A celebration of useful work

Yesterday as I watched a video of this procession, I found myself simultaneously smiling and tearing up. I didn't know what that was all about. I don't know anything about tractors or farming. As a matter of fact, I can't even grow a house plant.

But then I read a diary at Daily Kos titled Mythic Tractors March On Madison. Now I understand.

I grew up in farm country, and used to work around tractors as a kid, yet have never before yesterday truly appreciated the tractor as an American icon, a category of vernacular sculpture.

They are things of beauty: orange Allis-Chalmers, with their curvilinear forms, showing off their open engines under the manifolds; rectangular International Harvesters with their big boxy design, square and upright and battered by field work; little Fords, faded gray, looking more and more like artifacts from bygone days; and those brilliant emerald green John Deeres, proud testaments to American manufacturing. I've been to many parades, Rose Bowls, junkyards and art museums, and this Tractor Procession beat them all!

And, my god, the huge crowd was enthusiastic! We danced to the various drum cells that grew organically around us, we laughed at the creative ingenuity of the farmers, with their manure spreader tableaux of Scatological Scott Skits, and we reflected on their signs and reminders that they, too, are worried citizens working the backbone functions of our society, threatened by the same forces of mass unification and absolute corporate hegemony that have lurked behind the protests of the last three weeks...

This is where these reflections lead: Without play, without art, without song, we have no movement, we have only politics. We are now Situationists, but not through esoteric French intellectualism, but in our own homegrown Wisconsin sensibility, where tractors, by god, come miles from their fields of labor, and are transformed for one morning into the most beautiful and powerful kinetic sculptures that you have ever witnessed, recouping a bit of power from the trickery and fakery of our narcotic media, and where mythic figures remind us that our political struggle is here and now, rooted in these specific communities, but also timeless, rooted in a much deeper human struggle.

WOW!!! What can I add to that? Not much, except that it reminded me of one of my favorite poems:

To Be of Use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

It was the usefulness of those tractors that spoke to me - be they old and beaten through years of service or shiney and new with all the benefits of recent innovation. They were built to DO something useful. They - and the farmers who drive them, and the workers protesting - deserve respect for the useful work they do - even (or especially) when its "common as mud". I believe that's what people were celebrating yesterday.