The politics of mowing

...But the suggestion that our common life here has been altered in any significant way, let alone transformed, is an all-too-familiar and, alas, wearying falsehood...

...Essentially Bisnow is saying that he would like to alter the way the game is played...

...Greenness and smoothness are bourgeois affectations...

...The cynical politics George Bush practiced so expertly in 1988 will surely make good use of this now famous "victory...

...The struggle is with the poison oak snaking through the fence, and with thousands of little sow bugs ravaging the slight cucumber v's...

...There is something about the human mind that keeps it well within the confines of the parish," E.B...

...The mowing of our own particular meadows or lawns not only figures the destruction of the rain forest in Brazil but also has a real effect itself, a literal effect, however small...

...Right now Paul Tsongas, former senator from Massachusetts and the one announced Democratic candidate, is launched on a campaign which seems as quixotic as that proposed by Bisnow...

...Mowing the lawn again the other day I was thinking that the nineties are complicating all our usual losses of innocence...

...It's not easy...

...If my platform provoked even a blip of public response, they might sit up and listen...

...But someone should run just to get a serious message to the voters about the problems facing your country, argued the foreigners...

...Or maybe it's harvest...

...The fact is the sweetest dream labor knows," Frost says in "Mowing," a poem about (among other things) the scything of a meadow...

...It is a shell of sound keeping out external influence...

...But in the ecology of whatever large systems are at work here, there will be some compensations, I expect...

...They saw it as a moral lapse with possible worldwide repercussions...

...Lawn care increases water use by as much as 30 percent in the summers...

...At least half of the points he made zeroed in on the relationship of politicians to moneyed special-interest groups, a prime source of the public's disgust according to the foundation's report...

...So, while we think parades are on the whole a good thing--and balloons and confetti absolute musts---our sense of elation is "The trick is to swallow the worm without swallowing the whole hook, line, and sinker'" haunted by the profane purposes to which the rituals of public life are routinely put...

...I've been taking that statement personally...

...In the delicate balance we find ourselves in, grains of sand might make all the difference...

...There was nothing better than lifting the mower into the truck on those sweet summer mornings and bombing off to the next job...

...The more limited audience for this publication is still no excuse for its insightful comments...

...In a very real sense, we need balloons and confetti...

...If even 10 percent of us began using organic pesticides, there would be 2.5 to 5 million fewer pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment every year...

...If one hundred thousand of us avoided overwatering in the summer, 5 million gallons of water would be saved...

...In his announcements, Bisnow anticipated the findings of the recent Kettering study ("Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America") which found Americans angry about a political process they think is controlled by a professional political class and the media...

...and the reward that half of them [those who voted against the war] get is public mortification and rebuke...

...My brother and I were "Anderson Brothers Enterprises Ltd...

...He would run, he said, to change the present system: "Sure I wouldn't win...

...ET CETERA SO CUT I T OUT...

...It is a grave dilemma...

...What I usually think about as I'm walking is not the spotted owl and the problems of the old-growth but the way the light hits the maple or the sound of the stream...

...Tsongas, too, would like to alter the way the game is played...

...It's that contradictory love of the sound of the engine, so out of keeping with my usual aversion to noise and machinery...

...Everything is parochial in the sense that everything concerns us, affects us, just as we affect everything else...

...The trees and flowers have a presence, a density...

...McMullen's...

...They speak to a common life using symbols that afford all of us a social intimacy largely absent in a proudly competitive and individualistic culture, ha doing so, they evoke the legitimate authority of a community to articulate its values and celebrate its life...

...But it's worth a little personal humiliation to help get my message across to other candidates...

...An acre of lawn needs more than twenty-seven thousand gallons of water each week...

...I'm the generation on the cusp, with all these private associations 12Ju~ 1991:421 and nostalgias to reverse, and a fatal love of greenness, of the broad green slope...

...White says...

...It takes $10 million just to get through the Iowa primary...

...Robert Bellah and the other sociologists argue there that American culture is dominated by individualism, that our vocabulary for describing commitments to anything larger than ourselves has atrophied...

...Mowing is the closest I come to working the land and bringing in a crop, even though I mow without bagging, leaving the clippings to return their nitrogren...

...But as the world gets smaller and the atmosphere more fragile, the differences between the parochial and nonparochial also shrink...

...Running the mower is the first mechanical skill I learned--put your foot on the rim here, my dad taught me, adjust the choke so---and I remember feeling accomplished and grown-up as I practiced in our backyard, overlapping the wheels just slightly at each new row, smiling with authority...

...Mowing is mechanical...

...And he would refuse to run in the way outlined as obligatory by the congressional wife cited above...

...The grass dries up anyway in July and August, they argue, so why bother...

...There is the smell of gasoline and the roar of the mower, yet there is also the smell of the cut grass and the sun beating down...

...I'm mowing and watering less...

...As he goes from living-room fund raisers to small city Rotary meetings the effect may be incremental...

...Americans routinely overwater by 20 to 40 percent...

...In the partisan tidying up ahead we fear a calculated exploitation, if not betrayal...

...Crook's and Mr...

...He would limit campaign contributions to $50 a person, do no TV advertising ("It's expensive, simplistic, and deceptive"), reject all endorsements, use no pollsters, media consultants, or speech-writers ("Politicians shouldn't lip-synch...

...That must not be the case...

...Pesticide or no...

...Both are necessary, he thinks, but it's the garden that might make the most difference...

...Such a campaign was announced halfseriously recently by lawyer and former congressional aide Mark Bisnow (the inspiration for the early idealistic Michael Doonesbury in Garry Tmdeau's cartoons...

...There is pattern and regularity, and the feel of the earth beneath my feet--the sense of covering ground, my own ground...

...In "The Reactor and the Garden," Wendell Berry reflects on what has the most political force, getting arrested at a nuclear power plant or going home and planting a garden...

...Gardening is the finest sort of challenge to intelligence," Berry says, "correcting the cheap energy mind...

...Homeowners use up to ten times more toxic chemicals per acre than farmers, up to five to ten pounds per lawn--a national total of 25 to 50 million pounds...

...Our values are largely private...

...There's a payoff for our personal ecologies, in other words: the smooth functioning of our own individual systems...

...How does one get the message out, she countered, when it has to be tai/ lored to costly TV thirty-second spots, to slogans and sound bites retailed by a media with no interest in serious discussion of complex issues...

...As Meg Greenfield has written (Newsweek, March 18, 1991), the congressional debate on the Gulf War was a "rare and admirable exercise in political accountability...

...Few may be listening right now, but Tsongas is doggedly taking every opportunity to reach the voters with a new plan for Democrats outlined in a position paper entitled "A Call to Economic Arms...

...For Frost it's the whisper of the scythe that brings this knowledge, not the droning of a four-cycle engine, but I think I know what he means...

...The participants included several savvy diplomatic wives of varying backgrounds: one Frenchwoman, one Fijian married to a New Zealander, an Egyptian member of an international commission...

...If all of us composted grass clippings, we could cut landfill congestion by 18 percent...

...It's the smell of the gasoline as much as the smell of cut grass...

...And there's no mention here of the amount of gas consumed by lawnmowers across the country, and the pollution that causes...

...Why, they demanded of the American women present, was no prominent Democrat running for president...

...In the interminable rain of confetti from the miraculously blue June sky, we sensed goodness and the warm bonds of a common life affirmed...

...Caught up in the grand ecology, no single action can be innocent, unreflective...

...It's my dad telling me to put my foot on the rim and then yank up on the cord at a slight angle...

...Bisnow's campaign proposals are not as far-fetched as they might seem...

...Americans must once again be able to meet along that figurative parade route, and from such celebrations bring back to everyday concerns the avowedly communitarian enthusiasms our all-too-small-minded politics now lacks...

...Once elected, he promises, among other things, to serve only one term, limit his office staff to five--there now are senators who have personal staffs of one hundred--vote the national interest whatever the consequences for California, refuse speaking fees, free meals, golfing trips, or anything else of value from any private interest while in office...

...Taking showers, flushing the toilet, using deodorant, driving to work, eating a hamburger, making a fire in the fireplace--in a time of global warming, oil wars, waste disposal problems, and diminishing resources, everything we do has implications...

...I give to environmental action groups but I keep thinking that instead of spending my time walking in the forest I should be attending committee meetings...

...How can we ask anyone to run, answered a Democratic congressional wife, when the conditions are so impossible...

...As the Independence Day celebrations recently completed reminded us, a love of country is the privilege of every American, whether he or she supported the Bush administration's policy in this war or not...

...I'm starting my first garden now...

...This year, explaining one of their rankings of scholarly Catholic magazines, their worships opined as follows: "Social Thought wins third place...

...We do not doubt that aggression was repelled in Kuwait...

...The ground is hard...

...Who doubts that the "Mother of All Parades" will become--in sharp 30-second sound bites--the mother of all presidential reelection commercials come 1992...

...We put up a sign on the maple tree in the front yard and ran an ad in the Northtown Shopper...

...But now comes Fifty Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Environment and a set of different facts...

...It means that deciding whether or not to mow the lawn and how often is a political act, which is the point of all the recommendations in Fifty Simple Things...

...Lawton Chiles of Florida reached the Senate having refused any campaign contributions over $100 a person...

...Gray's house next door, then across the street at Mr...

...That's politics, say a good many people...

...Still, it is hard to abide President Bush's claim that the Gulf War exorcised the so-called "Vietnam syndrome," or that American troops went abroad to repel aggression and returned home to find a "nation transformed...

...If everyone planted a garden the world would be a different place, not only because of the direct environmental impact--the impact on food distribution, the release of all that extra oxygen into the atmosphere--but because of the calming, centering effect of working in the soil...

...Again the congressional wife was skeptical...

...This idea of connection and synergy helps put a book like Habits of the Heart in perspective, too...

...She spelled it out...

...Mowing is masculine...

...Several friends have decided not to mow their lawns at all this summer...

...It's the illusion of pattern, the illusion of authority...

...To the victor belong the rights to spoilage...

...It's meditative...

...Interconnectedness means that we have some power...

...But now that habit of metaphorical thinking needs to be literalized...

...420: Commonweal Mowing is the first way I earned money, too, first at Mrs...

...The next year dad co-signed a loan so I could buy a new red Toro and go into business in a bigger way...

...The emblems of patriotism, the conviviality of community ritual, even the bright, childish excitement of balloons, melting ice cream, and marching bands are good for the soul...

...But perhaps the trap of eternal fund-raising and nondefinitive primaries can be avoided...

...The mission of the 422: Commonweal...

...For we cannot solve our most pressing social problems using the language of individual rights and self-interest (see Robert Bellah et al., "The Good Society," p. 425...

...Jimmy Carter became a leading contender in the 1976 primaries by substituting intensive personal campaigning for a media campaign...

...We have always thought metaphorically, always realized that our private lives are implicated in something larger...

...Our habit is to think in "small, conventional terms...

...The roaring of the engine is an element in the pleasure, silencing everything else...

...CHRIS ANDERSON Chris Anderson is an associate professor of English at Oregon State University...

...Why, the implication was, were the Democrats abandoning the country to George Bush and the current Republican administration...

...A candidate would have to spend two years raising money and part of that time is gone...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS Abigail McCarthy WANTED: SACRIFICIAL LAMB FILLING THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET I f I can judge by an after-lunchover-coffee conversation the other day, the failure of the Democrats to produce a presidential candidate is becoming something of an international scandal...

...If he wins there, as Richard Gephardt did, and falters in New Hampshire--as Gephardt did--funds dry up...

...The ladies at lunch, for example, waved him aside when his name was brought into their conversation...

...All it would take would be a breakthrough by one candidate--a candidate who refused to accept the limitations of the present campaign givens...

...We are concerned that this individualism has become cancerous," they say, "that it may be destroying those social integuments moderating its destructive tendencies...

...For whatever losses there will be gains--if nothing else an awareness of the web itself, an awareness of this unavoidable economy...

...Frost uses the scything of the meadow as a metaphor of death and mortality, echoing Andrew Marvell and the great scythe of time hurrying near...

...There's a forest behind our house where I go walking almost every day, breathing in the smell of the fir trees, losing myself...

...I charged $2 per lawn the first summer and kept a little ledger to record my earnings...

...In any event, I am adjusting the level of my mower and I am starting to compost...

...Mowing still centers me...

...Blake urged us to see the whole world in a grain of sand...

...Berry's point is that personal health depends on social and environmental health...

...Working in a field or a yard, repeating the same motions over and over, our thoughts subside and the plain fact of things emerges...

...Grown-ups keep having their rugs pulled out from under them...

...Awards in the annual Catholic Press Association competition (see back page) are usually accompanied by judges' citations...

...It's not just children growing up and discovering their realities are appearances...

...We desperately need just this symbolic vocabulary if we hope to really transform American life...

...In the meantime your family has led a fractured life and has been under almost unbearable strain...

...And vice versa: we can take care of pollution only when we begin taking care of our inner pollutions...

...Admittedly his announcement was for a Senate race in California but the size of California and the millions spent in its Senate races make what he had to say relevant to a presidential candidacy...

...But that ecology can work the other way, giving hope...

...I was driving by then, an old '49 Chevrolet panel truck, and we'd do hauling and general odd jobs, too...

...REPORT FROM THE BACK YARD THE POLITICS OF MOWING GENTLEMEN, SLOW YOUR ENGINES owing the lawn has always given me a private pleasure...

...Maybe my preoccupations are too aesthetic and interior...

...Who knows...

...The clean, even rows give the illusion of order and accomplishment...

...the Washington bunch did the right thing...

...It's the long hour of the soothing mechanical mindless motion and then coming in for coffee, my grass-stained shoes left on the porch...

...I put out the peppers too early, but the bush beans and rhubarb are doing fine, and wild asparagus keeps coming up at odd places among the rows...

...Going up and down the rows, laying down the pattern, I move into a lawn-mowing trance, my brain waves lengthening...

...You can't keep going...

...But such crudely partisan uses of the war are in the truest sense unpatriotic...