{"id":2722,"date":"2016-10-16T22:50:39","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T02:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/?p=2722"},"modified":"2020-11-12T22:29:24","modified_gmt":"2020-11-13T03:29:24","slug":"pmsc18-aperture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/pmsc18-aperture\/","title":{"rendered":"Peace Meal Supper Club™ #18: Aperture"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201dThat stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence that persists, that cannot be effaced, that draws me out of myself towards another. It is the insistence of the other face that charges my obligation to that ‘strangeness that cannot be suppressed, which means that it is my obligation that cannot be effaced’.”\u2014From Migrancy, Culture, Identity<\/a><\/em>, by Iain Chambers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A displaced family during the collapse of the 1930s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What if that ghost, that stranger, looks back at us from a photograph? Does their insistence lose its urgency? Are we still drawn towards them, or do we turn away from the interrogation their presence demands?<\/p>\n

With a passion for reform, a corps of American photographers set out in 1935 to frame the insistent faces of America\u2019s rural poor. Their photographs have come to encapsulate the Depression for many of us, as well as the accompanying ecological collapse and the subsequent displacement of thousands of families. Through skillful composition and informed selection, they documented rapidly vanishing lives and devastated landscapes.<\/p>\n

\"Farm<\/a>
Farm Security Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Working in support of Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal agenda, the photographers of the Farm Security Administration<\/a>\u2014including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein\u2014hoped to improve conditions for poor farmers and sharecroppers who were further impoverished by the economic depression. Their cameras served as tools to \u201cvisualize social facts, to show the truth of what was happening,\u201d unobscured by politics or fantasy.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

Their photos of tenant farmers, migrant agricultural workers, families, and children were printed in popular magazines, artistic journals, and news periodicals, as well as displayed in NY galleries. Public response ranged from criticism of the photos\u2019 subjects\u2014dirty children, salacious women, people responsible for their own poverty\u2014to technical assessment of the photographers\u2019 skill sets and aperture choices. The actual people, still struggling to cope with devastation, ceased to exist, having become only objects in the public\u2019s eyes. Their very real and immediate plight had been obscured by spectacle and taste.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Myrna<\/a>
Myrna Loy in a bath of flowers, equally as urgent as the devastation of tenant families during the Great Depression. (Photo from the set of the 1933 film, The Barbarian.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Nascent mass culture magazines such as LOOK fostered a \u201cstance of surveillance\u201d on the part of the viewer, sandwiching the displaced sharecropper between a Zulu wedding pictorial and a spread of Myrna Loy in a flower-filled bathtub. \u201cWithin LOOK\u2019s editorial vision, however, there is no cognitive dissonance here. The \u2018savage,\u2019 the sharecropper, and the sexy starlet all merit equal representation and treatment.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

As Cara A. Finnegan notes in her book, Picturing Poverty<\/em>, the FSA photographers faced a challenge in presenting the poor to the unpoor. \u201cIt is important to note the paradox of documentary: It purports to offer \u2018real\u2019 and \u2018natural\u2019 views of the world but is able to do so only through the framing and construction of those views.\u201d[4]<\/a> Even the most carefully constructed view can succumb to objectification.<\/p>\n

Far from being the \u2018other,\u2019 the \u2018stranger,\u2019 or an unfortunate alternate \u2018us,\u2019 the poor had to live through the economic and environmental collapse in the most resourceful and resilient way they could manage. Programs created under the FDR administration helped considerably, but not entirely. Those programs, established to manage a temporary situation\u2014such as the somewhat handily defined Great Depression\u2014did not provide a permanent solution to poverty.<\/p>\n

The poor remained well after the economic recovery brought by World War II, so President Lyndon Johnson envisioned another war. In his State of the Union Address of January 8, 1964, he pronounced:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOur aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it,\u201d he continued. His far-reaching program focused on \u201ca fast-growing, full employment economy; an all-out \u2018assault\u2019 on discrimination; investments in education, job training, and health care; and locally organized programs of community action, planned with what would only later be added as a legislative mandate for \u2018maximum feasible participation\u2019 of the poor.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>
One chart from the Mother Jones article accessible via the link given in the text.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How did Johnson\u2019s program perform? As it neared its 50th anniversary, analysts across the political spectrum weighed in. (This report in Mother Jones is particularly informative.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Regardless of how the program performed in relieving poverty, it did not at all cure or prevent it. Neither did it cure nor prevent the objectification of the poor themselves. Through the aperture of institutional analysis, the poor have become data objects, their faces exchanged for acronyms and categories, devoid of environmental context.<\/p>\n

As University of California, Santa Barbara, Professor Alice O\u2019Connor<\/a> explains in Poverty Knowledge<\/a><\/em>, \u201cthe technical jargon of recent decades has taken poverty knowledge to a level of abstraction and exclusivity that it had not known before. It is a language laced with acronyms that themselves speak of particular data sets, policies, and analytic techniques\u2026in which individuals are the units of analysis and markets the principal arbiters of human exchange.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor writes about the enduring tension of federal policy, in which some view poverty as a cultural pathology, while others view it as the product of social and political barriers.[8]<\/a> Welfare reform under President Bill Clinton in 1996 treated the presumed pathology, seeking to change the behavior of the impoverished, rather than addressing systemic problems of low-wage work, rising income inequality, or political disenfranchisement.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

O’Connor presents poverty research as \u201can inescapably political act: It is an exercise of power, in this instance of an educated elite to categorize, stigmatize, but above all to neutralize the poor and disadvantaged through analysis that obscures the political nature of social and economic inequality.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

Whether a voyeuristic act or a political one, viewing poverty holds the poor up for our evaluation. They become the \u2018others\u2019 in the FSA photographs, whose hygiene and morals were freely questioned. In reality, however, they are the \u2018strangers\u2019 who cannot be effaced.<\/p>\n

\"Dust<\/a>
Dust Storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, by Arthur Rothstein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The photos of the FSA were clearly composed to create drama and remind us of our social responsibility.[11]<\/a> But something is lost in the careful framing and cropping. We don\u2019t see the full-color gone-with-the-wind landscape. Neither do we see the churning, whirling, overwhelming political economy that created the collapse. It\u2019s ambient and unquestioned, and somewhat impossible to picture.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also the substrate upon which social experimentation, including industrial agriculture and poverty analysis, occurs. It comes with a heavy social cost: dispossession<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe growth of capitalism necessarily entails the destruction of modes of production based on the personal labor of independent producers.\u201d[12]<\/a> The effects are far-reaching, disrupting social stability at all levels.<\/p>\n

Our political economic system runs on accumulation by dispossession<\/em>[13]<\/a>, and it plows like a tsunami into all sectors of life: \u201cThese include the exacerbation of regional inequalities, generation of income inequalities at the farm level, increased scales of operation, specialization of production, displacement of labor, accelerating mechanization, depressed product prices, changing tenure patterns, rising land prices, expanding markets for commercial inputs, agrichemical dependence, genetic erosion, pest-vulnerable monocultures, and environmental deterioration.\u201d[14]<\/a><\/p>\n

The quote above, from Jack Ralph Kloppenburg\u2019s excellent book, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology<\/a>,<\/em> deals directly with the commodification of plant material, but it rings true across all landscapes, rural, urban, and suburban. Our economic model is as pervasive and manipulative as Muzak<\/a><\/em> at the mall.<\/p>\n

This manipulative relationship does not show in the photos, nor in the poverty data analysis of the LBJ administration. But it does show in the widescreen version, where we see systemic problems that silence any arguments towards pathology of the poor.<\/p>\n

Consider the viscerally vanishing landscape of the 1920s. It didn\u2019t descend out of the blue onto flawed families of the plains. It was a devastated outcome just as they were.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s widen our focus for a moment, and take a panoramic shot.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=6DRP7KxjFXQ&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6DRP7KxjFXQ&has_verified=1<\/a><\/p>\n

Industrial agriculture hit the plains in about 1873, in the wake of the economic panic<\/a> that hit the US and Europe. Railroad companies, which had benefited from extensive speculative investments, suddenly ceased expansion projects. Among those companies was Northern Pacific, who found themselves at the end of the line in the Red River Valley, along the border Minnesota shares with North Dakota. There, they waited out the financial crisis by experimenting with large-scale agriculture, primarily in wheat.[15]<\/a> They hoped their experiment would prove attractive to Germans and Swedes\u2014in whose countries the company had established recruiting offices.<\/p>\n

\"Bat<\/a>
Bat guano was the first ‘chemical’ fertilizer to hit the farm. What this advertisement doesn’t mention is the international warfare surrounding the procurement of guano, and the accompanying indentured Chinese labor. Read more here: http:\/\/bit.ly\/2eb5wwZ<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Their experiment worked, and the era of corporate farms<\/a> was born. Great Northern Railroad soon followed suit, as did others.<\/p>\n

These farms required seasonal labor as opposed to year-round work. They also required significant irrigation and soil enrichment with minerals collected off the farm<\/a>. Smaller farms were crowded out, with the effects being felt even in New England.[16]<\/a> In short, these corporate experiments supplanted the older model of self-sufficient family enterprises (i.e., not much money to be made) with an industrial operation full of dependencies (i.e., lots of money to be made).<\/p>\n

Projected into the 20th<\/sup> century, the social effects have been considerable. In 1977, University of California-Berkeley plant physiologist Boysie E. Day addressed the American Society of Agronomy, and accepted the role of industrial agriculture in the social re-designing of America: \u201cThe agronomist has brought about the conversion of a rural agricultural society to an urban one. Each advance has sent a wave of displaced farm workers to seek a new life in the city and a flood of change throughout society.\u201d[17]<\/a><\/p>\n

\""The<\/a>
“The Dark Side of Corporate Research,” an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This development was accompanied by a tightening bond between land-grant universities, government agencies, and private corporations, which Kloppenburg relates in great detail in First the Seed.<\/em> This collusion was largely invisible to the public and remains so, but it drives most of the current agenda at revered agricultural institutions such as Cornell University.<\/p>\n

The corporate farming model did not invent soil depletion. It did, however, greatly accelerate it.<\/p>\n

Yale professor Steven Stoll, in his book Larding the Lean Earth<\/a><\/em>, recounts the crisis that hit the United States within decades of the Revolution: its soils were completely exhausted by 1820. This depletion of farmlands among the original thirteen colonies was a major impetus for western expansion. Rather than improve the lands they already owned, many farmers hungered for the fertile fields of the Midwest, the west, and beyond. Some farmers and agriculturists fought this trend, pushing instead for responsible rejuvenation of the soil. The expansionist urge of the country favored westward movement.<\/p>\n

Those who traveled westward took with them their unsustainable practices, as Stoll recounts. Their arrival in the Midwest and Great Plains coincided with another, and older, environmental shift: In 1725, French planters along the Mississippi River installed the first levee system. Doing so initiated a \u201ccomplex geoclimactic relationship with about 41 percent of the United States,\u201d states Alexis C. Madrigal, a contributing editor for\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>.[18]<\/a> Thirty-five thousand square miles of wetlands began drying out. By the time the directors of the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the land was dry enough for wheat\u2014and for persistent cycles of droughts and floods.[19]<\/a><\/p>\n

Lying within that progressively-drying Mississippi rivershed were Kansas and Oklahoma. Decades before the Farm Security Administration photographers documented the 1935 Dust Bowl, the first one\u2014and many more–had already occurred.<\/p>\n

\"Page<\/a>
Page 30 from McDonald’s study of erosion in Oklahoma, 1938.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Clarence Petrowsky, in his frequently cited Ph.D. Dissertation, \u201cKansas Agriculture Before 1900<\/a>,\u201d details the turbulence of the latter 1800s in the region. A land boom, lasting from 1875 to 1887, brought thousands of settlers into Kansas. They brought with them the same methods they had used in the Eastern US\u2014those methods that had already worn out the soils in the Original 13. Kansas had far less rain, averaging 24\u201d annually versus 32\u201d in Pennsylvania. An unusual wet period, from 1882 to 1886, skewed peoples\u2019 perception of the region, and they planted accordingly.<\/p>\n

Drought arrived in 1893, and lasted for five years. It coincided with a world-wide depression (called The Great Depression, interestingly enough, until 1929). Those years saw multiple population upheavals, as farms could no longer support the families who worked them, which left a surplus of abandoned but cultivated land.[20]<\/a> Over the state, farm production was down, as were farm receipts. Relief was being paid to farmers throughout the state, with counties also buying seed for the farmers. [21]<\/a> Meanwhile, bad advice flowed like sand in an hourglass: \u201cbreak up the prairie, plow the soil deep to make a reservoir\u201d advised Kansas\u2019 Agricultural Secretary Martin Mohler, in order to reverse the drought.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A fascinating photo from April 22, 1889, when the Oklahoma Land Rush began.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Not everyone could stay to witness the fantastic filling of those reservoirs. Many fled to Oklahoma, when the \u201cunassigned lands\u201d opened up for Anglo settlement in 1889. They brought their tried-and-true methods with them. Writing in 1938, USDA Assistant Soil Conservationist Angus McDonald tells a familiar story. Some highlights include:<\/p>\n

\u201cTo the farmers of the Plains, wind erosion has been a serious problem for 50 years.\u201d[22]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cHere also, erosion was experienced as soon as cultivation was introduced. Within 40 years of its settlement, the Territory had become one of the most critically eroded sections in the country. Probably nowhere in the world has so much destruction occurred in so short a period of time.\u201d[23]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe advice of farsighted individuals that much of the land was unsuited to cultivation was ignored\u2026 the inertia of tradition militated against such a revolution.\u201d[24]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1894 the sandstorms began again and recurred during several successive years. Reports for the years 1893, 1894, and 1895 are numerous. The sandstorms usually began in March or April and lasted for several days. Often they continued intermittently during the summer and into the fall. An April dust storm of 1895, accompanied by a 40- to 50-mile wind, evidently covered several counties. Clouds of dust obscured the sun and it was impossible to see halfway across the street.\u201d[25]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cBy the beginning of the century it was felt by some farmers that breaking the sod was a mistake.\u201d[26]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Frances<\/a>
Frances Owens Thompson, by Dorothea Lange. Mrs. Thompson was a migrant laborer long before the Dust Bowl.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The trend toward migrant and tenant labor also continued. McDonald reports that, \u201cThe whole area, however, is characterized by a progressive increase in tenancy.\u201d The drastic shift in just two counties\u2014Kingfisher and Logan\u2014is alarming. In 1890, almost 100% of farms were cultivated by the owners. In 1900, only 67% and 59% respectively. By 1910, only 61% and 55% of owners were the cultivators of their own farms.[27]<\/a> This means that 40 to 45 percent of those working the land had no ties and no security.<\/p>\n

Blowing in the wind across those distressed farms is our political economy: \u201cThe agricultural system of the time in actuality placed a premium on soil destruction and a penalty on soil conservation. A program of soil conservation was not compatible with the greatest profits that could be derived from the land in a short period.\u00a0 The renter had, in many instances, mortgaged his crop and was forced to plant those cash crops that would pay the mortgage,\u201d writes McDonald.[28]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>
Edward H. Faulkner’s “Plowman’s Folly” challenged the established practice of laying the soil open and leaving it bare. His 1943 book is a cornerstone of the modern no-till approach.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The tenants, the migrants, who were created by the capitalistic urges of an industrializing agricultural system\u2014these are the faces that we see in those FSA photos. Creative cropping, artistically, socially, and philosophically, eliminates capitalism from our view. We see only the folly of the plowman<\/a> and the dirty, torn clothing of his dispossessed workers.<\/p>\n

So where is the pathological problem, if indeed it exists?<\/p>\n

The Dust Bowl, Depression, and mass displacement of the 1930s were not sudden aberrations. There were plenty of precedents, along with ample warning. Yet the poor\u2014whether they be tenant farmers, migrant agricultural workers, miners, railroad laborers, or textile workers\u2014continually take the brunt. Could it be that the system in which they live and labor is the pathological one?<\/p>\n

As Alice O\u2019Connor states in a recent column, \u201cThe problem of poverty cannot be resolved without addressing the deeper inequities of race, class, gender, geography, and power\u2014a lesson overshadowed by the myth of a \u2018culture of poverty\u2019 that gripped policy elites in the 1960s and continues to thread through popular and academic discourse to this day.\u201d[29]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>
This graphic is from the critical new report from Human Rights Watch, “Disastrous Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use.” Read it here: http:\/\/bit.ly\/2e4A7zS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Unfortunately, however, \u201ccontemporary poverty knowledge does not define itself as an inquiry into the political economy and culture of late twentieth-century capitalism.\u201d[30]<\/a> \u00a0Don\u2019t implicate the system, just analyze the data. Objectification of the poor happens in safe and sterile isolation. To do anything else would be un-American.<\/p>\n

However, images continue to fly across our screens at blinding speed, reminding us that we must act. We are in the midst of the largest refugee crisis the world has ever seen<\/a>. Poverty is being criminalized<\/a>. African American men are being incarcerated at an alarming rate<\/a>. The people of Flint, MI, have become irreparably ill by drinking water from their home taps<\/a>. We have sufficient reason to question our economic and political philosophies. It seems as simple as asking, \u201cShould we be plowing up all this dry land?\u201d<\/p>\n

Referencing Susan Sontag, Cara A. Finnegan says in her introduction to Picturing Poverty<\/em>: \u201cThe FSA photographs functioned to \u2018help people take possession of space in which they are insecure.\u2019 And the images served as a tool for power.\u201d<\/p>\n

\""We<\/a>
“We can do it!” by J. Howard Miller, 1943.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Images of dispossessed workers, urban poor, and displaced refugees help us to fight that tendency spoken of by Alice O\u2019Connor, to push against the stigmatization and neutralization of the poor. They help us to see the true political nature of social and economic inequality.<\/p>\n

In looking past the composition and cropping of the images, we might see despair, but we can also see hope. In a recent Democracy Now!<\/a> interview with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, educational pioneer and critical theorist Henry Giroux<\/a> expressed a spirited anticipation:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see young people all over the country mobilizing around different issues, in which they\u2019re doing something that I haven\u2019t seen for a long time. And that is, they\u2019re linking these issues together. You can\u2019t talk about police violence without talking about the militarization of society in general. You can\u2019t talk about the assault on public education unless you talk about the way in which capitalism defunds all public goods. You can\u2019t talk about the prison system without talking about widespread racism. You can\u2019t do that. They\u2019re making those connections.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut they\u2019re doing something more: They\u2019re linking up with other groups. If you\u2019re going to talk about Flint, if you\u2019re going to talk about, it seems to me, Ferguson, you have to talk about Palestine. If you\u2019re going to talk about repression in the United States, you\u2019ve got to figure out how these modes of repression have become global.\u201d[31]<\/a><\/p>\n

Giroux\u2019s words, prompting us to widen our frame of vision so that we see beyond the cropped image, provide an energetic response to the call of Iain Chambers, which is worthy of repeating.<\/p>\n

\"Allie<\/a>
Allie Mae Burroughs, by Walker Evans<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201dThat stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence that persists, that cannot be effaced, that draws me out of myself towards another. It is the insistence of the other face that charges my obligation to that ‘strangeness that cannot be suppressed, which means that it is my obligation that cannot be effaced’.”[32]<\/a><\/p>\n

So we have a lot of work to do.<\/p>\n

(This essay accompanies Peace Meal Supper Club™ #18: Aperture. To read more about this event, please click here<\/a>. Also, read about the album that inspired this event by clicking here<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0 Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs<\/em> (Smithsonian Books, 2003), xiv.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> I\u2019m summarizing a lot of the information presented in Finnegan\u2019s absorbing work. Consider giving it a read.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Finnegan, 198.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Finnegan, xv.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Lyndon B. Johnson:\u00a0“Annual Message to the Congress on the State of the Union.,” January 8, 1964.\u00a0Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,\u00a0The American Presidency Project, <\/em>accessed October 16, 2016, \u00a0http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=26787.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Alice O\u2019Connor, \u201cThe War on Poverty at Fifty,\u201d Institute for Public Accuracy,<\/em> January 7, 2014, accessed October 16, 2016, http:\/\/www.accuracy.org\/the-war-on-poverty-at-fifty\/<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Alice O\u2019Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth Century U.S. History <\/em>(Princeton University Press, 2001), 15.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> O\u2019Connor, 16.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> O\u2019Connor, 4.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> O\u2019Connor, 12.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Finnegan, xv.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Jack Ralph Kloppenburg, Jr.,\u00a0First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 2nd Edition<\/em>\u00a0(University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 38.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Summarized in modern Cliff Notes form at the friendly neighborhood Wikipedia: https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital#David_Harvey.27s_theory_of_accumulation_by_dispossession<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Kloppenburg, 7.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 15.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Hahamovitch, 19.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Kloppenburg, 6.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> Alexis C. Madrigal, \u201cWhat We\u2019ve Done to the Mississippi River: An Explainer,\u201d\u00a0The Atlantic,<\/em>\u00a0May 19, 2011, accessed July 22, 2015, http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2011\/05\/what-weve-done-to-the-mississippi-river-an-explainer\/239058\/<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Christopher Morris,\u00a0Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina<\/em>(Oxford University Press, 2012), 169-170.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> Clarence Leo Petrowsky, \u201cKansas Agriculture Before 1900\u201d (Ph.D. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1968), 202.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a> Petrowsky, 203.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a> Angus McDonald, Erosion and its Control in Oklahoma Territory<\/em> (Miscellaneous Publication No.301, U.S. Department Of Agriculture, 1938), 1.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a> McDonald, 2.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a> McDonald, 5.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a> McDonald, 8.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a> McDonald, 12.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a> McDonald, 7.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a> McDonald, 8.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a> Alice O\u2019Connor, \u201cThe War on Poverty at Fifty,\u201d Institute for Public Accuracy,<\/em> January 7, 2014, accessed October 16, 2016, http:\/\/www.accuracy.org\/the-war-on-poverty-at-fifty\/<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a> O\u2019Connor, Poverty Knowledge,<\/em> 4.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a> http:\/\/www.democracynow.org\/2016\/10\/14\/is_trumps_rise_a_result_of<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a> Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity<\/em> (Routledge, 1994), 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201dThat stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence…<\/p>\n

Continue reading Peace Meal Supper Club™ #18: Aperture<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2714,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70,144,404,152,416,403,402,413,406,123,405,244,180,225,414,415],"class_list":["post-2722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activism","tag-art","tag-beneath-the-dark-wide-sky","tag-civil-rights","tag-desertification","tag-dream-the-electric-sleep","tag-dtes","tag-dust-bowl","tag-farm-security-administration","tag-farmworker","tag-fsa","tag-human-rights","tag-peace-meal-supper-club","tag-pmsc","tag-poor","tag-poverty","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2722"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3226,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2722\/revisions\/3226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kevinrayarcher.com\/WordPress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}