stopped in the doorway. I had already turned my back. He called out to me.

"Sir?" he said. "I enjoyed it very much."

Two kids--one of them a snarling, venomous Sandra Bernhardt, another an embryonic Sidney Poitier, one being told the truth and spitting on it, and another anxious to show kindness, even if he had to work at finding the words.

We see proof of good and evil every day. We struggle with it every minute of our lives. We do what we shouldn't, and we don't do what we should. We know we are cutting corners. We know we are blaming others because it's easier than reforming ourselves. We know there is some moment of encouragement that we could give--but won't. Sometimes, we know we are being mean, and hurtful, just for the sheer, cussed spleen of it. The other day I complimented Lockton for reading a book without being prompted, and the timing of that one compliment bore fruit. I saw all of the kids, engrossed in novels the next day. Sin crushes the spirit. Virtue brings peace. We see that basic reality everywhere.

Why--with so much good and evil around us--have the words themselves become comic? Why can't a police watch commander begin the day with the words, "men, today, we will be a scourge to evil and a blessing to the righteous?" Why would director Roland Emmerich opine "we don't want to be teaching any lessons in this movie?" Why are you unlikely to hear a teacher say, "children, I expect you to be good boys and girls--obedient, respectful, and anxious to learn--but you will feel my wrath, and this ruler, if you do evil?"

Is it because no one trusts anyone else's definitions? I find that hard to believe. Anyone with eyes in their heads would have to conclude rock-slinging girl was given over to evil and gratitude-boy was seeking goodness.

Is it because we want to examine causes? Again, who cares about the "causes" or rock-slinging girl's mean-spiritedness? Would a chain of directed pain justify doling out random pain to others?

In truth, we all know the definitions of good and evil--its basic contours--and we are without excuse, but our very knowledge convicts us. Moral ambiguity isn't more sophisticated than moral clarity; it's just easier.

Our public dialogue would be infinitely more sane if we employed our native moral sense, if we stopped blaming external realities for internal failings.

We should be talking less about "change" and "hope," in other words, and more about "good" and "evil." When we pray, we should pray that our new political leadership is delivered--from its own shallowness.

Farm Roundup and Another of My Snobby Cultural Quips

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:42:00 EST

OLD OLD NEWS: We now have Colonial Newspapers--make that Newspaper--for sale. If we sell even one copy, it will mean we are growing faster than the Los Angeles Times. Here's the concept: for as little as $3.75 a month, you get four BIG pages of very old news delivered to your home. The first re-print is of the New Hampshire Gazette dated January 30, 1767. Granted, this is a gift for the real high-brown in your household, the guy or girl who likes to brew a cup of very subtle herbal tea, repair to a comfortable chair on the porch and commune with the ancients. You have to be a real sophisticate, in other words, to look forward to your delivery of an 18th century newspaper, but even if you're not, the first issue speaks of cannibalism and gold-diggers. So there! (There's a little Rupert Murdoch in everyone, I guess.)

Adventures in the Old World, Christmas Style: We have new Christmas-based additions to our Adventures in the Old World program. Come out to the farm, make your own Christmas Wreath with local foliage, decorate ginger bread, throw a tomahawk, grab a walking stick and enjoy the cold country air. Then take in a hot cider and a chicken pot pie at the public house. Is that Yuletide or what? If that's not Christmas, I'm the High Duke of Curmudgeonville.

In the Good Old Summer Time: You read that correctly, madame. It's time to start thinking about Summer Day Camp at Riley's Farm. We don't have all of our prices yet, but in a few days, I'll announce a discount for early bookings. Memo to Jeff Hammond: google other day camps and see what kind of discount is given to forward-thinking moms and dads.

Snob-fest: okay, so Mary and I are in a Christian book store looking for a family gift, and--whoah-nelly!--I round the corner and there on the floor, cross-legged, are two teenage maidens, book-shopping--one of them doing a refrigerator-repairman impression. It used to be that Christian missionaries would have to travel all the way to Fiji to get the native girls to cover up, but now all you have to do visit the local, um, strip mall. In the car, on the way home, I said to Mary, "Am I a Pharisee for thinking, maybe, some matron in the local Sunday School should be saying, 'heah, girls, liberty in Christ is one thing, but you don't want to go husband-shopping by cracking a foot of southern exposure in the Joel Osteen section?"

Okay, so you get two snobby impressions for the price of one: have you ever noticed there is an etiquette about getting to your table in a restaurant? We saw an older couple taken to their seat last night. A moment later, they were standing next to us, quietly asking the server for another table. Mary said this was their third request. They had been seated once, twice, and now they were actually scanning the whole place for a third spot.

"I couldn't hear that," I asked Mary. "What was she after?"
"She says there are too many lights, too many people." Mary paused. "Too much draft, too close to the kitchen, too close to the bar television."
"This is Applebee's," I said. "What was she thinking?"

I looked up at them, in the distance now, testing another table.

There was a poor, tired, friendly looking man next to her. Her husband.

I'm saying a prayer for him now.

The Coming Pruning Season

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:30:00 EST

In a few weeks, when it starts to get cold, we'll begin hacking down the raspberry canes right to the ground; we'll chop down sick apple trees and we'll plant younger, more vibrant grafts in the holes left behind. The roses and the grape vines will be cut back and all of the fields will get ripped up two or three times--as a way of killing of the weeds. "Cutting back" is the way to keep a farm growing.

It's very likely we will all be going through something like this as a country soon. Why? Because we have a lot of dead wood. Consider a few recent headlines:

Despite bailouts, and perhaps using the borrowed funds, many Wall Street Financial Firms will be paying lavish, multi-million dollar bonuses to their executives. Details.

Even as it begs the Federal Government for financial assistance, GM allocates $17 million for its workers' Viagra needs. Details.

The State of California proposed $118,000 for two workers to distribute arts and crafts to death row inmates. Details.

Keep in mind, these are just the stories that bring the phenomenal waste into high relief. Our system--both the public and the private sector--is full of the indefensible and the unnecessary and what you might call the ubiquitous false freebie. A pediatrician once told me. "In the old days, there were grandmas, and the need for pocket cash, that acted as the check on a doctor visit. Now, with the $5 co-pay, the waiting rooms are full of people who think their health care doesn't cost anything."

When you combine the false-freebie with the assumption of growth, you find companies and government planning to pay these costs by "growing" into them. Social Security is supposed to work, on the false assumption that our population, and our economy will always grow. The entire sub-prime debacle was caused by the false assumption that real estate prices MUST escalate. Dead-beat borrowers, in other words, would be protected by the growth in the underlying value of their homes.

I think we all know someone who works for a public entity, or one of the world's super-firms, and we hear about the benefits, the vacations, the pensions that are far beyond the imagination of anyone struggling to run, or help manage, a small business. To use the orchard metaphor, these mega-entities are just older trees, with more apples on them. When the tree is healthy, it produces more, and you would expect the workers to share in the bounty.

But when the tree shows signs of decay, if you want it to live, you need to start cutting back. You need to work harder to save it, and you might even need to accept fewer apples in your basket for a few years.

I think the resentment the electorate feels at the bailout is the sense that no matter how sick the old trees are, no one will endure any pruning. Taxing the working economy, which is primarily small business, to preserve the comfortable status quo of the non-market economy (de facto corporate monopolies and state agencies) will only delay the reckoning further. If the prisoners need to be stacked up five deep in the jails, to save money, start stacking. If the $250,000 a year agency head, needs to scale back to $150,000, so be it. Financial executives and government employees and contract-protected union workers will all need to do what those of us in the small business world have always had to do--expect fewer entitlements, less salary, and more work.

..But it's good for the soul. If you like our apple trees, learn a lesson from those who tend them.

Family Rambling

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:46:00 EST

We celebrated Mom's 90th birthday this weekend. My brother Mike and I talked about getting older, about politics, about religion--all the things you aren't ever supposed to discuss in polite company. The fellow who made up the rule about never discussing politics and religion must have had a sizeable investment in the status quo. Has it ever occurred to anyone else that the people who have political and ecclesiastical authority in this country are quite happy that we all keep our family conversations as superficial as possible?

Superficial family conversations make for superficial leadership. We get the sort of public policy, and the sort of theology, that reflects the shallowness, or the depth, of our dinner table conversations. It's easy, in other words, to hood-wink a nation full of people who keep it light, and casual, and breezy.

By the way, Mike and I had a very civil conversation, since we're both deep thinkers. (And since we share Bea Riley's Constitutional Education.) I also learned a few things I never knew about my brother. For instance, once, on a family vacation, Mike knocked on the door of a polygamous home in Colorado somewhere and succeeded in getting the entire clan to take a picture with his kids. Mike has my mother's gift of immediate friendship with people. He could get a picture of the Pope, and I'm quite sure the Holy Father would walk away thinking, "where do we know that fellow?" I also learned that Mike, when he worked for Disneyland as a teenager, played cards with Mickey Mouse and Goofy--or maybe Pluto.

This was the lightest part of the conversation. I promise. We talked about politics and religion the rest of the time.

I have begun editing our film/television project in earnest, and I discovered whilst working on the titles an unexpected surprise from Windows. Bickham Script Pro! Joy unspeakable! "Bickham" is a historic font, people. George Bickham wrote a book in 1722, I believe, showing young clerks how to write round hand and Old English. Here's an example of the Windows version of his pen:

You can't fool me, Mr. Bill Gates. You fashioned this font just for Riley's Farm and you installed it during one of your nightly unannounced updates. I owe you a five pound apple pie. You can collect anytime, so long as you mention the words "Riley's Farm" in three or four of your next appearances.

Bill, by the way, we need to discuss politics.

Towards a More Manly Weight Watchers™

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:46:00 EST

Towards a More Manly Weight Watchers™

Okay, so I can't eat Salmagundi all day long, so this morning I tried a little fresh apple oatmeal, which was okay, with the raisins and all, (and-okay! okay!--the three sausage links.)

Still, even with the sausage, it felt rationed. I knew I couldn't have all three, so I gave one to the dog, who, frankly, didn't seem appreciative enough. I had to say, "Bess. The sausage is right in front of your nose. Eat it. I can't eat it. Do you understand what I'm doing for you?"

And then I fell to thinking: why do they always have a little Weight-Watcher's portion of the menu with stuff that real men don't really like? Why not just give us the straight point-scoop on the Chicken & Cheese Alfredo or the twelve layer Lasagne? I mean if you go out to a restaurant after a week of shaved carrot sticks and granola, are you really going to spend your "Weekly Remaining" point total on an extra ration of onion soup and a scoop of fat-reduced Vanilla?

What's more, would you really visit a Colonial Public House, and drive all the way from El Segundo to have "corn pudding lite" or "Mount Vernon Reduced Fat Meat Pie?"

I asked Krystle to make a garden omelet with the quantities she would use if she were my normal pigging-out self. I wanted to see what that would do to my daily point total.

She handed me the ingredient list:

2 Ounces Cheddar Cheese
1 Oz. Green Onion
3 Oz. Eggs
2 Oz. Tomatoes
1 Oz. Bell Pepper
1 Oz. Onion

By my reckoning, that's 10 points. A Riley's Farm Colonial Public House Garden Omelet is 10 points! And Melania made the omelet just the way I like it--well done, with golden chewy cheese all over the top and stiff scrambled egg batter. (I know some people have to have their eggs soft; I like mine hard. It goes back to childhood, when slithery, slippery stuff like Swiss Chard made me gag.)

Am I on to something here? In a restaurant, wouldn't you really prefer to employ the Patrick Henry philosophy? "For my own part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I prefer to know the truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it."

I think so! Watch out bakery girls. Get out your food s

The Enduring Image

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:20:00 EST

I found this photograph in an antique store near the Mission Inn last Christmas and picked it up for $3.00. Somehow it wound up taped to a file cabinet in Jan's office, and I decided to blog about it this morning, since it fits our latest project.

My instincts were to coin a caption--something like, "Our Customer Service Department," or "The Four Edwardians--A Serious Sports Bar," or "No One Parties Like the Baumgartner Sisters."

I suppose that instinct comes from the sense that life, for better or worse, has become considerably more casual since this photograph was taken. (Mary guesses 1905.) The high collars, the choker ties, the pleats, the pearl button fronts, the ridge-shoulders, the tight, neat sweep of the hair--it all announces a kind of order, and grace, we just don't see anymore. These young women took the occasion seriously. You wonder why number four was picked to stare at us, why number three is so sad. Does that ribbon around number two holds a locket, with a picture of her intended, or was she just the most responsible of the four, and thus entrusted with the key to the dry goods mercantile where they all worked?

It is a mystery photo. There is no clue on the back, except that it was once glued to a black paper scrapbook. Were these girls native Southern Californians-orange blossom gentry-or was this brought out West by a World War II vet, who died without grandchildren? Who could possibly sell a picture like this anyway? Wasn't there someone around to say, "Frank! That is your grand-aunt Polly-Jean! Glue that all back together! How much of this stuff have you been swap-meeting anyway?"

I suppose the real question is: would you want to leave so beautiful but cryptic a memory?

No! Of course not!

In Defense of Salmagundi

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:12:00 EST

Two confessions: I don't like weighing myself and I do not like taking my blood pressure. If I can find some other plausible use of my time, I will call a Flash CS3 web-ad more important and leave the life vitals to some other day in the murky future. There's something about feeling your pulse pumping back at you, through the cuff, that just makes me shudder. The Rileys have high blood pressure. It's a family thing. The only way to fight it, short of channel-blockers, and ace-inhibitors and gout-aggravating diuretics is to lose weight, and horror of horrors, I weighed myself this morning. TWO HUNDRED FORTY SEVEN POINT ONE pounds. No wonder the stinkin' Wahmaker cowboy pants don't fit anymore! That's ten pounds more than my usual weight and TWENTY POUNDS more than my Weight-Watchers™ flirtation-weight about a year ago.

Well, I had the kitchen staff make me a light salmagundi this morning--lettuce, one ounce of light turkey, a half ounce of ranch dressing, two ounces of pickled beets, a half ounce of sweet corn niblets, three ounces of lettuce, and a slice of tomato. By my count, that's 3 of my 35 daily Weight-Watchers™ points. I could eat ten of these things a day, and they taste great, more filling. (I like the filling part.)

Well, I won't put these on the menu, but you CAN order them. It's a special for farm journal readers. You have to order the "Jim Riley is Getting FAT Salmagundi." You have to say it just like that, and then the waitress will have to go in and weigh the quantities for you. $5.49. You have to remember the price and be honest.

Let's get svelte together, people.

Unless, of course, you want to use our place as the once-a-week 35 point binge-release. I have no objections there, either.

Friends and Cormorants

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:55:00 EST

One of our Many GREAT guests writes...
"..I was part of the Cameron Elementary School field trip to Riley's Farm on Monday, November 10, 2008. I think I had more fun than the kids, and they had a LOT of fun! I'm looking froward to coming back in the future and bringing my family. There is definitely something special about Riley's Farm! Thank you so much.."

Tara, Barstow

Friends & Cormorants

We got hammered yesterday by a Veteran's Day crowd that filled the tavern, the store, and the orchards. (We still do have u-pick apples for those willing to look for them.) I heard Brandon Ryder on the radio calling Jeff Hammond to help with serving food, and I knew there must be a big crowd waiting for a meal. Mary went down to help short order cook; I helped bus dishes. Lizzy watched Michelle's kids so that she could stay on and waitress, and we were packed-busy right till closing time at 4:00 PM. Usually, when the owner gets involved, something gets messed up, and, sure enough, I seated a party out of line.

The party who had to wait was not happy, and I had just chastised a Denny's manager the other day for seating parties out of order, so it was my turn to eat humble pie. I talked to the offended guest, and after her meal, we actually became pretty good friends. I gave her party one free lunch, and I confessed to her my error, even letting her know how hard I had been on the Denny's manager, and she said, "you have a conscience! I will be back. I will bring my friends back!"

Customer service is a delicate art. From our side of the counter, I've found that if we really make a mistake, it's better to own up to the problem right away, and try to make up for it. Reasonable people will understand an error, particularly if you don't run from it with excuses. Some regular customers reminded me yesterday they had been waiting for their soup; I ran back to the kitchen, and sure enough, the waitress had left a half-order unfilled. I made up for it right away--and I apologized.

There are some customers, however, who will not be happy, even if you tie their shoes and offer to send their kids to college. I usually give someone one or two chances to prove they are a reasonable guest, and if they don't respond, then, if they are lucky, I ignore them. The really unreasonable guest gets a list of other Oak Glen establishments where they would be welcome. (Sorry, fellow merchants.) If they are really rude, or crop-lifters, they get something like a sermon, while we wait for the deputy to arrive. Most Rileys, on both sides of the feud, have this ability to extend pastoral advice and homiletic stripes to wayward guests. It's a kind of service to the 99.99% of our guests who expect rural felicity and kingdom-style civility. A few weeks ago, a guest family launched into the orchard with their own bag, stealing apples. When our operations manager confronted the two, he was called "the Devil" by the eldest son. When I arrived, I told the apple-stealing matriarch of the clan, "your son has an unruly temper. He probably needs to kept in a pen somewhere, away from civilized people."

Well, that's not exactly corporate public relations love-speak, and they would fire me for that kind of talk if I worked at McDonald's, but I don't work at McDonald's. I think when people "go over the river and through the woods to grand mother's house," they expect the tranquility of the old world, but also its discipline. Polite, reasonable people are greeted with love. Rude, hateful, self-hating curmudgeonly cormorants are encouraged to migrate.

More of the Farm Journal -- November 11, 2008

Mr. Guppy and Other News..

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:34:00 EST

Lisa Mertins wrote/sketched a charming chronicle of the Big Band Dance yesterday. Lisa is a Cherry Valley resident, and chicken and shoe guru, who has been covering the farm for the Orange County Register for years, and I sat her next to Jeff & Krystle Hammond for dinner. It's one thing to get newspaper/magazine coverage, but it's quite another to be painted right into immortality. Thanks, Mona Lisa!

On Sunday, a huge plume of smoke started rising from about a half-mile up Oak Glen road. It was deep black at first, and barreling into the sky at panic speed. "Car fire," I said immediately, and thanked the Almighty it was happening on a cold, sleety day. The fire department got there very quickly, even past the crowded Sunday Oak Glen traffic, and the black smoke turned white. I got to thinking about the last car fire I can remember here, and then remembered it took place at just about the same spot. I shared my theory with Scott that when a car is prone to heating up, the physics of the matter are remarkably consistent. They happen just shy of the Oak Glen fire station. "Yeah," Scott said, "that's about where Bob B--- had a car fire years ago." Note to drivers: Oak Glen is not exactly mountain driving in the way of Lake Arrowhead, but there are prolonged grades. Drive the new car, if you can, or pack a few extra fire-extinguishers.

I give two hearty thumbs up to the 2005 Masterpiece Theater version of Charles Dickens' "Bleak House." I liked the production so much, I even sleuthed out the name of the guy who played "Mr. Guppy" - Burn Gorman. He plays a hilariously credible version of an aspiring legal clerk, complete with obsequious bows, and rehearsed speeches, and a thin-lipped, sliver of a mouth that looks like it was painted by Dickens' very muse. Gillian Anderson, as Lady Dedlock, is introduced in such an unsympathetic light, that her confession, mid-plot, seems nothing short of baptismal. You weep for--and with--her. The heroine, Esther Summerson, holds the hand of a dying boy and says the Lord's Prayer with him in a way that speaks of an age that was Christian in more than name. I mean really: how can you not like a a story with surnames like 'Skimpole,' 'Tulkinghorne,' and 'Rouncewell?' Rent it!

Dream Reels

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:50:00 EST

I usually photo-chronicle the Big Band Dances fairly extensively, but last night I dreamt my way through the evening, doing my happy-as-an-idiot impression.

We met Uncle Louis and Aunt Gina of the Drazin family extended clan. Uncle Louis was a paratrooper in World War II, and his wife, Gina, was part of a big Italian clan of girls from Glencoe, Illinois. (They danced to Bennie Goodman when they were courting.) Uncle Louis still plays basketball with the Drazin grandkids--at 83. The Crow Family brought two World War II pilots along with them, one who piloted a C-47 and another who piloted a B-29. Bill Blanchard of the Little Big Band turned seventy-five and he had five generations of his family with him, including his 99 year old mother and a great grandson who was not yet one year old.

The Riley kids, and their friends, were a kick in the pants, even if I say so as a papa. Haley Kaiser, a friend of Mallory's, got all the boys and girls dolled up on the hair front, 40s style. (The girls and their friends, yesterday, were literally walking around with their hair tied up in rags, until an hour before the dance started, and then they disappeared into the beauty-girls bedroom to emerge fashionably late for the dance, looking like MGM ingénues.) During the 1940s costume contest, I was struck by the fact that nearly all the participants were under twenty-five, including eight year old Gabriel, who timed the swinging of his watch-chain to maximize applause. There is no competing with an eight year old in a Fedora hat. The swinging watch chain nearly undid his mother, and Mary is not an easy mark. I still chuckle when I think about. "Who taught him that?" I asked Mary. "He saw it in a movie," she said.

And life was about as simple as a movie last night, without the conflict. Last night was the laughter scene.

The Marriage of Good Ideas

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:33:00 EST

Even though I was a fairly old guy when I got married (28), I have come to believe young marriage is a good idea. Let's face it. Very few of us have the gift of celibacy. I remember the years between 18 and 28 as being a kind of gauntlet of broken hearts and intense emotional restlessness, even despair. I even remember the last "date" I was cursed to endure, before deciding I would begin looking for a wife. I had dated the woman three times, and it suddenly occured to me she had spent every one of those evenings talking about shoes. The shoes she had purchased. The shoes she was about to purchase. The shoes she had ruled out entirely. Open toed shoes. High heeled shoes. Italian shoes. I didn't even hear the details. It was like rain. She was a one woman thunderstorm of shoes, pitter-pattering down through every conversation from salad to dessert.

I remember snapping out of my trance and thinking to myself, "no woman can be good looking enough to endure a conversation like this for the rest of my life."

The point here is that dating--the sorry substitute for marriage--is an agreement to endure, perpetually, the same silly, superficial rituals of introduction. Someone will usually care about the other person more than the other, and so, it usually means someone is going to get hurt, and someone else is going to feel guilty for hurting them. Even if there is mutual attraction, an after-glow at each parting, people who are programmed to date mistake that "glow" for love. When the glow disappears, people think that love has disappeared. The post-Christian world has it wrong though. Love isn't a feeling. It's a decision. You make an intelligent decision, in your head, not your heart, to love someone who deserves your love. You have to say to yourself, "in good times and in bad times, will I really be able to love this person?" The shoe girl would have been very hard for me to love. It would have taken a special annointing from the Almighty to love the shoe girl. I made a very intelligent decision that Mary would be easy to love--and she was--but it was a decision. Dating just lets you put off that decision. It keeps you at the superficial, tormented, lonely stage, where no intentions are stated and so no intentions can be fulfilled. For the modern male, frankly, dating is a selfish romp. For most women, emotionally, it is a cruel roller-coaster.

Well, when we tell young people to put off marriage, we consign them to this insanity, until--presto--we consider them emotionally mature enough to get married. But dating, along the way, inevitably makes them more selfish, more choosey, more aware of what it likes to fail in a relationship.

When my daughter met a man we considered a good life choice for her, we didn't hesitate giving our blessing, even though she is eighteen years old. The groom is a good match, emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. He comes from a good family. The two of them are capable of making a decision to love each other because they are good friends. It just makes sense to get started in life. There is really nothing you can't do married, that you can't do un-married, except, I guess, fool around.

But there is a modern prejudice against marriage. There is less stigma in a woman having a baby out of wedlock than in announcing a young marriage. There is less stigma in sending your daughter off to college to be debauched, potentially, by frat boys and turned into a Marxist by her professors than there is in announcing a teenage marriage. There is less stigma in a pair of randy teenagers lip-locking each other on the couch, without any talk of covenant, than there is in the same teenagers deciding they are going to make it permanent. We have it writ-large in our conscience that a youthful marriage is necessarily a rash thing, but there is more stupidity in serial dating than there is in deciding you are ready to begin your adult life...

..by getting married!

A Jimmy Carter Kind of Morning

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:31:00 EST

Years ago, during the Michael Dukakis run for the presidency, I remember a kind of pre-election jamboree on a Greek Island that was receiving a lot of American television coverage. The crowd of Greeks was yelling "Dukakis," in anticipation of a presidential victory. Of course, that didn't happen, but I can remember thinking, "how does anyone become so tribal? How does race, or ethnicity, triumph over ideas?" I have a lot of sympathy for Greeks, in this case, since I married one, but voting for someone because of a shared demographic seems like the exact opposite of what Martin Luther King was fighting for. We are supposed to judge each other according to the "content of our character," and not "the color of our skin."

I can understand the tribal thing when it comes to rooting for sports teams, but that's just a past-time. If the Raiders lose, you might be depressed on Tuesday morning, but it doesn't mean you turn over the oval office to a Bronco fan the next morning. Tribalism is for family game night and office betting pools and sports bars--not elections.

So I would have to say I'm disappointed with America this morning, as yesterday's election seems like a triumph of cheap symbols and cheaper ideas. In one sense, you could say yesterday's results were a triumph for continued racism, even as the "historic" nature of the occasion is being lauded, from one old media desk to the next. Like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama merely enters the office in partial response to the mismanagement of the previous administration. He comes on the heels of a Bush Administration that talked about fiscal responsibility and committed the country to a ruinous spending spree. George Bush talked about fighting the war on terror, but then didn't miss an opportunity for a photo-op with the world's greatest terrorist organization--the Saudi Royal family. The electorate sensed the double standard--and took a different course.

Unfortunately, like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama is more hype than substance. He shares the intellectual's belief in reason, in discussion, without the depth of understanding necessary to guide that discussion towards meaningful conclusions. He combines that shallowness with an inflexibility, a hard-left orthodoxy that will ultimately make it difficult for him to govern. On abortion, the 47% of liberal Californians who voted for Proposition 4 yesterday simply won't disappear because Obama has made a pledge "not to yield" to Planned Parenthood. When the American people get to see a college radical attempting to govern, they are going to see very stark policy extremes, and those extremes will provoke a reaction--a future election that just may be about ideas, and not about cheap symbols. The American people, moreover, will not abide a phony. Barack Obama, for the benefit of Rick Warren's church, defined marriage as the union between a man and a woman, but then ridiculed Proposition 8 for putting that definition into law. This is nothing short of craven intellectual dishonesty and moral failure. It's just about as absurd as trying to fight international terrorists, Carter-style, by making a pledge to walk circles in the Rose Garden.

Eventually, there will be a Reagan waiting in the wings. Eventually, the Jimmy Carter morning will be over.

Election Day

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:46:00 EST

Election Day

I'm no big fan of our political choices today, but I do hope America is wise enough not to trust Barack Obama with its future. The video on the right is only one instance of his horrendous lack of judgment. Thomas Sowell wrote yesterday what I've been thinking for some time. It's not just that Obama is a radical. He's a naive radical. He's more fitted for president of the student body than he is for President of the United States. Sowell, an African American, writes: "...The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges — very bright and articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world..."

Earlier in the year, Charlie Gibson chided Obama for making some fundamental foreign policy gaffes, with respect to Israel. "Rookie mistake?" Charlie asked. Obama bristled. He insisted that even a "veteran" could make the same mistake. The reality with Obama, is that he suffers from the " bright-young-man syndrome." An idea is expressed, articulately, with all the right motivations, with soothing tones for all the right constituencies. It is shot down by real world considerations, and then the bright-young-man re-processes events to express "what he really meant." He's never really wrong--just misunderstood. How could he be wrong? He went to Harvard.

The facts are fairly clear. Obama started his political career in William Ayer's living room. When John McCain reminded him of that fact in the third debate, he denied it. The facts simply had to be re-processed because when Obama started his career he wasn't thinking "William Ayers, terrorist." He was thinking, "William Ayers, distinguished professor." The bright young man didn't think it through. When confronted with what he had done, he had to re-process it somehow, because, after all, he was Barack Obama--a bright young man. Bright young men never really get it wrong. You just misunderstood him the first time. You didn't know what he really meant.

The problem is: neither does he. He doesn't really know what he thinks in the real world except that, eventually, he'll be proven right. He went to Harvard after all. He's a bright young man.

It is true that I think Obama's economic agenda is wrong-headed, that it will ignore the lessons of history and fuel poverty. It is true that I don't believe you can negotiate with international terrorists who want us dead. It is true that I am very nervous about electing someone who attended a racist church for twenty years. It is true that I think Obama will be the most shamelessly pro-abortion candidate in this country's history, and for a black man to service the racist agenda of Planned Parenthood is a tragedy beyond words.

But I am more nervous about his pride. You can learn from your mistakes if you throttle your pride, but if you can't, then I have one warning for America: The presidency is not a mid-term examination.

The Fenians, Apples

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:25:00 EST

Fenians, Apples

Around here we tend to compare every Saturday, in sales, to the same Saturday the year before, and we had a whopping 3 fold increase, so people must still be thinking about Oak Glen. We're happy to report we still have some apples to pick. You are not too late for the harvest.

We strolled down to the Edward Dean Museum yesterday to hear the Fenians. No matter what's happening in life, I find that a good Irish rebel song puts the war back in your bones, and I get a kick out of what good businessmen these guys are. They set up the Fenians gift shop right outside the door, and they announced the Irish world cruise, and they've actually put out five CDs and a DVD.

Entrepreneurial Spirit! That's what America needs. A nation of shopkeepers and farmers and tin whistle players for profit! We're getting soft and girlish as a country--asking for handouts and dishing out warmed over New Deal platitudes to an electorate with too many brats screaming for a free lunch. Obama's revealed intention to bankrupt the coal industry is exactly the sort of thing I would expect from a guy who never once had to prove himself in the private sector.

A new Constitutional Requirement: all candidates for national office must run a successful regional Irish band for five years, feeding their family on nothing but gig fees and band t-shirt sales.

Too narrow? Let's go back to foundational principles. Let's take all salary and pension away from those who serve in Congress. Let's make it the volunteer national service of people who have actually done something succesful somewhere else!

November Harvest Update

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 11:41:00 EST

We should be scouring off the last of the apples today and clearing the pumpkin fields. We'll have lots of music and good food too.

Some of you might want to know what living historians wear when they want to look a little more contemporary. Well, we now have really neat Riley's Farm hooded, zipper-front sweat-shirts in stock, with red, black, green, and ash-white colors. Suppose you're carrying a cartouche box, wearing knee-length gaiters, cross-belts, and sporting a three corner hat, and you need to stop by Stater Brothers for some Roman Meal bread. Suppose you're wearing a mob cap, petticoat, buckled shoes, and apron, and you need to stop by Costco for a party-pack of fresh croissants. You might want something to make the whole ensemble a little more casual. These contemporary sweatshirts, as you can see, make you fit right in, and they proudly display the Riley's Farm logo for all to see, letting everyone know you are really an apple farmer at heart. It may just be me, but I think they would make excellent Christmas presents for the u-pick and history fans in your family. Brandon will get these posted on the Riley's Farm on line store this week!

October 31, 2008 5:53 PM

That Scary Time of Year

Well it's that frightening time of year again, when every sort of witch and wizard and hobgoblin comes out of the woodwork and tries to get in your face, demanding tricks or treats. I've never seen so many strange costumes, so many warted noses, so much deathly white face paint. I've certainly never heard so many agitated stories of distress and lamentation.

I'm not talking about Haloween by the way. I'm talking about the election season.