Unsettling Dialogue

If you have read this thing for a while, you know that I am a fan of Wendell Berry.  I like his poetry best, I think it rises to the level of prophetic speech at times.  I enjoy reading about the fictional denizens of Port William in books like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow.  It is his non-fiction, in the form of books and essays of cultural and (I think) spiritual critique that let you see the clear thought and bracing wisdom behind the poems and the stories.  I had a doctor's appointment today and my doc is notoriously behind schedule so I brought a book, which just happened to be Berry's Unsettling of America.  I like to bring books I've already read to waiting places, because I can absorb the distractions better if I kind of know what I'm reading already.
Unsettling was first published in 1977, and Berry, in the preface says that time is the enemy of a critique such as the one he was putting out there.  The world of agriculture (which is the subject of the book at least on the surface) was in flux and he was trying to see larger trends that might prove to be timely.  What he actually managed to capture in much of the book is a rather timeless analysis of human culture.  Sure some of his more nitty gritty criticisms of certain policies and practices and the occasional person are a little out-dated, but the premise that what afflicts our most basic industry (the production of food) is really a canary in a coal mine for larger cultural issues, was spot on, and I would say prophetic.
I talk about this book a lot, some of you may have heard me extolling its virtues, but as I waited for my medical specialist to tell me what the various numbers revealed by blood tests and such mean for my overall health, I was reminded again of how prescient Mr. Berry actually was by the following paragraph, remember first published 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was President.  Berry was working on a different way of seeing the differences between people and even within individual psyches, other than liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, capitalist/communist.  He did not break entirely out of the mindset of dualism, but he did offer one of the better dichotomous classifications I have read recently: Exploitative versus Nurturing.  We all have a little of both in us and some people are more dominated by one or the other, but the two attitudes are clearly at odds with one another, and in this case it is fairly clear to see that one is more prone to immorality than the other.  Anyway here's what he says about the exploitive (sic) mindset:

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer.  And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided as we are - both against each other and within ourselves.  Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship (the craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need and do not want for more than it is worth) Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.  In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction.  The "constantly expanding market" first opened in the New World by fur traders is still expanding - no longer so much by expansions of territory or population, but by the calculated outdating, outmoding, and degradation of goods by the hysterical self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitative economy.

I almost dropped my book.  This has been going on for my entire life, in fact, Berry makes the argument that it is not some sort of late modern mutation, but rather a fundamental characteristic of the American (New World) mindset. We now have politicians who are primarily salesmen and the Clintonian maxim that "it's the economy stupid," has become canonical to the point where we don't even flinch when new and more draconian forms of exploitation show their faces.
As we speak, we have a salesman/conman (depending on your opinion) for President, people are drooling over $1000 iPhones that they really don't need, and up the road in D.C. they are working on a tax plan that is going to achieve the exploiter's wet dream of corporate tax cuts at the expense of regular people, at the expense of exploding the national debt (which for 8 years of the Obama Presidency was like the black plague, but which now seems like just the cost of doing business).
Tell me how a Kentucky farmer saw this so clearly when I was three years old.  Why didn't anyone listen to him?
That's enough for now, my doc told me my blood pressure was high, so I need to relax.  But I'm going to come back with more Unsettling, it's just too important to stop there.