AgriCulture: Bellwethers on Tenterhooks

If you have any doubt about how much of our heritage derives from our pastoral, agrarian past you might think about how much of our vocabulary descends from it. This week, as we endured the agonizing wait to know who won the election, two words from that past kept coming to my mind: bellwether and tenterhooks

A bellwether is an indicator of what’s going to come in the future. We use the term a lot in election years. When I was a boy, the saying went “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Maine was considered a “bellwether state.” I knew it was a metaphor of sorts, but the picture in my mind when I heard it was spelled “bell-weather;” I saw a bell swinging in the wind, sort of like a weathervane, that would somehow tell us the direction things were going in.

Once we had the farm and a flock of sheep, my erudite late partner, Peter, explained to me that the term in fact described the wether, or castrated male sheep, who wore a bell and led the flock. Our wether Orhan essentially served in that capacity for over 12 years. Orhan was one of the first two ram lambs born on the farm. His mother, who produced insufficient milk for both her twins, favored Orhan’s brother, and we had to supplement Orhan’s milk with a bottle.

We eventually sold Orhan’s twin, sexually intact, as a breeder. But Orhan, who like the vast majority of ram lambs on the farm was neutered, became like a pet. His dual affections, for the flock and us, were useful to us. If we wanted the flock to come, we just had to attract Orhan, and the rest would follow. Explaining what a wether is, introducing Orhan, and then giving the derivation of the term bellwether became staples of my guided tours for guests of the farm.

While we owe the term bellwether to sheep, we owe the term tenterhooks to processing their wool. Traditionally, after woolen garments were made and washed, they were stretched tight on wooden frames, held in place by a series of hooked nails, to prevent the fabric from shrinking as it dried. The stretching frames are called tenters (from a Latin root meaning “stretch”) and the hooked nails are thus tenterhooks. The process itself goes back to the 14th century. The first use of the term “on tenterhooks,” meaning to be in a state of painful anxiety, is recorded in literature in 1748.

I think it would be fair to say that many of you, like me, have been on tenterhooks all week, as we have contemplated our latest bellwethers, especially Pennsylvania, for signs of which way the presidential election would go. So much so that the two words kept colliding in my mind, with the mash-up, the image of a bellwether on tenterhooks, bringing a particularly horrific and agonizing vision to mind. And maybe an appropriately horrific one, given the stresses we all felt in the long wait.

The image of a bellwether on tenterhooks got me thinking about the polar oppositions that we see ourselves as being stretched between. It has made me question even the nature of a bellwether. When I was younger, whether it was Maine, or later Missouri or Ohio, that were considered bellwethers, I had the vision that those places were, unlike liberal New York or conservative Alabama, populated by people with ambiguous ideology who, like a great sea of Orhans, could be swayed in one direction or another.

Now I am seeing that bellwether states are more likely those with a somewhat equal numbers of ardent liberals and conservatives, often reflected in the rural urban divide, and that the swing back and forth is largely the effect of which side provides greater motivation to its members to come out and vote in a given election. The middle of the roaders are there, but there are fewer of them and polarization is pulling them into different camps.

As numerous commentators have noted, that polarization is severe, and it is everywhere. The sides see each other in caricature only, defined by their most extreme elements, such that, for example, Joe Biden was painted by the Trump campaign as a communist because he advocates government regulation and intervention to protect public health and welfare. In de-legitimizing their adversaries, the partisans justify the use of hardball tactics to defeat the other side at any cost. Take the dynamic that occurred when Republicans refused to consider or confirm Obama-nominated judges and the Democrats responded by depriving Senate minorities of leverage to filibuster in exceptional circumstances. I commend to you all the lecture I heard on Alternative Radio by Steven Levitsky on How Polarization Can Kill Democracy, for the dangers of continuing down that road.

Not only do they see each other in caricature, the more extreme partisans seem to be unable to see any aspect of the world other than through the prism of their ideological battles. Take Attorney General William Barr, who claimed that mandates to wear masks in public to prevent COVID 19 transmission were the greatest restriction on human freedom since slavery. What do you bet Mr. Barr is perfectly fine, however, with governments mandating that people wear clothes in public, infringing on the rights of those who prefer to freely move about naked, simply to protect the sensibilities of people who share his prudish views of social propriety? Would he even see the irony in his inconsistency?

We, like sheep, are herd animals, and living as part of the herd means an inevitable push and pull between collective responsibilities and individual liberties. Where we draw the lines, what liberties we’re willing to give up for the collectivity, may depend on many variables, including cultural heritage, “tribal” allegiance, and other arbitrary factors. We perhaps need to recognize the arbitrariness of our own views and be more willing to engage in a give and take that ends in accommodating each others’ very human, weird and arbitrary preferences.

Even as we spent the last four days awaiting that ritual (and entirely unofficial) call by the news organizations, I felt pretty comfortable in the expectation that Joe Biden would be our next President. A significant part of the country, including many centrists and traditional republicans, had repudiated the awful corrupt authoritarianism of the cult of Trump.

The Biden Harris administration is likely to govern from the center, because he is not, despite the caricatures, a communist. And despite my own policy preferences I think I am quite comfortable with that, too. In many ways it has been four years of being stretched to the extremes, like wool on tenterhooks, it will be nice to have the tension relieved and to feel once again that we’re all part of the same fabric.

WHAT’S NEW THIS WEEK:

It’s Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Is there any other news?

WHAT’S AVAILABLE THIS WEEK

Escarole $3/bag
Cheese pumpkins, $1/lb
Small White turnips, $3/bunch
Collard greens, $2/bunch
Large black Spanish Radishes, $1 each (or smaller ones in bunches)
Daikon radish, $1 each
Kale, (curly leaf or lacinato) $2/bunch
Swiss Chard, $3/bag
Fresh dug horseradish root, $3/lb.

EGGS: $5/doz

MEATS:

LAMB: fresh back from processing, Legs of lamb and loin chops, $14/lb, boneless lamb shoulder and shoulder steaks, $10/lb, Ground lamb, $7/lb. For the Central Asians among you, lamb tails, $5/lb.

PORK: fresh ham roasts (2 to 3 lbs), $12/lb

CHICKENS: They were quite uniform in size, all just around 6 lbs, a few under. We’ve already had one and the freedom rangers have been what you want them to be, deeply flavorful. They are now frozen. $6/lb. Separately, bags of chicken livers, also $6/lb.

FARM PICKUPS:

Email us your order at [email protected], and let us know when you’d like to pick up your order. It will be put out for you on the side screened porch of the farmhouse (110 Lasher Ave., Germantown) in a bag. You can leave cash or a check in the now famous pineapple on the porch table. Because I’m now here full time, we’re abandoning regular pick-up times. Let us know when you want your order any day between 10 and 5, and unless there are unusual circumstances we’ll be able to ready it to your convenience. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to call or text at 917-544-6464 or email.