“Are you sure about all that?” I ask Dr. Deng.
“I’m just telling you how I see it, and how many in the Middle East see it. Now, I must tend to my next patient. Excuse me, Fizzy Oceans.”
Dr. Deng bends to examine yet another child, the next in a never-ending line of innocents. He presses his stethoscope to the child’s chest, and he must not like what he hears, because his expression falls as he removes the earpieces from his ears. He brushes flies away for the girl’s head. A gust of wind blows sand in everyone’s face. Dr. Deng whispers something in the mother’s ear, and she immediately takes the child away.
Into the gathering comes an emaciated man, his black skin looking like leather draped over his bones. On his back he carries a heavy burden of sticks and twigs, firewood collected God-knows-where, which he wants to sell for food and water. But there is no water—only dust and misery. He moves along, hoping to find a buyer for his wood.
I have been to refugee camps before, but nothing like this. This is Hell on Earth—or at least Hell in VL. What’s the difference? None, I think. Darfur in VL is as distressed as Darfur in PL.
And I am choking… Is it from the dust, or is it from disgust? I don’t know, and I don’t care. Again, what’s the difference? I feel ashamed of the Human Race, of its greed, of its ignorance, of its insensitivity. Maybe we do not deserve to survive as a species. Maybe it would be better if the earth flicked us off its arm as we flick off a mosquito. Maybe She would be happier if dolphins or whales were running the show. I don’t know; I just wish for sanity and a bit of compassion. I wish we saw ourselves as a family—the Family of Man. Does that sound hokey to you? Maybe a bit dated or cliché? Again, who cares how it sounds if it would make a difference, if it would alleviate suffering, if it would consign such events as Darfur to the Hell in which they belong, never to occur again? But that’s not going to happen, is it? No, there is too much to be gained; and too much to be lost, too. Yet I cannot help but feel that while even one person suffers such indignity, and such misery, that we all suffer a similar fate. Maybe not in PL, or even in VL, but suffer we do the degradation of omission and selfishness. We have lost ourselves, I fear. We are beyond redemption.
One click and I am away from Sudan and in the heart of America’s grain belt, western Iowa. I am here to meet my friend Randy Skinner, who has agreed to take me on a tour of his Farm Town REP. Standing amidst the scenic rolling hills planted with tall corn swaying in the summer breeze, I wait for Randy to arrive. Were I in PL, the scene would be a sentient one, even intoxicating; but alas, here in VL it is but a recreation of something that once existed, of something now gone and consigned to memory and to virtual experience, where the senses do not function and the corn itself is food only for nostalgia.
Here comes Randy now, tramping through the eye-high corn under a cerulean sky. His tall muscular body and suntanned face are a sight for my sore eyes. As he emerges from the cornstalks, I see that he is wearing blue dungarees, a plaid shirt and a straw hat. In his hand he holds a pitchfork.
“Hey, Fizzy! Welcome to Iowa!” he drawls.
“Hey, Randy. How’s it going?”
“Happy as a pig in shit that you came,” he tells me.
“Soo-ey!” I proclaim.
Randy looks me over and quickly determines that my clothes are not appropriate for my visit to Farm Town: “You look like you been through a twister, sister,” he says. “Where you been hanging out, Hell’s Kitchen?”
“Something like that,” I tell him. “Darfur.”
“What-fur?” he says.
“Western Somalia.”
“I think I have some clothes for you back at the farmhouse. You can clean up there and get changed.”
“I’m just glad to be someplace green,” I tell him.
As we approach Randy’s farmhouse in VL, it looks like a dream from out of the past. Situated in a large clearing with a venerable oak tree shading the entire front yard, the wooden house is substantial and dignified—broad at the shoulders, like its owner. It stands two stories high with the parlor, the kitchen, the dining room and the mudroom located on the ground floor and the bedrooms (each with its own dormer) and bathroom located on the second floor. The entire house is painted white with gray trim around the doors and windows. On the side of the house is a screened-in porch where cool drinks can be enjoyed on summer afternoons, or where Randy can sleep if it is a particularly hot night. The house is an exact replica of the one where he lived as a child. The PL/NL house was built in the 1880s, but it was finally torn down in 1992. “Not that there was anything wrong with it,” he tells me, “but Archer Daniels Midland bought the land, and I guess they had no use for the house.”
“That’s a real shame, Randy,” I say.
Randy shrugs. I know he is sad about the loss of his family’s farm, and of the home where the Skinners lived for three generations, but he is also resigned to the present day situation. “I’m just glad that VL came along when it did,” he says. “When there was still somebody around that remembers how it once was, somebody who actually cares…”
The clothes that Randy provides for me are hardly my usual style, but they seem quite appropriate for farm life. The dungarees fit my ass pretty well, and I’ve tied the tails of the plaid shirt together underneath my ribcage to form a pretty sexy halter top (not that I’m expecting anything to happen between Randy and me, because as I said a long time ago, I don’t do sex in VL anymore). As I come down the stairs from the sewing room to the parlor, Randy greets me with a playful catcall, which I can’t help but appreciate considering it’s coming from this big, strapping, handsome farm boy. “Mind your manners,” I tell him as I swagger my hips and click my tongue.
“So, I suppose you want to see my farm,” he says to me.
“You bet,” I tell him.
We go outside and climb into Randy’s 4X4 Ford pickup. He starts the motor and takes off down a dirt road. On either side of us ‘the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye’. In the distance I can see grain elevators and a water tower. Nice props…
“I tried to make it exactly as it was,” he tells me as we drive. “Exactly as I remember it…”
“When did it all begin to change?” I ask.
“Late seventies and early eighties,” he relates. “Mostly, it was caused by politics. Embargos, subsidies, fuel prices, lending practices. You name it. Some folks like to blame Jimmy Carter, but the fix was in way before he came along. And don’t forget, he was a farmer himself. Or, at least his folks were farmers… Back in the sixties when I was born—and a long time before that, too—virtually all the land in Iowa was privately held—family farms—some large, others smaller. But when the OPEC fuel embargo happened in the seventies, it kicked off a lot of delinquencies. You see most of these farmers were operating each year on the next year’s money, so when the price of fuel skyrocketed, you can just imagine what happened. It kicked off even more borrowing. For machinery, for seeds and chemicals—you name it. So then the government, in its infinite wisdom, makes this treaty with the Russians to ship them millions of tons of wheat, because the Russian farmers weren’t doing so well, and the people were facing a pretty hard winter. As usual, things went from bad to worse for the independent farmer. Before long, because of subsidies, it made more sense to plow the land under than to actually grow crops. If you’d driven down Interstate #80 in 1980, you would have seen one field after another plowed under for three hundred miles. And for anybody who was used to seeing Iowa like this—like I’ve recreated it—it was a shock. Anyway, one by one the independent farmers got into trouble with the banks, and before they really understood what was happening, they were getting foreclosed on and their equipment was being auctioned off. I can remember those auctions; they were not only sad, they were infuriating. Looking back on it, I’m surprised there wasn’t some kind of farmer’s revolt. But there wasn’t, and most went quietly. They lost their farms and went to either Des Moines or Lincoln or even Chicago and got jobs in factories. That’s what happened to my papa, except he lasted all of two years in the Berwyn, Illinois factory where they put him to work making air conditioners. I think my papa died of a broken heart. I think a lot of those farmers who lost their farms did…
“Anyway, once the banks had control of the properties, they started selling huge tracts of farmland off to companies like ADM and Heartland. Plenty of others, too. They were all waiting in line to bid on Iowa black dirt. Not just food producers, either. The list of Fortune 500s that now own PL Iowa is a long and auspicious one. Besides ADM, which is the largest property holder in the state, you got companies like Ajinomoto, Cargill, Diamond V Mills, Garst Seed Company, Heartland Pork Enterprises, Hy-Vee, Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred International, and Quaker Oats. Which some might argue was not such a bad thing, since these companies employed some of the farmers that lost their own farms, and also because they had all the latest technology—not to mention all the money they needed for upgrades—and in the end productivity actually went up, at least for a while. Now it is on its way down again. Fact is that collective farming just doesn’t work—whether it’s a government collective or a corporate one—and some might argue that it’s the same anyway. Look what happened in the Soviet Union. The communists took over all the farms and made them collective. For a time, productivity went up. Then it fell off a proverbial cliff. What you had in the end was a whole country full of farmers who couldn’t manage to feed the people. There were shortages of virtually everything. That hasn’t happened here in the States yet, but mark my words, it will happen sure as we’re standing here in VL. But that’s not the worst of it…
“The really sad part of all this isn’t even the lost way of life. I realize that over time things change. Change is the law of the universe. You ever hear of entropy? No, the saddest part—at least to my mind—is what they did to the soil.”
“You mean toxic chemicals,” I say.
“Yep. Of course the independent farmers were using pesticides and herbicides and other shit too, but nothing like what happened when the corporations took over management of the land. (Now, ain’t that an oxymoron if I ever heard one?) And you can bet your life that if farmers like my papa had known the dangers of those chemicals, they would have stopped using them, pronto! They cared about the land, because it belonged to them. Whatever Carl Bremer and Elmer Sedgwick were doing to the land, the corporations did a thousand times more, you can bet on it. Because they had to maximize short term profits for shareholders, and they didn’t care what they did to the ground itself.”
“So you’re saying that the land has been poisoned,” I extrapolate.
“Yep.”
“And the food that’s grown on it?”
“I wouldn’t eat it. And I wouldn’t drink the ground water either. It’s not safe anywhere in the Midwest.”
“They don’t tell us that, Randy.”
“They don’t tell us a lot of shit, Fizzy.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”
“It’s pretty much a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil situation. But the health effects are certainly not invisible…
“Health consequences from exposure to soil contamination vary greatly depending on pollutant type, pathway of attack and vulnerability of the exposed population. Chronic exposure to chromium, lead and other metals, petroleum, solvents, and many pesticide and herbicide formulations can be carcinogenic; can cause congenital disorders, or other chronic health conditions. Industrial or man-made concentrations of naturally occurring substances, such as nitrate and ammonia associated with livestock manure from agricultural operations, have also been identified as health hazards in soil and groundwater.
“Chronic exposure to benzene at sufficient concentrations is known to be associated with higher incidence of leukemia. Mercury and cyclodienes are known to induce higher incidences of kidney damage, some irreversible. PCBs and cyclodienes are linked to liver toxicity. Organophosphates and carbamates can induce a chain of responses leading to neuromuscular blockage. Many chlorinated solvents induce liver changes, kidney changes and depression of the central nervous system. At sufficient dosages a large number of soil contaminants can cause death by exposure via direct contact, inhalation or ingestion of contaminants in groundwater contaminated through soil.”
“You’re just full of good news, aren’t you?” I observe.
“Hey, Fizzy, don’t shoot the messenger,” he says.
After riding another ten minutes along an interior gravel road, Randy stops the truck near a barn to show me his hog operation. The barn itself is a majestic sight cast against the rolling fields of corn and the hazy Iowa horizon. In their pen, the pigs conduct their own unique society, which reminds me for the moment of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, and I wonder if Orwell might not have been on to something. Are the seeds of revolution not sown in sloth?
“Nothing wrong with these porkers,” says Randy. “I know. I made them myself.”
“Playing God in VL?” I tease.
“You know how it is,” he says. “You’ve got to work with what you have.”
“Precisely,” I affirm.
After seeing not only the hog operation, but also Randy’s personal crop of Iowa Gold (he picks a few buds for us to enjoy later that evening), we return to the house to have dinner. And wouldn’t you just know it, a honey-glazed ham is already prepared with all the fixings: creamy mashed potatoes, peas and carrots, vine ripened tomatoes as big as a fist—Randy’s fist, not mine—as well as freshly baked dinner rolls dripping with butter churned just this morning. “What a feast!” I proclaim.