Back by no demand at all. Not even mine.
There are no longer polls. I guess you should know that up front.
The header image is taken from the 1985 Harlan Community High School Harpoon. The theme for that year’s yearbook? “Something’s Missing”.
Written at the depths of the 1980s Farm Crisis, the Harlan Harpoon’s editorial team decided they wouldn’t beat around the bush: they determined to show that while there were positive things in their lives, there was an unmistakeable pain, too. Families lost their livelihoods,
lost their farms, moved to town, saw Mom take another job, saw Dad take a job in town, heard about suicides and murdered bankers and wasn’t Ronald Reagan going to do anything about this?
(I learned this all from Iowa State University professor Pam Riney-Kehrberg’s 2022 book When A Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis. It’s a sobering, challenging study of the depths of the collapse in the agricultural economy—especially here in the Midwest—and the still-echoing ramifications the crisis had for rural society, culture, and politics in Iowa.)
Well…no. No, he wasn’t. Other than joke that America should “keep the farms and export the farmers” and sign a belated Agricultural Credit Act in 1987, Reagan oversaw the gutting of farm programs that helped small family farmers—rather than corporate farms stretching throughout California and the Southwest.
“Have You Noticed? Something’s missing.”
Harlan Harpoon (1985), p. 3
So read the “Theme” page of the Harpoon, nestled beneath photos of a barely-filled parking lot and a combine harvesting corn, and opposite a half-filled classroom with the caption “Highland’s fourth hour Chem A has a few seats not filled: a common condition in many classrooms. Declining enrollment takes its toll…”
“Everyone has friends that have moved or are going to move,” the introduction continued on the next page, having noted that in Harlan, a town of just over 5,000, there were over 150 homes up for sale.
That fall, musicians Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp decided to call attention to the Farm Crisis, raise money to assist family farmers, and put some political pressure on the powers that were in America: they planned and hosted the first Farm Aid concert at the University of Illinois’s Memorial Stadium on September 22, 1985:
When you get through the frankly staggering list of acts that open up that broadcast, as Willie hits the first bars of “On the Road Again” and you see the rain-soaked, rough-around-the-edges crowd assembled at Memorial Stadium, a sense of the scale and spectacle starts to hit you.
“Welcome to Farm Aid, the concern for America!”, Willie shouts, before he and Roger Miller roll into a few more songs. It’s not until 10 minutes into the concert that they remind you to call 1-800-FARM-AID “to raise a lot of money.”
Farmers had been in the news: they’d driven their tractors to state capitols across the Midwest, planted white crosses at courthouses and the Mall in Washington, D.C., and, in some extreme cases, taken to violence. Others went to the foreclosure sales of their neighbors’ farms and executed, often successfully, the penny auction: gathering in force at the farm and bidding just one penny, intimidating any other would-be buyers with a (usually unspoken) threat of violence.
Willie rattled through the numbers of farms lost each year in 1982 and 1983 at the 16-minute mark. The transitions between sets aren’t seamless. But there’s a down-home, humble quality to the whole affair—when Brenda Lee and Gary Beatty, the hosts of the event broadcast on The Nashville Network (TNN), finally show up on the broadcast a couple minutes later, there’s just a brief plea for money before it gets back to the music. Later, Foreigner sings “I Want to Know What Love Is” with a whole white-robed gospel choir behind them. It’s schmaltz, it’s big hair, it’s 80s meets country and folk.
Politics are unavoidable, though. When an informercial-style ode to the farmer begins at the 29-minute mark, at first it’s scarcely different from a truck commercial today: a farmer atop his tractor, fields being plowed and chores being done.
And then Willie shows back up.
In a cutoff Chicago t-shirt and the signature bandanna, Willie walks the viewer through the challenges: trade surpluses, low prices, mounting debts, and more. “Like the American eagle or the buffalo, the farm family is becoming an endangered species,” he warns, before running through the statistics and ubiquity of the farm economy, whether the viewer realizes it or not. Later, Sissy Spacek—star of the 1984’s Farm Crisis-themed film The River—invites the viewer to grasp the enormity of the crisis, then joins Loretta Lynn on-stage after “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (2:38:40). But when he joined Lee and Beatty in the booth at the 3:20 mark, musician Charles Hayes concluded, “it has to be congressional, it has to come from the government, and it has to come from the people.”
It was a break from the curated TV message, that the family farmer was in trouble and that a few dollars would help save them.
And then Neil Young showed up and blew a hole through any veneer of nonpartisanship:
That’s Neil Young endorsing a bill introduced in the Senate by freshman Iowa senator Tom Harkin (D) — “what you call a direct appeal,” Beatty wryly notes, before the two turn it back to the enormity of the endeavor and the ways in which it feels like a throwback to earlier days in music.
That bill never passed, nor did several more offered by Harkin and other farm-state Democrats in the 1980s. Family farming thinned out once again, but Farm Aid lived on. Its 40th anniversary is this September, this time at a different Big Ten stadium: Huntington Bank Stadium, in Minneapolis.
And yet, looking around at rural America and the consolidation and corporatization of American agriculture and food production, forty years on, no one could deny it: something’s still missing.
Remember, as always, the syllabus is here if you need it.
Saturday Morning
Don’t Watch This
Incarnate Word Cardinals at Nicholls Colonels [12pm, ESPN2]
Watch That
#22 Iowa State Cyclones vs. #17 Kansas State Wildcats
11am | ESPN | in Dublin, IE
If you’re wondering “Why Farmageddon in Ireland?” just remember: it’s all Nebraska and Penn State’s fault:
This can and probably should be good and stupid—both teams have good quarterbacks and playmakers on offense—but it can’t compare to the 2023 iteration of this rivalry:
Saturday Afternoon
Don’t Watch This
Idaho State Bengals at UNLV Rebels [3pm, Mountain West Network]
Watch That
Tarleton State Texas at Portland State Vikings
3:30pm | ESPN2
I wish I could do “getting to Stephenville, Texas [home of Tarleton State],” but in the style of this gem from DWT;WT days gone by:
Honestly, this website used to be great. I planned out a whole trip to Jonesboro, Arkansas, using a silly now-defunct twin-prop Essential Air Service carrier. I used to have ideas. What are you still doing here reading this?
Saturday Evening
Don’t Watch This
UC Davis Aggies vs. Mercer Bears [6pm, ESPN, in Montgomery, AL]
NC Central Eagies vs. Southern Jaguars [6:30pm, ABC, in Atlanta, GA]
Watch That
Fresno State Bulldogs at Kansas Jayhawks
5:30pm | FOX
Sam Houston Bearkats at Western Kentucky Hilltoppers
6pm | CBSSN
Stanford Cardinal at Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors
6:30pm | CBS
Remember: it’s unlikely that much of what you see will, comparatively, come close to this stupidity:
It’s late and I’m drunk…
Don’t Watch This
lots of really dumb MLS [6:30 to 9:30pm, MLS Season Pass on AppleTV]
Watch That
{AFL} GWS Giants vs. St. Kilda
9:20pm | Fox Soccer Plus
{AFL} Western Bulldogs vs. Fremantle Dockers
12:15am | Fox Soccer Plus
First, that CBS didn’t allow for Stanford-Hawai’i to be flexed out into even just the 8pm slot is an absolute crime. There’s no way anything CBS shows after 10pm could be better, they had to fire all the talent to suck up to a wanna-be dictator.
Second, HIGH DRAMA in the AFL: St. Kilda’s eliminated from the AFL finals series—learn more about its excellent finals system here—but it’s all to play for with the other three teams in the season finale: GWS and my Dockers are both in a pileup for fourth on 60 points, with Western a win behind at 56 points and the Gold Coast Suns with two games to play at 56 points. The top 8 teams qualify. Here are the standings:
If you’d like to be amused, West Coast is WSR’s favorite team.
MNW’s Lightly Plagiarized Trivia
- Iowa State and Kansas State don’t play for a rivalry trophy in Farmageddon. But the Cyclones play for two other rivalry trophies: the Cy-Hawk Trophy with Iowa, and…what, with whom?
- What religious sect, founded in 1747 by Ann Lee, gained its third American member this week—a notable boon for the celibate furniture-makers?
- The six flavors of quarks are “up”, “down”, “top”, “bottom”, and…what?
- “Timshel”—“thou mayest”—is the line repeated to Cal by his dying father, Adam Trask, at the end of what John Steinbeck novel?
- What Crown dependency with capital Douglas is located in the Irish Sea between Ireland and Britain?
Enjoy the games, everybody.
