Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

There are no victory gardens anymore.

Are you old enough to remember victory gardens? If not, did you learn of victory gardens from your study of history?

Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit and herb gardens planted at private residences in the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom during World War I and II to reduce the pressure on the public food supply brought on by the war effort, according to Wikipedia.

In addition to indirectly aiding the war effort these gardens were also considered a civil “morale booster” - in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown. Making victory gardens became a part of daily life.

Amid regular rationing of canned food in Britain, a poster campaign (”Plant more in ‘44!”) encouraged the planting of Victory Gardens by nearly 20 million Americans. These gardens produced up to 40 percent of all the vegetable produce consumed nationally.

We could live in a world of victory gardens now. It could have been different, if only our child king president had not been so personally insecure and hell bent on political victory at any cost. Instead of lowering taxes on the rich, he could have asked the people to join him in shared sacrifice to create a safer future. But no, he just had to go his own way and fill his government with the incompetently loyal - and to hell with the rest of us.

By tradition in the South, I planted a garden this week, the first week of April. It is certainly not a victory garden, because there can be no victory in Iraq - no matter what John McCain says.

It is simply a labor of love with the earth in bad times.

I planted cantaloupes, sweet corn, cucumbers, collard greens, green beans and three kinds of tomatoes, along with some marigolds to keep the bugs away, sun flowers for beauty and the seeds for bird feed and a couple of gourd mounds for bird houses.

As I plant my seeds in the ground and read about victory gardens on the Web, I often think of George Orwell and his Victory Gin, that bad grade of liquor manufactured by Oceana for the working classes.

And I wonder, as Orwell did, why I bother to write sometimes.

In 1947, Orwell wrote an essay entitled “Why I Write.”

In it, he says:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in - at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own - but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write.

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living.

They are:

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all - and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.

But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose - using the word “political” in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Perhaps I write for all of those reasons, or none of them, although the idea of blogging perhaps lends itself to the last.

I would like to see the American people come together and create a better world, but I do not hold my breath with a lot of hope that it will ever happen. We can only try to prevent a world described by O’Brien, Winston Smith’s torturer, in 1984.

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face . . . for ever”.

No, I will not live in that world. I will tend a garden with love - and hope enough people come around to the same point of view. I think I will plant an American flag in my garden along with a scare crow and call it a Revolutionary Garden.

With the rising price of gas and food in Bush’s world, there is something to be said for spending $1 for three tomato plants - and eating tomatoes with every meal for four or five months out of the year from July to October or November. Imagine a tomato a day for 150 days from an investment of 33 cents. There is not an investment bank or public stock that pays anywhere near that kind of a return on investment.

Maybe you should plant a Revolutionary Garden too…

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Under the Microscope III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.