What’s possibly the best word in the German language?

Schadenfreude.

Venomously translated it means “taking pleasure in another’s misfortune.”

And while there’s plenty of that available now, over the next three years there will be more. Much more.

This correspondent is enjoying to the hilt what he can of it today and hopes even more to as the years grind on. Not that I’m particularly vicious – I can be when prompted. Frankly, there’s a part of me wants to sympathize with those tens of millions of MAGAs so blessedly dumb to be drowning the worse Act Two than One appeals of Donald Trump campaigned on during Election 2024. But I can’t. They’re deserving of what they’re getting.

Better, it’ll become horrible. Oh, yes it will.

My enmity doesn’t stem from how over half of voting Americans ignored the responsible presidency of Joe Biden. He straightened the shambles left behind by his immediate predecessor. Nor am I vengeful that Kamala Harris did not succeed Biden. Though a quite capable replacement, her window was too small and short. Besides, this country isn’t ready to elect a woman as president. Particularly a black woman. It was hard enough for much of Anglo America to put aside fear, trepidation, and bigotry to elect Barack Obama, the most overqualified president to ever enter the White House.

That’s how good Obama was. His sterling qualities let supremely dumb Anglos make clear conscious choices. Twice. And neither was a leap of faith. He was so clearly the obvious pick, casting ballots for other candidates would’ve struck those voters as harming themselves.

In Obama, even a substantial portion of Anglos who’d swear to other Anglos of the same miserable ilk they’d never vote for a black man realized not only could Obama help the nation, he could help them. In America, morons able to vote for their own interests instead of against them is a miracle on par with walking on water or parting the Red Sea.

No, capable as Harris was too many American voters saw her as steps too far. They weren’t ready for her another black candidate who would’ve done what possible to advance them and the nation. And, boy, have they been caught short by his slash-and-burn grievance and plunder tour the short-fingered vulgarian has unleashed against America.

Know those campaign promises the grifter in chief made throughout the election? Every last one is a reversal of what his voters expected. He promised “winning.” He has delivered losing. Bigly.

How hasn’t our nation retreated under his second defilement of America?

This is how abysmal it’s become in nine months – the American government has alienated Canada. Those above the 49th Parallel aren’t simply the best neighbors a country can have but the most ideal.

From a 79-year-old adolescent’s pique the United States has forfeited its global preeminence. Once we undisputably led. Under the scab our nation is now tumbling back to the pack. In doing so we are earning the disdain of allies who must struggle to remain in common cause with us.

Would the above circumstances have ever been contemplated anytime during Election 2024? No. Right alongside considering possibilities of crashing jumbo jets into office buildings. Now? Yes. Before the event itself? Certainly not.

Though we see it because we’re living through it, we won’t know the full extent of what we’ve squandered for years yet. There will be rational, sensible, sane successors to the grifter in chief. They’ll perform yeoman services attempting to regain, restore, and revive the prestige of the United States.

However, fewer and fewer afterwards will ever know or remember the trust Americans once enjoyed. We were careless with it. We’ve lost it. Yet we will do business – honest business, not Trump lining his pockets business – again. But we won’t be received nor seen with the same assuredness and confidence from our partners.

The resentment we’ve manufactured will be deep enough to last several generations. And unlike us now, our inheritors won’t comprehend what America had forfeited. Perhaps in the future our universities political science departments will offer advanced degrees in willful American squander.

Similar to how scholars present the fall of the Roman Empire.

Wish I could claim intense injury through these months since the end of January but I’m retired. Along with my cohort of maligned Boomers, the generation that helped successfully compel the end of the Vietnam War, improved civil rights for Americans the mainstream felt comfortable, if not justified, in marginalizing; and helped women become recognized as far more than servile breeders. We also added immensely to this nation’s greater prosperity, its intellectualism, while turning pop culture into a major weapon that bludgeoned the Iron Curtain, dissolved the Iron Bloc as well as dismembered the Soviet Union.

How so? In one sentence: Denims and rock music beat Lenin. Our foreign accomplishment was the soft power pinnacle of the American Century.

And what of our successors? We left them solid foundations upon which to excel, rise, and prosper further. After all, listening to them they’re smarter than us, more technologically astute than any science fiction we ever read. Moreover, they have greater tolerance and open-mindedness than Boomers ever expressed.

Let’s see. Thanks to handheld devices those following us really mustn’t learn much because talking circuitry will provide them answers. And having forsaken nuts and bolts for circuit boards and chips they may calculate faster than we ever could. Yet when viruses seep into programing or when interfaces malfunction, or best of all, the power blinks out, they’re helpless. Meaning they must resort to using the big processor between their ears.

If minds are muscles, and must be exercised, the upcoming generations have been skipping the gym frequently. Not only will artificial intelligence eat their lunches, it’ll also drink their milkshakes. It’s already happening.

As we’ve learned recently, there’s been a nasty backlash to tolerance and openness. In this, the progress believed made appears to have been deceptive. Many Americans claim and are accepting that the small percentages among us who find fault or invent fault with other tiles in our mosaic can freely express their distaste to what formerly had been extreme limits.

They’ve bent so far backwards discourse once best accepted as crude and disharmonizing now freely pollutes ether. Through airwaves these messages seep into and further sour ever more corruptible minds. And while what American doesn’t advocate free speech, the reactionaries, tender as they truly are, can’t handle replies refuting their base, off-target, off-color harangues.

American black shirts will insist free speech exists – but solely for them. Again, they can’t debate, can’t wend paths through discourse, but may only browbeat while insisting what they’ve invented is truth. The only suitable truth. They repeat lying bullet points with red-faced ad nauseum. Yell them enough, maybe they’ll become new facts. The kind divorced from reality. Therefore, as if this needed stating to the sane among us, what they say is undeserving of our courtesy, respect, or contemplation.

They are to be dismissed.

Despite proclaiming mastery of early 21st century advantages, Boomers’ inheritors are mincing towards greater precariousness vis-à-vis financial futures. Forget security, more like modern versions of living hands to mouths. Already theirs are the first generations of Americans who’ve regressed.

In retrograde as America is, much of our techno-industrial society may experience 21st century privation. A state best imagined through titles by George Orwell or Pearl Buck.

Say what can be said about the Boomer youthquake of peace, love, understanding, soul, of be-ins, consciousness raising, tie-dyes, all sorts of now laughable fads and -isms, also the way better drugs and sex than of today, when the gong struck the practical subsumed the fanciful. Boomers took on appearances and attitudes their parents recognized.

No, we did not become our parents.

But we certainly assumed their harder-edge aspects. (It’s funny how today’s young adults wouldn’t recognize their grandparents while they cracked whips during their own parents’ upbringings.) As the years advanced, as responsibilities mounted, those necessary decisions became less agonizing, anguish an energy squandering luxury.

Boomers learned to play the game. One plays to win. Too few in the cohorts succeeding us have understood this principle. Too few in the cohorts succeeding us have grasped any of the basics of Third Millennium self-preservation.

What next? And how?

During my early adulthood I didn’t know any of my contemporaries not driven by some version of this obsession.
What next? And how? What must I do? What’s the next step forward? It was always forward. While where we were then might’ve been awfully comfortable, a goal among all wasn’t immediate satisfaction, but reaching a place where it became as cushy as possible.

Now, there’s a preponderance of make-do. Of course, a great many of those striving today are shackled by chains to weights that would’ve been inconceivable at our comparable ages. Debt loads carried for obtaining an undergraduate degree that then could’ve passed as double the mortgage amount for a two-bed, two-bath on an eighth of an acre. Okay. Sixteenth.

Surveying objectively, Boomers may comfortably render this evaluation of those to whom we will bequeath: most of them really won’t have much of a future.

Just escaping the mire of debt alone will require a dedication few of our successors possess. That after finding an advocation that’ll provide beyond sustenance earnings in order to service the education debt. A home of one’s own, a family, putting aside for any children, more and more likely self-financed retirement schemes. The way costs are pulling farther from salaries workers of tomorrow will truly be wage slaves. They’ll be beholden to algorithms calculating human resources’ maximum production capacities before coping capabilities break.

Yet the way artificial intelligence is being hyped, maybe sooner than any human can know technology will have made people obsolete for such jobs. Sad. All that college debt for nothing.

Therefore, they will provide even more ripe harvest for right-wing grievance reapers. Empty sacks of hot foul air like Charlie Kirk. He hasn’t been dead long and already he’s as forgotten as Rush Limbaugh. Two blowhards who spewed plenty but at each’s respective demise left nothing deemed significant.

But at least Kirk left a moneymaking dead-guy merch concession.

Dummies who hung on his poisonous words can still purchase gear and sundries to remind them of why they idolized that zero in the first place. Otherwise, without these they’d have to strain to remember why he’d become a “thing” which for a time papered over the craters in their lives.

Kirk shared one notable similarity with every other right-wing grievance reaper. He could make those who failed exploiting their lives’ advantages believe they’d been victims. That somehow voluntarily joining the ranks of the marginal was somebody else’s fault. Young Anglo men’s mushy minds have become fertile fields for such seeds to rampantly grow. Alibi providers like Kirk got them off the hook of their own failings, their own lack of initiative and motivation. Rancid megaphones like Kirk also gave them targets through which to further dislodge these whiners off their own inadequacies.

With them it’s never opening the field to segments who’d been excluded and letting them prove whether they belonged or not. Somehow the board was always tilted. Towards groups insisted upon as inferiors which detoured from the “rightful” beneficiaries.

If Kirk and other right-wing resentment breeders ever expressed one honest sentiment, they’d expend some capital in truth by informing viewers/listeners/readers those once considered under them made the most of lowered barriers and doors propped ajar. Through dedication and diligence, they made the most of opportunity. The same not-so-secret formula that propelled returning World War II veterans farther into the mid-20th century’s middle class and beyond.

Today, the young look at middle-class mid-century American life as an affluent mirage. To them no way it could’ve been that bountiful for working people. New cars every three years. A second car to park in the two-car garage. A boat to haul to the lake or keep moored at a dock whose inlet led out to the ocean. Maybe a small getaway place in the woods. A house whose mortgage didn’t demand Rockefeller payments. A job with benefits inclusive of medical insurance and a pension.

All the adult goodies now unimaginable because wealth that once spread throughout society now funnels upward.

Should there be expressions of envy or jealousy, it should come from realization we then agitated for what we believed was deserved. And once getting it, we kept hawklike vigilance maintaining it.

Hard to see the immediate gratification/short-attention span generations doing the same. Which is why they are where they are. In back tenuously clasping the short end.

As time proceeds, gleaning anything worthwhile from reactionary screamers will be more futile than it already is. Society is rapidly approaching that day when others’ self-invented resentments will be automatically pushed aside. Literally and figuratively it’ll only be white noise.

Instead, Americans will ask one question. One with multiple branches. “What are you doing?” It’ll serve for every facet of life.

It could be the basis behind “How are you making it?” “How are you living?” “How can you be so careless/indifferent/uncaring?” “How do you not see/ignore what’s occurring around you/us?”

Perhaps dropping onto lower economic levels will finally wrest the eyes of the young from their handhelds and onto whatever future can be crafted. They’ll actually get to see a horizon. Maybe one they’ll figure is worthwhile reaching. Because the alternative is remaining below any rewarding sightline.

Since there’s no app for it and AI cannot and will never divine the urgencies of humanity, people who’ll wrested themselves from overreliance on technology may finally develop drive. That impulse to advance, to improve, to earn satisfaction through accomplishments.

If there was a memory implant that every young and upcoming Advanced Techno-Industrial American needed installed it would be “the Great Depression Chip.” No, not for moping and sulking. Looking around one sees that’s an emo default among our inheritors. But a chip which would visualize how great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents coped with the 1929 Crash and its decade-long aftermath.

Unlike now, individuals then weaved their safety nets. For much of the 1930s, no one had any notion of the public assistance programs many today take for granted. Too many so far as taking them as “rights.” Until the New Deal, and, later the Great Society, help for the destitute got doled out in miserly portions – when any help existed at all.

Wits served as guides. And those were constantly developed and refined. Just the sort of mental exercises that might at first exhaust Boomers’ successors. But failure means being stuck on the shoulders as life zooms past. So, the effort to move should eventually fire them. Who wants to be regarded as broken down?

Glad to see the Queens mook’s “I Hate Americans and America” crusade has finally affected salts of the earth. Farmers and ranchers. He had shat all over industrial workers and urban dwellers, much to the wrongheaded pleasure of jus’ plain folks occupying the hinterlands.

Not all rustics suspect strangers who live above their speed. Urbanite, suburbanites, who enjoy twisty culture, or regard as normal the sort of fast thinking/fast talking which swiftly reduces difficulties into manageable bites. Nevertheless, too many exurbanites resent those imbued with those very qualities.

And most beyond urban America merrily voted against their interests for Fat Caesar.

But then factory laborers and people residing in sizable cities and their suburbs aren’t blameless in the least. More of them in Election 2024 threw caution and prudence aside than had in 2016. Let’s hope it was because the process which brought forth Harris was ramshackle. Slapdash does not inspire confidence. Nonetheless, it’s a bad sign for America when ordinarily reliable segments of our populace choose irresponsibility that leaves our nation cartwheeling off a cliff.

In the months before his Inauguration when Bad Vlad’s punk spoke menacingly of tariffs and immigration, the wary saw what barreled down the pike. Much of what convulses the nation today appeared for readers’ displeasure in Slow Boat Media’s final three of four 2024 dispatches and the first one for 2025, The White Bone of Truth, We Have Plenty Yet We Are Poorer, Welcoming Vampires and Dumb and Docile, respectively. Rereading these in October, the question should be why wasn’t that prescience dumped into lotto picks?

No one could’ve had an annex of the White House being razed for a Louis XIV vanity project on his or her card. The very thought of it is deranged.

Surely, no farmer or rancher would’ve foreseen such. In fact, none of them are seeing it now. They’re solely occupied by foreign trade and agricultural policies which have an indecent percentage verging on the kind of debt leading into ruin.

One might’ve thought after the scab’s first term anyone who farms on a large scale would’ve remembered his first term’s agricultural policies had taxpayers bailing out much of the sector. Who could’ve believed that in the intervening four years he would’ve become more attuned to farmers’ needs?

All he knows are his own wants.

Unlike his first go-round starting in 2017, in 2025 there’s no one around him to body block his impulses. He’s seated a cabinet of the weakest adults laughable. Neither can anyone in his current scrum of acquaintances speak truthfully to him. Even if those people orbited him, would the six-times bankrupt even listen?

For any who somehow haven’t yet noticed, Donald Trump, a 79-year-old adolescent, lacks control. It’s always failed him. But age exacerbated by mental and physical maladies lets him rampage heedlessly.

His insistence on tariffs wasn’t the most telling indication. It was the percentages seemingly plucked from his fat ass. No rational numbers, only figures intended to intimidate. Of course, at the beginning the numbers were so incredible, so incredibly unfathomable, it was tough to accept them honestly. We all must know that sane, stable, and sensible people hearing them needed time to have processed outbursts so nutty. His numbers based on nothing but a resentment-larded raver’s whims.

Again, since there are no adults around him, no one to simply say, “No,” or, better, “Enough,” he will stumble farther. He will lead the United States into economic disaster.

The Queens mook bears numerous outdated notions. Particularly about manhood, women’s places in society, and “others.” Anyone not white, male – but not too male – whose Christianity isn’t malleable, or isn’t an incessant flatterer, is more than distrusted in his beady pig’s eyes.

Arab emirates or kingdoms, evangelicals of the most craven sort, right-wingers adept at playing tunes which make him dance their jigs while letting him believe he’d selected the reel, really anyone disreputable whose dubious enterprise will let the grifter in chief wet his beak, know how he operates. Much to their credit, the Chinese will not endure the pantomime necessary for agreements with the decaying man-baby. With the Chinese it’s business.

They won’t go through the antics of fluffing him.

The Chinese do not stroke. Business with them is business.

The scab didn’t learn this during his first term. And now without any restraints whatsoever he’s doubling and tripling down on attempts to have the Chinese bend before his reeking corpulence. If he’s capable of an honest moment, Donald Trump will admit he views President Xi Jinping, the leader of a nation holding substantial amounts of our national debt, as if this dignified man a lowly Chinese restauranteur or laundry man of his youth back in Jamaica Estates. It would take nothing for the American liar, thief, sexual abuser, and traitor to broadly caricature Xi. The swine soiling the Oval Office would readily raise stubby index fingers to each eye’s corners then pull both into slits and speak in some sing-song fashion about “No tickee, no laundree!”

Yes. Donald Trump has a concave learning curve.

It never occurred to him while he yanked tariff numbers from his favorite orifice that threats to Chinese industry and trade could backfire spectacularly. None should doubt that anticipating the worst of a Second Trump Administration, the Chinese considered all possible avenues. Knowing their man better than just over half of the Americans who somehow voted for him, what could’ve been too outlandish?

Therefore, when the tariff proposals mentioned only sought to humiliate China, the Chinese were ready. Far more than their American counterparts, arrogant white men who probably envisioned the competition kowtowing in order to keep mainlining dollars.

Through complete shortsightedness, everyone in this present administration forgot the maneuver China had pulled against American growers his first term. They cancelled huge commodities purchases. What was to have prevented them from repeating this in 2025? In fact, mustn’t they have seen the first time as a test run? Since then, hadn’t they expanded access to possible other suppliers? Indeed, they had.

In the interim, several other nations had increased their planting acreages, primarily Brazil and Argentina. The contacts weren’t much noted during the Biden Administration because responsible officials worked diligently to keep US harvest sales to China constant. Of course that meant walking carefully as far as other trade. While China enjoyed a favorable manufacturing imbalance with the United States, the big picture was to prevent the whole ledger from sliding off the table onto the floor. Which Chinese purchases of American farm products did.

Both sides were content. American farmers profited nicely. Chinese consumers ate well.

But leave it to Donald Trump to screw up sure things. What can’t he screw up? A rhetorical question. One whose answer is well known. After all, he operated money-losing casinos. Money. Losing. Casinos. Enterprises one must work harder to fail in than succeed at.

How easy must it have been for the Chinese to double, treble, the ante against the American blowhard? Cultivating possible alternative suppliers had been an ongoing process since the scab’s first four years. And while no one in Chinese authority could’ve foreseen the need, prudence does reward. It did in this case. Much to the chagrin of American farmers.

They went from earning billions to collecting bupkis. Too bad the market for goat shit is miniscule.

Thanks to the Biden Administration, American farmers regained much of the market lost by the Queens mook. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but a reprise appears quite unlikely. Biden’s successor has gone out of his way to infuriate the customer. Xi remedied that. He now deals with more pleasant businessmen. People who appreciate his trade. Doubtlessly more solicitous than his former merchant had ever been.

Certainly, at this juncture farmers are praying for miracles. That maybe somehow the Chinese will forgive the rude, no, utter presumptuousness shown them. In that respect, farmers need to pray harder. Not that’ll help. Without firing a shot, the Chinese will teach America a lesson. Where it’ll hurt us most. Not upon our pride because as we’ve seen through callow Republicans, American pride can be bought, bartered, and pawned. No. Our Kryptonite. Money.

We have a mania for making money so profound it’s almost unnatural. Nearly obscene. We must someday decide whether ours is a weakness or a sickness. Or a failure. One stemming from immaturity. Other nations which once occupied global preeminence needed centuries before they inspired envy, jealousy, and umbrage before falling off the perch. It only took the United States less than 100 years.

And on the cusp of America’s 250th establishment, we’re already rotting. While there have always been detractors – because as the commercial brays, “We can’t help being Americans!” and a lot of people elsewhere kinda like what that looks like because it looks like fun – these days what parts of the globe aren’t actively rooting for our collapse?

If it happens, the delight may be such the planet could shut down for several days of celebration. That should be an extreme exaggeration but in nine months the short-fingered vulgarian, abetted by the most cowardly political party ever known – the GOP – has dumped the bucket of trust and good will accumulated drop by drop across 248 years.

Forget about being loved. Love makes it easy to abuse and be abused.

Americans were respected. That ended one minute after noon, on January 20th. Now, dismay is giving over to contempt. Seeing it objectively, we should expect no improved view until national leadership gets its diaper changed so it’ll stop being loud, contentious, and infantile.

There is only regret regarding the plight of farmers and ranchers. Theirs. The former are being denied markets by our own vindictive policies, the latter facing coercion to lower meat prices or imposition of them through importation of foreign beef. And it’s the candidate both backed squeezing them. Over 90% of voting farmers and ranchers cast ballots for Trump. Too bad votes aren’t like yo-yos.

Worry in the agricultural sector must be crushing. Now that the blinders have been pried off, who among the producers of our nation’s foodstuffs are counting on “rescue” from this criminal administration? Handouts, bailouts, welfare, just the remedies these Americans have spent lifetimes belittling. They grew up scoffing at such federal intervention. It was a sacrament for the calloused palms set to scorn government assistance. Why, listening their chorus, only “lazy city folks” sought the freeloader’s check, took it. Thanks to the Chief Felon, passengers of the capsized ship Agriculture will be crowding lifeboats with fellow survivors who’ll look much more familiar than the usual public assistance “deadbeats.”

America is at an odd inflection. The dream which propelled so many of us in the past has nearly vanished. Industry, dedication, patience, economy often rewarded. Sometimes quite handsomely. Now, if the stories from the multitudes of Next Wave Americans is true, those four qualities may be merely good enough to keep heads above water. In too many cases just barely.

One wants to claim the game is rigged. In a way, yes. What’s developed emerged from decades of jiggering our nation’s financial system. The gradually evolved new rules with which many must now contend have slowly DQ’ed most participants. Because the new rules have been formulated to benefit already advantaged players.

As we’ve seen in the housing market, so may it become throughout this land’s great green growing swaths.

The notion of owning one’s own home retracts from grasp daily. The initial hurdle, a down payment, gets higher as home costs soar. Then, should the mortgage rate be workable, the amount itself threatens transforming owners into automatons whose lives are proscribed by the monthly nut. Add a family, the challenge rises dramatically.

It’s almost as if people will become stuck in prisons of their own desires.

Further squeezing future homeowners, investors, whether they be banks or brokerages which can slap together sufficient funds easier than pulling rabbits out of hats jammed with them. These are the agents further contracting an already tight buyers’ market. They’re already devouring homes. Unlike individuals or couples desirous of their own walls, they’re not balking or haggling over prices. Instead through rapacious purchases, these entities are enlarging rental markets whose natural constituency will be people aced out of ownership.

Depending on one’s vantage, it’s either good business or an insidious practice.

Farmers and ranchers may expect a variant of this should “Mr. Art of the Deal” flop as usual during his negotiations with Xi. Americans must wonder can the scab muster enough persuasion to make the Chinese president relent?

Knowing skeptics have a ready answer. No.

TACO has damaged trade damage between China and the United States so badly, Xi should have no problem denying him – and through him farmers and ranchers – a lifeline. A reprieve. Better, Xi knows were the shoe on the other foot, Trump would kick China with it.

United States growers need preparing themselves to get kicked with shoes they’ve elected.

What may befall a good portion of American farmers and ranchers are developments Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, and Zane Grey never could’ve conceived in their prairie pioneer/homesteader novels.

A good portion of those making livings off the land today are in precarious straits. Profit margins are jagged. Several bad years without relief can suffice to ruin farmers and ranchers. Nonetheless Americans must commend those who work harder in a year than many of us ever will during our entire lifetimes. And while they assume these tasks to sustain themselves, there also must be the immeasurable reward of deep-seated satisfaction that makes the aches and exhaustion extremely worthwhile.

Adding on to that, there’s having possession of the land beneath feet and hooves. While revisionism has focused on the near absolute removal of the Indigenous, the wanton slaughter of the buffalo, and clawing deep into the soil for mineral exploitation thereby joining spoilage of agricultural acres or denuding grasslands by overgrazing, we are fortunate Old American West mythology as presented by Cather, Ferber, and Grey, among numerous other authors, will never be dislodged in the popular imagination of ourselves.

The prairie epochs of immigrants are as equally key in the American saga as those urban migrants who crowded cities and increased urban vibrancy. But deeper romanticism exudes from knowing multi-generations of families have tilled or roamed specific patches earth. Lines stretch back to wagon trains and rude farming implements busting virgin soil to the first rickety motorized mechanical devices to today’s computerized combines.

Throughout all the industrial advances, the sole steadfast has been families dedicated to the daily rhythms of sowing and gleaning, animal husbandry and driving cattle.

They are loyal to the land.

A lot of that resoluteness is verging on becoming history.

If the agricultural sector follows our housing sector, livelihoods of large numbers of farmers and ranchers will be imperiled. Those in the riskiest situations may have little alternative but to toss in the towel and sell. Horseshoes will be turned upside down.

Ideally, the available properties will be acquired by other farmers and ranchers. However, this is America. Sentiment is nice but the big bucks an investment consortium or corporation can flash will turn even the most conscientious landowner into the stoutest seller.

Why should moneyed entities buy farm or ranch lands? Because land is a most precious commodity. Besides, no one’s making more of it. Corner the land market, connect with consumer-packaged goods producers and biotech companies, and behold! – a burgeoning stranglehold of foodstuffs production which nourish Americans.

People need to eat. Starving isn’t an option or a lifestyle.

Acquisitive business interests will introduce an agrarian system as alien as alien can be to the United States. Collectivism. They will place their acreages under management of single holdings. So, the several, dozens, hundreds of formerly individually owned farms or ranches will be consolidated. They will become indistinct.

In their novels, Cather, Ferber, and Grey distinguished the owners of the loam, what roamed on them, the residents’ peculiarities, foibles even. These characteristics gave readers vicarious entries into lives next to none knew in the least. Also colored and shaded and sharpened were the region’s nuances and extremes.

Even now a fortuitously spied field of purple sage can arouse vision, its scent incense of the range.

Collectives don’t offer such individual revelations. Humans working them may as well be crops or livestock. That’s the same value they possess.

There are no great American sagas whose basis is collectivism. Americans aren’t those kinds of people. Whether our individualism is legend or fact, rugged or not, either way we glorify it.

Disheartening as it will be for farmers and ranchers to be dispossessed, it will be even more dispiriting – maybe even humiliating – should the new owners extend what’s next. It is a commonsensical one, all things considered. Seeing experienced labor already in place, why not have them remain?

A generous tender would include keeping residents in “their own” homes, free, while earning good wages working for the company. That is working their one-time acres under the auspices of a firm. Naturally, the new arrangement would have the now employees following orders, not calling any major shots.

That new reality would be unimaginably hard to swallow – and stomach.

Tough to become a tenant under a roof which had always been a lifelong family hearth. Heaping more insult on this is depending on strangers to determine the worth of one’s labor after a lifetime of working for oneself. That would be regression, not progression. Living in company housing, being subject to others’ guidelines insofar as salary, wouldn’t it all transform former landholders into modern-day sharecroppers or ranch hands? This possibly occurring overnight, much less transpiring over a generation.

Indeed, not the American Dream. Though, owing to Trump’s indifference, looking more and more like a further load on his true campaign promise of American Nightmare.

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