Farms Without Hope

...But these are demurrers about a vivid work that on the whole is more honest about people who live on the land than any of recent vintage...

...Like the older Greek poet, Hanson thinks there is a recognizable agrarian type, found in "families whose sole support, whose only occupation, is growing food...

...But Hanson's prevailing aggression is against himself: He feels a deep sense of shame at having failed where his ancestors gritted their teeth and survived...

...Still, I am simply not as convinced as Hanson that agriculture on a large scale-it is a continental country after all-precludes the fostering of the yeoman's virtues...

...The kerosene dissolved the soot, and the oily black worked its way so far into the pores that I don't think my palms turned fully pink again till summer...

...As a result, when the agricultural depression of the 1980s deprived him of his livelihood of choice, he returned reluctantly to the university and has since become a noted historian of ancient Greece, if still no ordinary academic...

...Hanson is standing in front of a barn, the unlikeliest classicist you have ever seen...

...This will doubtless go down like a spoonful of ipecac with his university colleagues...

...They may, like the Spartans in Attica, ravage the countryside outside the circuit, battle with family skirmishers on patrol, but the house itself will be safe...

...Hanson tells in unsparing and fascinating detail of the collapse and near-bankruptcy of his family's farm...

...Hanson wonders what historians of the future will make of this "curious late twentieth-century species, this whiny lamprey who slithers amid the swamp of American materialism only to turn back out of the muck to stick his tiny fangs into his bloated mother, now pouty over all the ingested pabulum that has made him fat but colicky...

...The sheer physicality of the family farm-the pig stink and the locust-tree perfume, the skin-frying heat and the eyelash-freezing cold, the sound of barbed wire ripping denim just before it rips the skin-came back to me reading Victor Davis Hanson's Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Idea (Free Press, 289 pages, $23.00...

...Most government agricultural subsidies raise the price for consumers, not lower them, as Hanson seems to believe...

...No bank, no hoodlum, no broker will make it inside that wall...

...His filthy trousers are tucked halfway into one of them...

...Hanson was the real thing, a fifth-generation California viticulturist...

...And he is...

...If the farm laborer and family farmer are by his lights inherently noble creatures, all others, especially those who earned a living while he was failing, are ignoble...

...In his struggle to master nature he masters himself, and his leavening presence in the polis "creates a stability that leads to affluence and greater freedom...

...Everyone else in America is just after "lucre" and "pelf" (even his mother's earnings as a jurist he describes as "lucre that accrued from the law...

...The workboots are not laced all the way to the top...

...A stockbroker is a "high-salaried parasite...

...To wit: Last year I built a stone-block wall all around the house and yard, a 550-foot circuit, 6 feet tall, 3,000 feet of steel re-bar, 50 cubic yards of concrete foundation, more a fortress really than a mere enclosure...

...If you look closely, it tells much of the story of his book...

...And his upper back was polka-dotted where the sun tanned it through the holes in his shirt...

...All that is a historical fact, not a romance, not an agrarian yarn...

...Likewise, this pungent passage about the yeoman agrarians Hanson reveres: You more urbane readers, I imagine that you would not want any of these family farming holdouts at a university lecture, a golf outing, or a group therapy session, much less on a weekend retreat or conference panel...

...If indeed a hardy race of agrarians is vanishing, Hanson has drawn the portrait of them that deserves to survive...

...Mush-mouths in white shirts" are "covetous and rapacious...

...It honors them in just proportion to their merits, which are considerable...

...Fields Without Dreams, it must be said, is an unrelievedly pessimistic book...

...This yeoman is not always pleasant or couth, it is true, but he is necessary to a healthy democracy...

...Victor Davis Hanson, let it be said, though no longer an agrarian through and through, is still a citizen of great stature...

...He looks back in sorrow and in anger...

...crookedness at the local cooperative that marketed his crops...

...The vocabulary of abuse is stunning...

...But not just the weather has beaten Hanson...

...Knowledge of the principles of classical fortification and siegecraft (poliorcetics) and ancient Greek masonry is not entirely without use...

...Hanson is convinced that the sturdy yeoman agrarian is an endangered, if not quite extinct, species in late twentieth-century America...

...My earliest childhood memories of my father are of the physical toll that farming takes on a body...

...So have depressed commodity prices...

...By them the young, sensitive homosexual who grew up across the road is dubbed "the boy who went queer up in the Bay Area...

...Fields Without Dreams is a deadly serious book, but it is enormously entertaining as well...

...Authoritarianism replaced popular government...

...You could do all this with gloves on, but it took twice as long...

...To keep water thawed for the hogs to drink, we burned small kerosene heaters under the tanks...

...the industrious but undercapitalized farmer without inheritance is cruelly dismissed as "the know-nothing about to go belly up...

...But a crucial type of citizen will disappear, with dire political consequences foretold in the fourth century B.C.: Once that Greek system of autonomous city-states based on agrarian notions of small farming, constitutional government, and infantry militias vanished, classical Greek culture was lost...

...He is ever so slightly leaning back on his heels...

...Many "agribusinesses" are family farms in disguise, taking on a corporate form as the only sane response to the fractured ownership that stems from the demise of old-fashioned primogeniture...

...His thumbnails, for instance, always seemed to be deep purple- badly aimed swings of a hammer will do that...

...For the sake of his wife and children, I hope Hanson has tenure...

...The book's larger argument is obviously self-serving, though that doesn't mean it is wrong...

...the grape picker on permanent disability with the fused back is greeted with "always siesta, huh, amigo...

...He was also, as it happens, trained in the classics...

...The dust-jacket photo of Hanson- a farmer by birth and temperament, and now accidentally a professor of Greek at California State University in Fresno-shows that he, too, has been marked by life on the land...

...He has a larger, less solipsistic purpose...

...And what of the professors who see the American farm as "the criminal spawning ground of homophobia, sexism, racism, and capitalism...

...As one of millions who have turned their backs on the self-denying struggle to scratch a living from the soil, I suppose it is equally self-serving on my part to see the demise of a certain style of agriculture as of no special consequence for the fate of the republic...

...His shirttail is out, and you can see he's wiped his hands on it...

...Like the barn behind him with its patched, corrugated-tin roof and unpainted siding, he looks weather-beaten...

...He is further convinced that extinction is inevitable, that his own failure to make a go of it is the future of American agriculture writ small...

...When I was a teenager working alongside him, my own appearance must have been similarly striking...

...and the flagging demand for raisins, the mainstay of the San Joaquin Valley farm Hanson once ran full-time with his brothers and cousin...

...This is not, then, the book of a dilettante professor who farmed as a hobby...

...Finally, I am not so sure that the stern virtues Hanson prizes are exclusively concentrated in so small a portion of the population, or that the decline of family farming presages the fading of these virtues, rather than the other way around...

...And Hanson's grasp of economics is suspect at times: "True, there exist real laws of supply and demand in farming," he writes, a concession on the order of admitting that, after all, gravity does make fruit fall from the tree...

...In 1978, at the tail end of the worst winter of the century, my hands turned black...

...Literature became stylized and repetitive...

...You see, as Theophrastus knew, the tanned crack in their behinds too often peeps out from their sinking Levis...

...Without the agrarian infrastructure there was no middle to frame, support, and mend an egalitarian society...

...Only the farmer earns his daily bread...

...The first third of the book is a sustained act of aggression in this vein, with Hanson dropping hints that he is striking a rhetorical pose ("The sophisticated and discerning reader finds the yeoman's simplistic distrust of brokers and merchandisers pathetic, his mind surely paranoid if not unstrung as well...

...The camera has caught him on a bad hair day, but that's the least of it...

...Hanson wishes to resuscitate the voice of the Greek poet Hesiod, whose Works and Days was a "melancholy" and "angry account of the necessary pain and sacrifice needed to survive on the land...

...the wealthy Armenian raisin packing elite are reduced to "the long-nosed thieves...

...Once or twice a day, I would have to knock the accumulated soot off a dozen or so heaters, refill them with fuel, and trim the felt wicks with a pock-etknife...

...They track mud on your linoleum and leave dirt on your sofa...

...He wishes to do this not simply as a corrective to the romanticism of Virgil, whose Georgics lauded "the harmony and community of the countryside" and who has proved a durable and saccharine influence on American memoirs of the farming life...

...disastrous planting decisions...

...Farming will go on, on a much smaller scale than the family farm with hobbyists, and on a much larger scale with vertically integrated agribusiness...

...Taxation and military expenditure soared...

...He loathes all the non-agrarians in his midst, and is now one of them...