I want to expand a bit on my remarks about Wallace's Farmer in my last post. Today I received my latest online edition through the WF affiliate FarmProgress. In it was one of the usual estate planning articles the magazine runs. Frankly these articles are generally a good thing because estate planning is a critical element of family farming, something I know all too well. The article was by one of their regular contributors, Curt Ferguson, an estate planning attorney in Salem, IL. Except this article had something in it that really brought me up with a start. Contrasting his farmer clients against "the sort of thing you see in the news", he wrote:
In the nature of my work, my clients need to talk pretty openly about their family. Their children, usually one or more of whom will be carrying on the family farming tradition, rarely include the spoiled types who are addicted to alcohol or drugs, are rioting in the streets or are living on welfare trying to avoid working for a living. There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exception, not the rule, and they often require special treatment.
I can't pretend to be surprised, though. This is racist, classist, entitled Turdville-speak, but it is standard Turdville-speak. I know because I grew up with it. He may have written that because he actually is that ignorant. Don't assume for a minute that just because someone is a lawyer they know anything outside of their pigeon hole or are aware of the systemic inequalities that got them where they are. On the other hand, he may have been fully aware of what he was saying but was playing to his audience, most of whom he knew are that ignorant. This is why Fly-Over Country goes so hard for the Tangerine Latrine, and why he loves the ignorant.
So let's take a look at this shoveler. Family lost their farm near Marshalltown, Iowa, in the early 80s. That's genuinely sad. Still managed to go to college, though, first locally and then at the now defunct Covenant Foundation College, affiliated with the conservative holiness movement, which he's apparently still affiliated with as a member of the Wesleyan Bible Holiness Church in Salem. Law school at University of Texas, where he joined the Christian Legal Society, an organization whose favorite pastime is suing colleges that won't let it practice gender and religious discrimination. Went into practice and also joined the Rutherford Institute, an organization with an agenda similar to CLS (because Christians are just so oppressed in this country) except they really lean into hatin' on the homos. Two daughter, both homeschooled, both graduates of Hillsdale College, which is a member of Project 2025, a center of COVID denial, and a place so proud of all its forms of religio-fascist discrimination it stopped accepting federal money just so it could keep practicing them. One of them actually managed to get to Oxford to study religion, but we are talking about Oxford, and on top of that we're talking about Wycliffe College, N.T. Wright's current and hopefully final bolt hole, so I guess it isn't that surprising. The other recently wrote a play glorifying a family of Charleston, SC, crackers bravely resisting the Damn Yankees during the Southern Sedition.
So yeah, I think he knew exactly what he was saying. And you should know this is what passes for information in Rural Murica.
Labels: agribusiness
