Editor's Note
Rothschild, Matthew
Editor’s Note Matthew Rothschild Want and Wants “Hey, Matt, Wendell Berry’s on line one,” a staff member told me. I love hearing from Wendell Berry, the environmentalist,...
...But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over...
...You’ve got to go further,” he said...
...It’s called A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, and it contains many of the wonderful essays he’s written for The Progressive over the past decade...
...As he put it, “We don’t have economic self-determination...
...They’ve never even gotten mud on their tires,” he said...
...But I have to concede some ground to Berry...
...The point of my Comment was to keep people from want...
...It is now up to all of us to take it back...
...We’re a nation that’s spoiled and trained to be suckers,” he said...
...I’ve been chewing on Berry’s critique for the last couple of weeks...
...If you simply put more money in the hands of the poor and the middle class, it will bypass the community and go to Wal-Mart and the other big companies...
...In classic Zinn fashion, he implores progressives not to put our hopes in our elected officials but to seize the initiative ourselves...
...We must figure out what we need locally,” he said, and “how to go about securing it...
...To have a valid economic criticism, you’re going to have to propose a kind of community life that would keep the economic value where it is, in the community,” he said...
...We don’t need to consume more of those, or we’ll be consuming the planet...
...In it, I blueprinted a floor of decency for every American—a guaranteed minimum annual income of around $20,000 to $25,000...
...Not at all...
...Berry’s point was to address their wants...
...I love hearing from Wendell Berry, the environmentalist, communitarian, farmer, novelist, poet, and outraged American, so I leapt to the phone...
...Those bastards will be just sucking it up...
...At first, I thought he meant that the amount I specified was too low...
...As a result, people will be going ever deeper into debt, spending their allowance on “four-wheel drives they don’t need, and jet skis, and all that,” he said...
...We’re delighted to have Howard Zinn weighing in on impeachment this month...
...After these pleasantries and unpleasantries, Berry said he wanted to talk to me about the Comment I wrote last month entitled “Our Sinful Economy...
...We joked about the 90 percent of SUV owners who don’t take their vehicles off road...
...We’ve democratized a kind of decadence and hedonism...
...Zinn, by the way, has a new book out...
...We live in a beautiful country,” he writes...
...Now I’ve got a soft spot for hedonism, but I understood where Berry was coming from...
...This would carry you to a literal conservatism and a real liberalism...
...He recommends that citizens around the country hold “people’s impeachment hearings” to drum up support for the sorely deserved punishment of Bush and Cheney and to raise awareness of what a grave threat their seizure of power represents...
...There was his rich, deep voice with its distinctive Kentucky accent, conveying his greetings and then commiserating about the war and the sundry sins of the Bush Administration...
...Big corporations manufacture demand for superfluities—and wasteful and polluting ones, at that...
...My first reaction was, well, at least people won’t have to worry about going hungry anymore, and let them spend the money on whatever they want...
Vol. 71 • February 2007 • No. 2
