Politics is a societal vegetable plot

It can't survive without sound husbandry

If I’m honest, the past week has been somewhat stressful, because I made a promise to myself that if I have nothing to say, I’d keep my mouth shut. I have to tell you that the love of my life suspects I’m feeling ill if I have nothing to say, but that perception fails to grasp the fact that writing about geopolitics and, in particular, US politics, is exhausting.

I don’t want writing to become an obligation or a chore, because that’s not why I started on this path of sharing my thoughts. Sometimes I simply find it more mentally productive to include a video in a note and add commentary to complement the content. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not losing my enthusiasm for the fight and certainly not my passion for writing, but take, for example, this past weekend. The choice was writing about what has now become the normalised dysfunction of Trump’s approach to one of the most consequential moments for the global economy, while he spouts absolute nonsense about his failed trip to China. Why would anyone want to engage with the same old conclusions?

The options were, to work on the remodelling of my garden and the preparation of my newly built veg patch and raised beds, or attempt to make sense of utter nonsense. The garden won hands down, and I came out of the weekend in a much better mental state than I went in. These are very challenging times for all of us, and it’s easy for despair and anxiety to creep in. Experience tells me that if I allow that despair to gain a hold, then it can lead to a dark place. I’ve been there before, and I have no plans to visit again.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned Florida that Democrats would engage in ‘Maximum warfare.” (AP)

I came to the conclusion that being immersed in the war that is politics, while immensely important, must be accompanied by an opportunity to escape to a place where one feels at ease, an opportunity to be human and appreciate that not everything in life is as bad as politics ( not that politics should be bad). Gardening has long been an interest of mine, and pre-retirement, I had the luxury of being able to afford to buy plants ready to pop into the garden from the local gardening centre. These days, you have to take out a mortgage to populate a garden with pre-grown plants and veg.

The new place I live in has an extended garden, half of which was, frankly, a jungle born of what was clearly once a sanctuary at the bottom of the garden. About 2 months ago, I decided I needed a project to escape all the chaos in the world. Something I could apply my autistic tendencies to. The jungle is now no more, and I have a blank canvas to make my own. Amusingly, I have applied the same research obsession to this project as I do to my writing, so I find myself on a parallel journey to talk politics while partnering with nature to create an oasis on a budget any Republican would be proud of.

With the exception of a planned purchase of a small number of mature plants as focal points, I am growing everything else from seed, propagating on every windowsill around the house at the moment. The whole landscaping element of the project is being built with recycled materials recovered from what was once the jungle, including uncovered pavers and discarded chimney pots. Much like politics, it’s about trying to create something beautiful from a neglected piece of wasteland. An opportunity to breathe new life into an out-of-control space where life continues, but is in desperate need of a little tender care.

Since I started the ground clearance work a month ago, I promised the love of my life that I would not only start the work but also change my lifestyle when it came to exercise and diet. In that time, I have lost over a stone in weight (with another two stone to go to reach my ideal weight), and I have made a new friend in the process. A Robin who seems to have become my cheerleader as I create new borders and dig up his breakfast, lunch and dinner. At first, he observed from a distance, but as the weeks have passed, he’s got bolder and bolder to the point of purchasing my spade and wheelbarrow, now feeding just feet from where I’m working.

At 66, and carrying almost three stone above my ideal weight, I am certainly in the middle of a journey of discovery when it comes to unused muscles. With about 2 stone to go, I have to tell you that it’s a long time since I felt as good about how I’m feeling. I’ve learned so much about how important it is NOT to sit in a chair all day writing about the challenges of the moment, but to also find moments of refuge in an effort that brings you joy in what can be a dark world.

The Robin, whom I have now named Peter, is proving to be a great listener. He’s now the most politically informed bird in England, having been subjected to the kind of one-way political dialogue we can only dream of these days. It has to be said, I do have nightmares that one day he’ll admit to being a Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson supporter, given his hate for blackbirds and his fiercely territorial nature.

Joking aside, speaking from a purely personal point of view, there is nothing quite like creating a planting border and working the soil with your hands and a trowel to prepare the way for new life from seeds you have reared yourself. There’s something special about creating a raised bed to grow your own vegetables while doing battle with pests and the elements to achieve success.

In many ways, gardening is very much like politics; to create a thing of beauty, you have to have the vision to look beyond the chaos of the jungle, developing a vision that enables you to build an environment that goes beyond the aesthetic to the functional. To create an oasis that utilises knowledge and learned experience to learn what works and what doesn’t. To understand that vegetables grow best in a collaborative environment where companion plants protect produce from pests that would do them harm, but to create a space where those pests are allowed to feed on spare vegetables that go beyond the harvest planning.

There has to be a recognition that without diversity and collaboration with pollinators, there is no end result. Every part of the complex gardening ecosystem, from the worms in the soil to good bugs feeding on bad bugs, has a place in delivering a balanced and productive end result. In nature, there are few shortcuts; seeds don’t germinate overnight. They take time and attention to nurture and encourage growth. Seedlings, as they grow, need bigger pots and natural fertiliser to become stronger and be the best they can be.

For plants to deliver the bright colours in their own summer Met Gala, they need to be placed in the right spot and not planted until the chance of frost has passed. The same goes for vegetables: it’s a carefully choreographed dance between humans, nature, the elements, and a vision of how all the critical elements of the growing process come together to deliver mutually beneficial success. For plants to reach their full potential, they must be planted in a space conducive to successful growth. This enables one to utilise every space in the garden, from shade to bright sunlight.

Nature is not exempt from invasive plants destroying a space, just as the oligarchs are doing in our society. When a garden is left to its own devices, the dominant invasive species will always prevail, and so we are finding in our own society. You can have hundreds of beautiful plants in a garden, but once you neglect them, the weeds take over, and the beauty is consumed by far less interesting invasive species. Ever was it so that beauty was ravaged by greed and the transfer of resources.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in a world where the beauty of society is crushed by the invasive nature of greed-obsessed monsters. The apex predators deliberately depriving those below them of any life beyond subjugation, designed to deliver them yet more wealth. I’m afraid these people are creating a societal desert where they and they alone live in a walled-off oasis of plenty.

The truth is, no society can prosper in a world in which the bottom 90% live in carefully constructed economic slave colonies. This reimagined America, ruled by the elite, can’t and will never prevail. Political evolution tells us that eventually, the numbers game will prevail. Much as these socioeconomic predators would have you believe otherwise, corporate rule will always fail, and we are now bearing witness to that slow, inexorable decline with Trump.

It is an uncomfortable truth that, unfortunately, the bottom 90% and, in particular, the true middle class, are all but extinct; all they have left is a middle-class badge and the memories of what could have been. They became the instrument of their own destruction. The people who lived in the hope that they, too, could breathe the rarified air of the elite if they only put in the extra effort. That was the illusion the rich sold to them. Illusion that morphed into delusion as their prosperity evaporated, leaving them scrapping for the crumbs from the rich man’s table with everyone else.

Meanwhile, the working class have become the working poor, not by fate of circumstances, but by design, as corporate welfare has consumed what used to be the welfare safety net. Americans in low-wage jobs are now labelled fraudsters because they are forced to rely on SNAP to feed their kids. They inhabit a world without a living wage, where AI checks their credit scores to gauge how desperate they are to work. These people are not workers; they are members of a slave colony, where the government is subsidising their wages for the new plantation owners, extorting their labour. In a disturbing twist of irony, they do this using the taxes paid not by the rich, but by the bottom 90%. Let’s also not forget the rich are evading an estimated one trillion dollars a year in taxes they already owe.

The whole reason the wealth gap was at its lowest between the late 1970s and the early 1990s was as a direct result of a progressive tax code and union representation. After World War II. The "Great Compression", which followed the Great Depression, meant that necessary economic policies severely limited the intergenerational transfer of wealth. Reagan changed all that, and tragically, Clinton continued to feed the greedy monster as has every president since. The rest is history.

When the wealth gap grows to the extent it has now, it will take a major economic catastrophe to rebalance it. The Great Compression is the primary example; you will note that the 2008 financial crash had little to no impact on the exponential growth of inequality. That’s because the amount of accumulated wealth at the top is now so colossal that your average economic shock has little to no impact; indeed, it provides an opportunity to grow wealth because it is all other people’s money leveraged against assets. They live in a world derisked by a government ever ready to use taxpayer dollars to bail them out, and it’s coming, believe me.

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of living in an overgrown garden dominated by weeds and suckers draining the life out of society. There might not be an appetite for economic revolution, but I’m here to tell you that Democrats tinkering at the economic periphery is as productive as a vegetable raised bed that hasn’t been watered for a month in the middle of summer. We need to insist on a better plan, I’m afraid. And there endeth my gardening analogy.

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