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October
21
2017

The Big Why
Hardscrabble Farmer

In the past few weeks America has been given a chance to examine it’s pathological descent up close and personal. Knee deep in a growing pile of human wreckage that is the opioid epidemic additional bodies have been heaped upon the charnel pile. First in Las Vegas and then in Hollywood, two towns that personify our ever increasing addiction to debauchery and dissolution. Cities built, not on an ethic of hard work and sincerity, but rather on fantasy and falsehoods.

Entire industries that prey upon the weakness of the body politic in order to bolster and empower the most venal and corrupt, the whore mongers and pimps. It has always been a one way street, an endless grift where fantasies are sold as reality and where both dollars and morality are stripped away from the rubes in flyover country like the garments from a young actress.

There has been a great deal of talk about motives though I have never been all that interested in what drives people to commit heinous acts of depravity against innocents. Neither do I abjure the complicity of those revelers in the dance macabre of modernity who think that they can boogie to the tune without paying the piper. There is a connection here, between the perp and the patsy, that is inseparable and those who suffer do so as much by their own complicity as by the machinations of sociopaths.

I live in a world that is as divorced from the progressive ideologies of Tinseltown as Enceladus. Reality and its outcomes are my daily companions and the failure to live in harness with it guarantees my failure. So the choices that I make and the way in which I live my life is tied to those observable features. I can easily see the connection between the Harvey Weinsteins, James Paddocks and the tens of thousands of unnamed OD’s in the Red States as clearly as the brilliant colored foliage of my homestead.

As certainly as form follows function these depredations and desecrations are the hallmarks of a society that has exceeded it’s capacity for wonder, to borrow a line from F.Scott Fitzgerald. Why, many would ask, would a man with the wealth and power of Weinstein, who could bed any starlet or model he chose willingly, or procure the most desirable courtesans on Earth choose to defile only those who resisted?

Or why would a man who makes more money gambling every year than most Americans will ever earn in their lifetime chose to butcher huge numbers of innocent revelers simply enjoying an evening of music? Or why would anyone, knowing what we know, of not only the cost but the addictive properties of heroin, voluntarily shoot themselves up risking death every time simply to chase a feeling, a rush?

Because there is nothing left to choose. All the taboos have been broken, all the dreams shattered, all the definitions redefined all the outrages surpassed again and again. As Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche so eloquently opined once upon a time, “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” We have reached the nadir of our cultural arc and that is the motive behind it all.

 

 

Hardscrabble Farmer is not about a man, a place or a lifestyle, it is about possibilities; that there is always time to turn your life around, that nothing is too hard, too mundane, too common to be fulfilling. That self sufficiency depends on others, that it is better to be a producer than a consumer, that the most rewarding things in life cannot be purchased for any price, that to move forward, it is often necessary to step back, and that more than anything else it is up to each one of us to define ourselves.

Sincerely,
Hardscrabble Farmer

 

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