The Scrapping of America 4-4-10

Riverchase, Alabama

An important painting from the mid-nineteenth century is “The Gleaners” by Jean-Francois Millet, unveiled at the Salon in Paris in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning grains of wheat from a harvested field. The women are shown picking up nearly invisible grains while sunlit mountains of wheat are in the background. The painting almost immediately came under derision by the middle and upper classes in France. “The bit dog hollers.” The upper classes did not want to be reminded of what happened in the French Revolution a decade earlier. That revolution was fueled in part by gross inequities of wealth distribution.

As one observer put it, “Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.”

The Old Testament Book of Ruth presents a profoundly emotive image of compassion and endearment with its image of gleaning. Boaz, a wealthy landholder instructed his field workers to deliberately leave an extra amount of grain for the homeless and stateless Ruth to glean. He also gave instruction that would insure her safety from restive young men working the fields. The story of Ruth and Boaz is the most endearing romance in all of Christian scripture.

Millet’s painting was considered a strong statement on the harsh realities of rural poverty in France rather than a new interpretation of the endearing image of the Moabite woman being taken under wing by Boaz. “The Gleaners” received little attention in Millet’s lifetime, having been sold by him for a pittance to an Englishmen who would not budge from his counter offer. Fourteen years after his death, the painting sold for nearly a king’s ransom, 300,000 francs. It eventually was given to the Louvre by Champagne heiress Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery. I last saw it in the splendid Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where it presently hangs.

About three miles south of here in a long-neglected part of town is a scrap yard that looks akin to something out of Dante’s inferno. A lifeless barren landscape contains mountains of the rusting detritus of a consumer culture gone amok. Occasionally, in the distant past I went there and sold small accretions of metals that found their way into my life, never waiting to pull up to the scales and get paid for my small lode. A journey to the yard now can consume hours. On a typical day three hundred and fifty trucks show up at the yard to sell an avalanche of anything metallic. The small side street giving access to the yard becomes grid-locked daily.

Suddenly, a vivid image emerged of three hundred and fifty gleaners fanning out across our small county every day to ‘harvest’ anything that can be converted to cash. Complaints from contractor friends about air conditioners being stolen out of their new construction, of copper wiring being stripped out of walls, of bronze vases being torn off of grave markers brought stark clarity to our present cultural reality. Catalytic converters are being ripped out of cars for the platinum that sells for nearly $1,700 an ounce. Whole cars are now being sold by the pound for the scrap iron contained in them. A car sold new for $25,000 is fetching about $300 at this yard, about ten cents a pound.

We are in such desperate condition economic condition because of decades of unbounded consumption, much of it financed by unsustainable personal and public debt. Most observers agree that our national and personal financial crises were precipitated by spending and leveraging ourselves into unsustainable circumstances.

As a kid I went around town gleaning soft drink bottles from the roadside where they were tossed from passing cars. This provided a reliable source of funding for the glue, balsa wood, and paint I purchased to build models. It is a very different world we live in where hundreds of grown men are out gleaning along the roadside in order to buy snack food, gasoline, cable TV service, cell phone links, Internet access, cigarettes at $5 a pack, beer, and wine. Others are scrapping in order to buy crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, Oxycotin, and tranquilizers to blunt the harsh realities of modern life.

Ruth was gleaning to feed herself. Millet’s peasants were gleaning to feed themselves and their families. Is the metallic gleaning going on all around me nothing more than consumers scrapping our nation’s future to pay for the addictions of the moment? Where but in America would it make any sense to destroy a new $6000 air compressor to glean its copper that will bring a mere $30 at the scrap yard? To keep the cable TV connected while one’s mother takes cold showers because the heat was shut off for non-payment?

Anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her profoundly moving account, Ancient Futures, describes the disintegration that occurs when a sustainable cashless culture is exposed to dynamics found in Western industrial consumer monoculture. She describes how in the span of twenty years the Ladakh people in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern Kashmir transitioned from being among the emotionally healthiest and happiest people on earth, to being severely stressed, filled with profound self-doubt; contemptuous of the traditional ways of living which provided an abiding sense of place, belonging and community to being. One now finds loneliness, depression, pollution, violence, and conflict in a place where such was virtually unknown for millennia.

As I watch hundreds of trucks filled with cars, washing machines, closet shelving, bicycles, anything metallic, being weighed, I can’t but wonder if we are not selling our very souls to satisfy some kind of craving that will only leave us wanting. Are we little more than addicts caught up in cravings that are destroying the foundations of our culture? Awash in cash, our culture teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.

Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.