And They Dug

 by Lael Ewy

The old observation about the Grand Canyon, the craggy attraction called out by all airline pilots who happen to fly over, is that it is, after all, just a big hole in the ground.

But we are enchanted by valleys of all sorts, naming housing developments for them; historical towns; our crooners from the 1950s; and America's favorite flavor, ranch dressing, which was originally marketed by Hidden Valley as a do-it-yourself mix, combining many of our favorite things in a convenient package, excepting flags and ammunition and guns.

When we're not busy admiring nature's holes-in-the-ground, we're busy making our own, striping the east with canals, the west with reservoirs, and everywhere with basements and the foundations of buildings.

A main indication that the settlers are here to stay?

They dig a well.

Between our buildings, we dig trenches for pipes carrying in fresh water and sewers carrying away foul, holes for fence posts, power poles, streetlights. In the rural area in which I was raised, to manage the waste we shat out or washed off, we'd dig a "septic lagoon," which nature, being less fussy, would promptly fill with cattails and duckweed, inviting in snapping turtles and redwing blackbirds. Rather than being disgusted with these interlopers, I've come to admire what they make of our muck.

On the subject of reservoirs, my dad helped dig one near Cheney, Kansas, which supplies the bustling metropolis of Wichita and its dependent suburbs with water. Well, my father didn't do the actual digging; he was a diesel mechanic who worked on the heavy earth-moving equipment that other men used to get the job done, the bulldozers and backhoes and front-loaders and such.

So enchanted was he with these diggers that, later, he got a bulldozer of his own, ostensibly to help dig deeper a natural pond on the 20 acres of heaven we owned east of town. But we knew better: it's just fun to dig in the dirt, to see the progress you've made as the hole expands, as the horizon rises, as the hole forms down past layers of grass and topsoil, into the deposits of sand or clay or rock below.

We dug as kids, with trowels or Tonka trucks, with garden hoses, blasting snake holes into the ground until our mom came out and told us to stop.

But she dug, too, and still does: holes for flowers or shrubs, neither hobby exactly nor compulsion; it's just what you do, grow things, and it always involves some movement of the soil, some disruption necessitated by production.

Dad had an acre set aside for a garden of his own, vegetables, of course, and he dug long, shallow trenches for sweet corn, deeper holes for sweet potatoes and tomatoes—the last his personal favorite, the starts going in by April, each delicate plant protected by a half a plastic milk jug against the likely event of frost. We'd often have fresh fruit by June, by early July, a precociousness I've never had it together enough to maintain.

On the reservoir project, dad met many professional diggers, men schooled in holes and the vagaries of their creation. Many of these men had worked as wildcatters and pipefitters in the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma, and they had colorful stories, were earthy people with an earthy set of sensibilities.

On a hot day, one of them might say "Hell's only about six-inches deep out there!" as if, with a spade, damnation might be surfaced via one, quick cut.

Other stories cut deeper. One of my dad's favorites was from an oil well worker who accidentally dropped a hammer down the hole they were drilling, potentially damaging the rig. It took many hours of work to retrieve, halting progress and costing the operation untold dollars.

When the worker had retrieved his lost hammer, the foreman said, "Great. Now, you're fired."

To this, the man, thinking quickly and with admirable presence of mind replied, "Well, I guess I won't be needing this anymore," and promptly dropped the hammer back down the hole.

My dad also tells one on himself, about almost getting fired for using one bulldozer to put the one he was working on on its side in order to access the parts he needed to repair.

But these are really stories about how management should properly treat their workers, about how they need to understand their situations and to give them the tools they need to do their work properly, ideas he took with him when he later took an executive track.

From Black English, we have the term "dig" to indicate understanding in a deep way, with the depth of our feelings, our thoughts, our souls aligned all the way down. Even today, as the kids have swirled down with "skibidi" and "rizz" rotting holes in their brains, if you ask them if they dig it, they still do.

We come by it honestly, this digging: notably, the kids continue to go down rabbit holes, something we've all learned from Lewis Carroll, and indicative of the safety many animals have always found underground: rabbits, moles, foxes, badgers, worms and grubs (of course), and even a species of owl or two. The occasional wasp or spider digs or moves in after the fact. Dens and burrows harbor the bigger digging animals; ants collectively create entire underground cities, their intricacy shaming even the complex earthworks undergirding a Paris, a New York, a Rome.

I've so far avoided the fact that when we stay in one place we put down roots, figuratively, but when a plant grows it does so literally, digging by pure force of whatever passes for a plant's will, sucking out the goodness of the very earth itself for its vibrant, verdant display.

I've avoided, too, a philosophical matter: the fact that a hole is a thing only in the absence of all that surrounds it, a thing we build only through negation. For every hole we want, there is material displaced. A pile of dirt develops, a berm, a mound, perhaps a place to play, a set of whoops over which a dirt bike might fly.

A hole is an act of mass selection.

We dig when we die, too, of course, or rather a hole is dug for us. We trust the embrace of that good earth with the remains of our most beloved, knowing that the dirt has both the power to forever remember and the heft to help us forget. It is only within this solidity that the quick may be separated from the "silent majority," a term Safire cribbed from Milton, the memento mori that there, by God's grace, dig I.

On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.