Kids Deconstruct Super Bowl Commercials in School

  

In 1996, while teaching at Santa Fe Indian School, my Native American students  told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment is still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

I played Super Bowl commercials in the classroom, and together my Native American students and I “deconstructed” them. This was, in part, an idea encouraged by the state of New Mexico. The Green Party, powered by thousands of off-the-griders like those I’d befriended in Dixon — who lived in pockets throughout the state — had increased their power in the state legislature and had worked with citizens’ groups to pass mandatory “media literacy” for all New Mexico schools. I went through the in-service training and then explored, with my twelve-year-olds from the Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo reservations, the ways marketers manipulate us by linking their brands to emotions like love, belonging, freedom, sexuality, and fear.

I showed a commercial with an SUV conquering a mountain, and my Apache student, Monique, correctly labeled the lie: “Freedom!” she cried out.
“Love and belonging,” another student suggested, noting that the male driver was accompanied by a beautiful woman and rosy-cheeked children.

      
A Hopi student raised his hand. Frowning, his anger grew as he spoke. His point, eloquently delivered, was that “crossing our sacred grounds with that noisy thing” did not mean love or belonging. He said that, to be more truthful, the gas-guzzler should be driving past the retreating glacier that its greenhouse gasses were melting.

I found these media literacy sessions as deliciously subversive as the chatter in Stan’s fields. Thanks to citizen pressure, the very nation that produced more global-warming gasses than any other was arming a million New Mexico students with the intellectual tools to reject consumerism.

Autumn arrived. On one of my last days working on Stan’s garlic farm (see previous blog!), before the tractor was oiled and tools stored for the winter, a half dozen of us harvested a fall crop of squash and basil for the farmers market. Stan and Rosemary cut basil on either side of me. I could hear the brook whenever the gentle wind stalled; the sky was a powder-puff blue, the mesas a ridiculous paste of orange, and I felt whole and alive, cutting wrinkly basil leaves, placing them in my wooden crate, the lively smell.
      
Stan seemed elsewhere, “Kind of Blue” on the breeze, perhaps already in his next novel. Clip-clip went his shears. How many basil sprigs had he chopped in his thirty years of farming? Clip. The breeze picked up and I couldn’t hear the brook, just the swaying trees above, and the smell of chemise and sage mixed with the basil. Stan stood up to his full, lanky height and ran an earth-covered set of long fingers through his beard, looking out into the direction of the wind as if for a sign. Then he sighed, almost imperceptibly and went back to clipping.
      
In Stan’s fields an idea germinated in me that would much later coalesce into a kind of general principle: be in Empire, but not of it. As the years went on, even as a Yankee pragmatism kept me cinched to Empire, I’d try to follow this, walking up to the edge of radicalism. I wouldn’t jump over, but the heat of the flaming edge, in Dixon, in Chiapas, Mexico, in Bolivia, in Liberia, and especially on the banks of No Name Creek, kept alive the embers of noncooperation, a healthy maladjustment to ecocide.
      
The long workday ended. Stan went to the till to fish out my wages. Wages that I could certainly use with my low teacher salary and high Santa Fe rent. But wages I couldn’t accept for the community of this fall day. “Stan, I won’t take your money for this work,” I said, in twenty-four-year-old earnestness. “There’s nothing I would have rather been doing today.”
      
Stan looked at me from his heights, his blue eyes suddenly animated, and he pat me on the shoulder and invited me to a late lunch of foods from his farm. I’d later realize that this, more than anything else, is what Stanley Crawford cultivated at El Bosque: an awakened, generous human spirit and, therefore, a new earth.

Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (II): Stay "maladjusted to empire"

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Stanley Crawford: Farmer and Novelist

Sometimes other laborers joined us. On summer solstice day, twenty of us gathered at Stan’s to harvest garlic. (Garlic is planted in fall and harvested in spring.) It was one of those Ansel Adams days in New Mexico, with the lines of the mesas carving a sharp edge into the sky. Stan himself stooped a little, squinting out into all that beauty with an artist’s eye, a gently discerning gaze. Then he shrugged and bent down to pull the first garlic bulb out of the ground. We followed his lead. Pollen floated in the chilly air as we pulled up garlic all morning. At one point I threw a bunch of garlic a little roughly into the crate, and Stan mused, “Careful with my babies.” We stopped at ten; Rose Mary and their daughter Katya brought a pot of miso soup into the fields, and we drank it out of cups. The picking conversation was often revolutionary. During a discussion about a proposed hazardous waste dump in the area: “Gandhi didn’t just talk about nonviolence in an evil system,” a salt-and-pepper grandma farmer said while pulling up garlic beside me. “He was all about noncooperation.”

Another friend of Stan’s, an artist from Santa Fe, talked about cultivating a posture of “maladjustment with Empire” in yourself.

“But everything is tainted,” someone else said, wiping dirt and sweat from their brow. “We’re feeding nuclear Los Alamos.”

“Right,” the artist said, “but you stay maladjusted to the general evil. That’s true noncooperation: not letting Empire inside you.”

Stan hardly participated in such discussions. He hovered a little over every situation, Miles Davis’ “So What” coming off the mesas; a softer, clearer place. But he wasn’t aloof; after all, he was touching the earth right there beside us. I reached down and touched it, too. When pulling lettuce from my own acres beside the vineyard, I reached down through the lettuce leaves, the lower part of the plant smooth like a lover’s inner thigh. Sliding my fingers deeper, to where the lettuce met the moist earth, I sunk them a bit into those depths, and then coaxed the whole plant loose. Made a salad out of it; took it inside. “Don’t let the Empire inside you. Stay maladjusted to civilization,” someone would say, and Stan nodded, or didn’t, pulling up another top-setting garlic plant, placing it into a pile, the pound weight of the real. I think Stan took pleasure growing dissent in his fields, along with garlic, chilies, and statis flowers. His life was so obviously maladjusted to Empire — why talk about it? His very presence, such a wise, well-known intellectual and novelist, hoeing a row right beside you, elevated everything in our midst.

The summer was coming to an end, and a new semester awaited me back at Santa Fe Indian School. I harvested the first of my squash, zucchinis, and blue corn and packed my little Nissan hatchback with them, driving it into the school parking lot and giving it out to the other teachers. They oohed and aahed, joking that they knew what I’d done with my summer. Teaching during the week, I continued to work at Stan’s on the weekends. I found that the experience with Stan and the anticivilization Dixon crew blended easily into my teaching. I was no longer the Ivy League expert here to impart knowledge; I was student to these young Native Americans.
Continues in the next Texture blog....

Beyond the Russian Grain Ban—Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (Part I)

Is there a better way?

Russia, crippled by intense drought that has withered millions of acres of Russian wheat, moved today to ban exports of its grain. This is a fifth of the world’s market, and comes at a time when grain prices are already up 90%.

This dangerous mix of global warming (this is Russia’s worst heat wave since record-keeping started there 130 years back), the precariousness of chemical-industrial agriculture, and the fickleness of world trade flows got me thinking, once again: Is there a better way?

There is. It’s bioregional production. Less fossil fuel intensive, closer to market, organic and healthy, and supporting small farmers. We could talk all day about the “wildcrafters” I discuss in Twelve by Twelve, the permaculturalists, the thousands of people beginning to craft their livlihoods around respect for nature. But it’s more vivid to talk about a single person with a different vision. That person is Stan Crawford.

If the flattening world of corporate-led globalization sometimes sounds like really bad Musak turned up high, Stanley Crawford sounds like John Coltrane playing to a room full of friends.

I was twenty-four when I first met Stan, and when I looked up in to his clear blue eyes I could practically hear “A Love Supreme” playing in the background — bouncing off the mesas behind his adobe house, out of his El Bosque Small Farm garlic fields, and off the tip of the phallic rock pillar beside them that he jokingly called Camel Cock (a wordplay on the camel-shaped Camel Rock up the road toward Santa Fe). There he was, gray-bearded and six foot three, esteemed author of Mayordomo, Petroleum Man, and the best-selling A Garlic Testament—in a pair of dirty overalls with a hoe in his hands. I followed him out into a field, to weed some rows, in silence, the cool winds coming off the Sangre de Cristos, the gurgle of the river running in front of the field.

Stan Crawford, New Mexico organic farmer

Stan paid me six dollars an hour to work with him, two days a week. He first taught me the word “permaculture” and its basic techniques, and I applied those techniques the other five days on my own back-forty, a sprawling piece of land on the Rio Grande with a small vineyard, just a twenty-minute bike ride from Stan’s. I’d worked out a kind of sharecropper’s arrangement with the vineyard’s absentee owner. I had his singlewide trailer and an acre on which to farm my own blue corn and squash; he got a third of my crop plus two days of my time tending his vineyard.

I’d arranged both the vineyard-sitting and garlic-mentorship through the Northern New Mexico Organic Farmers Association. I was ecstatic. Never before had I cozied up this close to the earth. After the suburban Long Island childhood and college in a big East Coast city, I’d come to Santa Fe to teach seventh-grade gifted-and-talented students at a Native American boarding school. But I was again in a city. Now I was bathing in the Rio Grande each morning before planting blue corn, tomatoes, quinoa, amaranth, and nearly two dozen other native and exotic food crops under a full moon, just as my Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo farmer-neighbors did to ensure a strong harvest in fall.
After my day spent planting, night fell. My hands were calloused from the shovel and hoe, my muscles sore and spent. The full moon illuminated the empty spaces that would become my blue corn, intercropped with beans (they pole on the corn) and squash (ground cover that suppresses weeds), and my contoured vegetable and herb beds. Permaculture, as I was learning from Stan, likes natural curves instead of straight lines, intensive planting, and mixing crops intelligently, such as fruit-, nut-, and hardwood-trees. I’d put the theory into the ground, and now, under the moonlight, I just saw a blank page, an expanse of moist earth.

Stan inspired me. He’d found a playful balance in life between laboring in the open air for seven months and writing in his adobe studio for the other five. He and his Australian wife Rosemary (their two children were already through college) had purchased their acres in the late sixties, built their beautiful house brick by adobe brick by themselves, and lived, without bosses or time clocks, in creative freedom, largely outside the system.

People in the area labored with the earth and then played. Saturday nights, everyone gathered at a local tavern for an exchange of organic pest-control tips and off-color jokes and for dancing to bluegrass and indie rock. Rural Northern New Mexico couldn’t be farther from the tenured world of my parents, from the East Coast establishment. Dancing manically around me were farmers, winery owners, artists, writers, silver and turquoise jewelers, small-town teachers, and yoga instructors. “What do you do?” I asked one guy. His reply: “Water in summer, snow in winter,” referring to kayak and ski instructing.
I’d just read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and felt some of that bohemian, spontaneous energy explode as the nights stretched on at the Foxtrot. More than dropout beatniks, Dixon’s folks were cooperating with nature rather than opposing it, sculpting, growing food and wine, painting, teaching, and making a living, if barely.
Part II in the next Texture blog....