So in order to keep this crunchy commune from getting too weird, let me post a few snippets from NR’s favorite military historian. First:

It is my simple contention, supported solely by instinct and supposition, that the entire cargo of our current unhappiness—materialism, crime, spiritual emptiness—is in inverse proportion to the number of people who are both rural and agrarian.

… I offer this alternative view of our culture because I worry that when the agrarian yardstick has vanished completely, there will be no bridle on the present absurdity of random violence, growing illiteracy, and spiritual desolation, no one left to tell us how silly it is all becoming.

… So it is increasingly difficult anymore to find a natural bedrock conservative, someone whose unease with present fashion and trend—whether it be multiculturalism or leveraged buyouts—is rooted in a lifetime’s observance of the growth and decay of plants; in the idea that a house, like a barn or shed that protects from the elements, need not be torn down; in the notion that men, like trees and vines, wear, age, and die and so have no need of cosmetic restoration.

… The eighties were to conservatives what the sixties had been to liberals. Be careful, the Greeks warned, to wish for what you should not have.

… the bizarre political coalescence of left and right who, cheek by jowl, conspired in the 1980s to open the floodgates of immigration and inundate California with millions of cheap laborers from Mexico. To the reactionary businessman of the 1980s, this wave of imported workers was the natural expression of laissez-faire capitalism: the market alone would adjudicate … Such conservatives, such patriots, these captains of industry and agribusiness!

The grocery cart is full of manufactured food, bread, cakes, candies, frozen dinners, and breakfast preparations. Most of those ingredients are processed sugar, corn, cereals, soy, and assorted other staples, whose plenitude is underwritten by the government, whose steep profits lie in the processing and merchandising rather than in the growing of the components of those bizarre creations. The true lethal narcotic in this country, the real killer, is not crack cocaine, not tobacco or even alcohol. It is cheap, subsidized, processed sugar and enriched starch that layer with folds of blubber the rear, the belly, and the thighs of the American eater.

Europe prizes family farming, believing the true price of agrarianism is cheap. In their eyes an ancestral vineyard creates community stability. It inculcates in youth subversive ideas like reverence for the elderly, repairing rather than buying things, physical labor, and staying home in the evening. For some reason they believe an agrarian patchwork in the countryside two millennia old, not a boom-and-bust urban sprawl, lends an aesthetic and sturdy fabric to the nation’s character.

Shame on the American consumer who boasts of his organic preferences, his purported uneasiness with chemicals and genetics. At the store he ignores the natural smaller bunch with its bird peck, dull color, and irregular-sized berries, a gnat or two circling in the produce section, like a miner’s canary attesting to the safety of the fruit. No, he really wants the colossal, hard, resplendent bunch, with huge, shiny, and perfectly uniform grapes, whatever the costs, whatever the effort, whatever the poison. He lies when he says he wants good fruit, ripe fruit, natural fruit.

Who would not trade check, pension, and health care to leave his neon abode for a nighttime ride on the tractor behind the garage, rabbit, fox, and great-horned owl paying their due as they race you for a furlong or two? Office man can get allergies from plaster, carpet, and perfume. Put that same invalid in the middle of a blooming apricot orchard, his arms in constant motion with the shovel, his brain full of calibrations of water and fertilizer, his eyes following pollen-carrying life-giving bees, and he revives. A great weight has been lifted. His sinuses will inhale dust and pollen—and then clear as the throbbing over the eye disappears. For he will be growing food by himself, not devising an ad campaign for Korean tennis shoes, not typing out the student evaluations of mediocre teachers … Corporate man has brought himself riches and leisure but not happiness.