Down on the Farm
Someone I was friends with 30 years ago has started a farm commune. From the outside, it also looks a little like a cult.
The farm in question consists of one (1) shack, one and a half (1.5) gazebos, one (1) tractor, and one (1) patch of flowers. If that doesn't sound like much of a farm, you would be correct. The patch of barren land does host various arts activities, which is where most of the effort seems to be going. That and the website, which has left-sounding political statements and AI art of happy people working the land (which is definitely not what's happening in real life).
This old friend of mine is a lifelong grifter. He's started and folded a succession of barely operating companies, mostly in the SEO business. He currently dropships coffee, which he rebrands on a rarely visited website in (again) left-sounding language about ecological responsibility. He's very proud of all this and eager to smoothly tell anyone who will listen about his entrepreneurship meets Bernie style democratic socialism.
When we were friends, in about 1996, he told me that his only aspiration was to never work. Never ever ever. Working, he said, was for suckers and The Man will stiff you. Hence the succession of grifts, the husk web businesses, the farm which isn't a farm. He spoke and speaks with a lot of confidence, which is worth a lot more than results, given that the farm isn't a farm but is one shack, one tractor, one patch of flowers, and one and a half gazebos.
Currently, he's pretty upset that the county they (it's a collective, but also he does most of the talking and planning and kvetching) bought in won't give them a permit for hosting agri-tourism. While the farm isn't really a farm and doesn't show any signs of ever being a farm, folks do show up for their artistic events. There aren't many people there, like maybe ten people showing up to sketch or dress like fairies, but the photos look like it might be more.
Nobody lives at the farm which isn't a farm. This might be part of why they can't get the proper permits. Someone pointed out, in a TikTok comment because of course you tout your simple hippie living on TikTok, that they weren't actually farming and communing if they didn't actually live there and work the land. He didn't respond.
That's not the reason they can't get a permit, of course. According to them, it's because they're a left-wing commune looking to forge a sustainable future in a conservative part of a purple state. And the good old boy network, which they might be able to join if they moved to the farm which isn't a farm. Which, maybe. I think it's probably because they drive up from the Triangle on weekends. My old friend explained all this in a TikTok video about his simple hippie living. In it, he confidently explains the laws and gets worked up over the word "shall". Then he shifts gears and says he doesn't actually know any lawyer stuff so maybe someone could help them pro bono.
It was all very confident.
I looked him up because I was curious to know where he currently lives, because it certainly isn't in the shack on the farm which isn't a farm. He lives not too far from me, though I haven't seen him at all in 15 years. This is also how I found an old email with a kind of suspect domain name. I checked and it was for a long defunct, decidedly sketchy porn site. Which maybe explains where some of the money came from. No shade on sex work, I was just bemused I found the one thing maybe he actually worked at, but also it did seem like it was on the sketchy end of the spectrum judging from the titles (photos and videos mercifully deleted) on the Wayback Machine.
His politics, if you didn't know him or his history, are awfully good, though. And The Man is stronger than ever. Might as well start a farm which isn't a farm. Anything but work.
My daughter became best friends with another girl on the very first day of preschool. They had the same birthday and were born in the same hospital, possibly to probably down the hall from one another. When they discovered this, it was like fate had chimed. Who am I to argue? And our families hit it off, becoming rather inseperable over the next several years.
The mother in this configuration made reality television. Big reality television. BIG big. TLC stuff. It was all pretty sleazy.
The family's politics were alright. Not as good as my old friend's, but as normie liberals go, pretty decent. And it was weird, as 2015 and 2016 rolled into view, that the dissonance of contributing to the milieu which gave us Trump never came up. I always bit my tongue on the sleaziness, because all jobs are sort of sleazy and our daughters were inseperable. But eventually I did. Not to be a dick; I like to think I'm not a dick. Rather, I like talking about philosophy and ethics, and this seemed like that sort of thing. So I asked if she ever felt weird writing and directing reality TV, given the whole thing with Trump and how everyone turned into a chud the second the shows were over.
Never. She snapped at me that none of that was her fault, though I can't remember exactly what she said. I'd offended her, and in retrospect she probably had reason to be offended. Her proximity was simultaneously too close and not close enough to see it, but the immediate mistake was mine: we weren't close in the way I'm close to other people. I dropped it, but we didn't hang out much anymore, then not at all. Eventually the girls didn't hang out, either. That seemed really unfair. Maybe it was that discussion, maybe it was something else. We've not seen them, outside of in passing downtown, in ten years.
Their politics were ok, though.
I bring all this up because we're living through the unending nightmare of it all. And I've been thinking about this post about Trump by hall of fame poster The Helldude. Like the best of microblogging, it condenses something I wanted to write in longer form.
My anecdotes about the farm which isn't a farm and the reality TV producer aren't settling scores, though I admit to finding the anonymous people involved annoying. It's because they're datapoints on how we all got here. Grifters can and do have outwardly good politics, but in the end it's still a grift. And those people, that collective we with the good and bad and indifferent politics which includes myself, made this. We don't really want to be ethical or good or to say no to money when it finally comes down the pipe. I don't want to "split hairs... about who bears that blame" anymore.
Of course the blame isn't evenly distributed. People actually voted for Trump and his nationwide network of cronies. Of course this is all systemic, ruthless, suspicious. To say that there was an ethical otherwise starts feeling a little deontological.
But also... maybe that old friend who was maybe a pornographer and who definitely started sham SEO companies to move money around could've done something (anything) other than contribute to the structure of feeling which gave rise to Trumpism. And maybe the reality TV show producer could've done something else with her camera and her creativity than parading broken people across the screen for our voyuers' eyes and hoping nobody noticed how they tended to become more broken still once the show cancellations arrived.
Maybe a little more civic virtue, a little more care, a little more work, and a lot less chasing a buck would've helped, because what is this moment but the culmination of a society which is the opposite of those things? The drip drip of normalizing a mode of existence which prizes self-aggrandizement, even in the people with the good or alright politics, really did a number on us. And now we're here, nothing but images and dollar signs and quarterly churn.
It's not their fault. It also sort of is. The farm still isn't a farm and probably never will be. The escape hatch is always someone or something else, and we're rushing the door without glancing back.
I've neglected this blog. I've been really busy and tired, mostly for good reasons. I expect my next post will either big good news or big bad news without a ton of space in between. Then I'll get over it either way.
