DoD-Ag Campus Starts New Professional Association!

We here in the DoD are pleased to announce the creation of a new professional association (taking “association” and “professional” and indeed all words loosely of course). 

Operating out of the DoD’s satellite Ag campus, the new group was founded after discovery* that academia is full of seedy sorts who don’t fit easily in The Club and could use a club of their own.  After long deliberations about what words might combine to make a cool acronym and yet could still be used in polite company, we named the new group the Society for Countrified Academics in Town – i.e., SCAT.  Here, then, are all the heady details.

SCAT Membership Requirements 

None really.  We don’t care who you are, town or country, but are pretty convinced that whoever you are it’s probably a lot more interesting than a regulation-issue academic persona permits you to freely express.

SCAT Mission

None really.  Except perhaps to affirm that most missions are best lightly held.  Otherwise you’ll get really frustrated when you head off on a mission and the truck won’t start again. 

SCAT Governance

We don’t really have any governance to speak of.  But we do bestow special honors for those who can pass the following quiz.

If I told you that Coca-cola can work both to get crud off your engine batteries and remove staining from toilet bowls, what would you say?

a)    That’s exactly why we shouldn’t drink Coke.  Just imagine what it does to your innards and teeth!

b)    Well, that sounds promising, but if it didn’t work, what a shameful waste of a good Coke.

SCAT Don’t-Call-Them-Meetings

All club “meetings” (but lord, don’t actually call them that!) shall be held in any of the following locations:

           

-Setting on a porch, any will do

-Anyplace two trucks pass in the lane and the drivers roll down their windows to share a few words

-At any parts counter, hardware store, machine shop, or any diner where the coffee costs less than two dollars and refills are free

-Over home-cooked food lovingly prepared out of highly processed or at least biblically justified delicious ingredients

-Anywhere and everywhere disaster strikes a member and a good casserole or some extra muscle would prove useful

To be absolutely clear, don’t-call-them-meetings do not require any actual conversation, much less (god forbid) an agenda.  They can also be held in silence, particularly if it’s an especially fine day that needs our full attention to appreciate. 

Things We Incline Against

Talk of pedigrees.  This is a professional association, not a puppy mill.

Rankings of persons, places, and things.  Though we do encourage a heated competitive atmosphere for tall tales about Darwin Award worthy doings involving heavy machinery and power tools.  And getting struck by lightning and living through it. 

Loving Walden, though this isn’t a hill we’d die on or anything.

Things We Could Almost Have But Don’t

If we did have a founding father (which we don’t) and we weren’t afraid of him (which we are, even though he’s dead), we’d pick Johnny Pentecost since he exemplifies the art of giving fewer damns.

We were tempted to have a logo and considered a coat of arms featuring a crossed pen and spade, but then asked ourselves:  What the hell would we put that on?  It’s not like we’re commissioning stationary or anything.

We’ve always been mildly attracted by the classy “elite” effect of gargoyles, but have settled instead for some inbred farm dogs.  They don’t move much and are impressively ugly, so we figure they’ll easily pass as nigh gothic architectural flourishes.  We’re all about things nigh around here. 

Things We Do Have and Plan to Keep

This goat skull mascot with baton stopper eyes.  Because even though we don’t need a mascot, we sure do like this goat skull and think it deserves a formal role in SCAT, however arbitrary.

This collection of truck mirrors for when SCAT members need to make sure their dirt necklaces are hanging straight

 A Bad-Day-in-Academia SCAT Dirge we sing off key when times get tough. 

Attitude.  In fact, multiple attitudes, often conflicting and yet still held all at once.

*After this published, I’ve received a lot feedback from others who wear chicken scat in academia.  Several elements of the above are inspired by things people sent me.

Big Ag Normal

While doing chores today at the DoD satellite ag campus, we were struck by the idea that Normal has become like Big Ag.  It tends in various ways to operate the way Big Ag does, most especially by its pronounced preference for monocropping.  Monocropping can have certain advantages from a profit maximization standpoint.  We here at the DoD satellite ag campus have lots of field fescue and it is, to be sure, reliable and steady stuff for making saleable hay.  But you wouldn’t want to monocrop farm fescue.

Different crops do different work on the soil so the spectrum of nutrients a single crop represents will be narrow and you risk wearing out your soil or needing chemical supplementation.  Monocropping will also have all sorts of unintended consequences.  Out here at DoD-Ag, for example, the quail population radically declined with the influx of field fescue in the region – fescue grows in tight clumps the quail can’t navigate to establish coveys.  And perhaps most of all, Nature doesn’t much like monocropping so if you want to keep out all her extras, you’re going to need lots of pesticides to keep your fields free from deviant incursions. 

That cluster of tall white-blooming growth is hemlock,
 the historical enemy of deviants.  We here at DoD-Ag love
variety, but all the same we’re not taking any chances and are
about to bushhog that pestilence down.    

On our worst days, we think Normal acts a lot like Big Ag.  Many of its formal structures and informal norms appear to favor monocropping:  Its conferences, journals, and curricula favor, sometimes insistently, uniformity, whether that be uniformity of methodological approach, source materials, or demographic identities.  Put more plainly, it excels at growing upper class white heterosexual people, mostly men, who work with Normal sources using “mainstream” methods.  It also seems to cyclically re-seed with more of the same, hiring most from a small clutch of institutions, thereby performing something like a single-sourcing of each new year’s crop.  At its most aggressive, its efforts at preserving the purported integrity of its monocrop can register like aerial dusting of pesticide, a kind of indiscriminant removal of all that isn’t fescue.  At least it can sometimes feel that way if you’re not part of the monocrop.

None of this is new.  Small family farm types have been remarking on it for years, objecting to the intellectual and demographic homogeneity of Normal.  But perhaps identifying Normal with Big Ag is useful in illuminating the costs it incurs not to the individual stray deviant plants but to the ecosystem.  Ag polycultures work best over the long haul precisely because variety and, dare we say, deviation, infuse vitality into growing processes.  They prevent exhaustion of nutrients or, to translate the analogy, a kind of boredom, stagnation, and endless stale repetition of topics, approaches, and perspectives.  What one sacrifices in reliability and familiarity, one gains in variation and natural supplementation of nutrients that can make the whole show better. 

To be sure, polyculture farming is more work.  You have learn about more than one crop to pull it off.  And you have to tolerate some complexity rather than immediately reach for the straightforward and easy.   We here at DoD-Ag are trying real hard to use manual control techniques rather than chemical as we fight off a variety of plainly bad invasive species.  That means lots of labor, but we’d rather not kill off those walnut saplings when we take out the buckbrush.  In similar fashion, we’re studying up on the myriad possibilities for land use.  So too, if Normal could become less Big Ag, it would have to ensure its much vaunted “standards” and “quality,” not by aerial dusting of the “non-mainstream,” the “non-western,” and the “unpedigreed,” much less the “non-white” or “non-male.” (So many “nons,” so little time!)  It would also have to cultivate curiosity about more than fescue and summon up some courage for novelty.

Department of Lost Things: Herd Sense

Out at the DoD satellite ag campus, we recently found ourselves idly studying cattle and courting dangerous ideas.  The cows were napping en masse in the shade of some trees.  Then, as one, they all headed into the sun to graze awhile.  Presumably having eaten their fill, they then meandered to the muddy pond for some spa bathing.  Finally, all together, they headed back for the shade and another round of napping. 

We here at the DoD are well familiar with the ways bovine and herd are deployed pejoratively to describe people. And of course, deviant itself is a term that might well invoke the opposite of just these pejoratives, the deviant being that which strays from the herd.  But given that we inhabit an age in which purported independence and non-conformity are all the rage, perhaps the more deviant gesture is to cast a more charitable eye on cattle?  At any rate, what we’re really ruing around here is that too few thinker types ever engaged in farming or indeed any manner of manual labor.  The lack of hard physical work among the intellectual class of course leaves all sorts lacunae in human inquiry, but we’ll stick for now to cattle or, more particularly, exposure to actual cows, as opposed to the fictive cows of thinker-imaginings from the armchair.

 Professional Bovine Types Doing Herd Stuff

In watching the DoD satellite ag campus cattle, we could not help noticing how much plain good sense their behavior makes.  We can’t go so far as to say we want to be like cows, but neither can we find being bovine or part of the herd the insult it is meant to be.  For we were struck by how admirably untroubled those cattle were by anxiety about their group and how none brought any pressure to bear on their peers to come along and follow.  It was more as if when one cow acted as a pilot cow, going off in some new way, the others thought, huh, that looks interesting, let’s try that. 

It’s surely fanciful to suppose that cattle know a good idea when they see it, but there are some more commendable things going on here.  Where human “herds” are depicted as coercive, cattle herds seem significantly more friendly.  Cattle are vulnerable creatures and so their tendency to stick together is sensible.  When a calf gets separated from the herd – say, by straying through a fence – the others tend to wait around rather than leaving it behind to fend for itself.  Likewise, cows appear to babysit each other’s calves, such that an unrelated heifer may take charge of another’s offspring for a bit.  Where calves are concerned, they seem to get that it takes a village.  Or a herd.  Best of all, cattle generally accept newcomers to their herds.  They’re not prima facie suspicious of additions and incomers, but instead tend generally to greet new cows with an unexceptional, “Oh, hey, let’s eat.”  So while they together constitute a bovine herd, it’s not the bovine herd your sneering non-conformist thinker types warn you about.  In fact, it looks a lot like a rather generous solidarity.   

Because of all of this, we can’t help wondering how thinker-types with actual farming experience might have swerved human sociality and solidarity differently.  Or how much more interesting discussion of the individual might get if we could drop the dripping disdain in announcing the “bovine” in others.