Charles Edouard Delort, Marie Antoinette at the Petit Trianon Versailles Playing at Being a Shepherdess

Charlotte Allen explains how modern Puritan triumphalism manages to make simplicity the new luxury and distinction.

Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns (hated by the professionally simple) and exploitation of animals (ditto). However, if you’re hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a “locally grown” boar paté, as does Berkeley professor and simplicity movement guru Michael (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) Pollan, or perhaps to experience an “epiphany,” as another well-fixed Bay Area boar hunter recently told the New York Times, you’re doing a fine job of returning to the simple life. Indeed, the Times article was replete with quotations from portfolio managers, systems analysts, and graphic designers who have taken up shooting boar, deer, and bison in their spare time because it affords them a “primal connection” with the food on their plates and is also “carbon-neutral” (zero “food miles” if the deer you slay happened to have been munching the tulips in your backyard). But if you’re a laid-off lumber mill worker bagging possums in Eutaw Springs, S.C., because your main primal connection with food is that you don’t have much money to spend on it, you’re an unsophisticated redneck.

Simplicity movement people always seem to shell out more money than the not-so-simple, usually because the simple things they love always seem to cost more than the mass-produced versions. On a website called Passionate Homemaking that’s dedicated to making, among other things, your own cheese, your own beeswax candles, and your own underarm deodorant, you are also advised to cook with nothing but raw cultured butter from a mail-order outfit called Organic Pastures. The butter probably tastes great. It also costs $10.75 a pound – plus UPS shipping. At farmer’s markets, where those striving for simplicity like to browse with their cloth shopping bags, the organic, the locally grown, and the humanely raised come at a price: tomatoes at $4 a pound, bread at $8 a loaf, and $6 for a cup of “artisanal” gelato.

Wealthy and well-born people admiring – and sparing themselves no expense in convincing themselves that they’re cultivating – the virtues of humble folk is nothing new. Two millennia ago, Virgil, in his Georgics, heaped praise upon the tree pruners and beekeepers whom he likely could see toiling in the distance while he sipped wine on the veranda of his wealthy patron, Maecenas. Marie Antoinette liked to dress up as a shepherdess and hold court in her “rustic” cottage at the Petit Trianon. Other harbingers of today’s simplicity movement were the arts-and-crafts devotees of the early 1900s who filled their homes with handcrafted medieval-looking benches and the 1960s hippies whose minibuses and geodesic domes that enabled their gypsy lifestyles usually came courtesy of checks from their parents.

But it has been only in the last decade or so that the simplicity movement has come into its own, aligning itself not only with aesthetic style but also with power. Thanks to the government-backed war against obesity (fat people, conveniently, tend to belong to the polyester-clad, Big Mac-guzzling lower orders) and the “green” movement in its various save-the-planet manifestations, simplicity people can look down their noses at the not-so-simple with their low-rent tastes while also putting them on the moral defensive. Thus you have Michael Pollan, whose zero-impact ethic of food simplicity won’t let him eat anything not grown within one hundred miles of his Bay Area home, and preferably grown (or killed, milked, churned, or picked) himself. He bristles with outrage not only at McDonald’s burgers, Doritos, and grapes imported from Chile (foreign fruit destroys people’s “sense of place,” he writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma) but even at Walmart’s announcement in 2006 that it would start stocking organic products at affordable prices. Walmart, like factory farms, SUVs, wide-screen TVs, and outlet malls, is usually anathema to the simplicity set, but here you would think the giga-chain would be doing poor people a favor by widening their access to healthy, less-fattening produce. Not as far as Pollan is concerned. Instead, as Reason magazine’s Katherine Mangu-Ward reported, Pollan worried on his blog that “Walmart’s version of cheap, industrialized organic food” might drive the boutique farms that served him and his locavore neighbors out of business. …

The problem with the simplicity movement isn’t simply that you’ve got to be rich to live simply. In their 2007 book Plenty, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, who had vowed to spend a year sticking to the 100-mile locavore eating radius (and, as freelance writers, had plenty of time to put together meals that lived up to this promise), discovered that they were spending $11 per jar on honey to substitute for $2.59 sugar and that one of their locally foraged dinners cost them $130 and more than a day to prepare. …

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Japanese intellectual worker’s survival rations: canned coffee and a couple of packs of cigarettes. The pezzonovantes would never let anyone package such hazardous products together in this way in the “mostly free” US of A.

Hat tip to the News Junkie, Ambisinistral and Trendhunter

August Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, 1883 – 1886, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fast cars, smoking, flirting, even eating fast food at Burger King, the puritans of the Left are determined to eradicate each and every one of life’s little pleasures, Dennis Praeger warns.

Just as the Soviets removed Trotsky from old photos, anti-smoking zealots have forced the removal of cigarettes from old photos — from photos of FDR, from the famous Beatles photo — and from movies whenever possible. Torture and murder are ubiquitous in films, but smoking is all but banned — even cigars are now banned from James Bond films.

Smoking has been banned in entire cities, outdoors as well as in. In Pasadena, Calif., one cannot even smoke in a cigar store. …

Virtually every game I played as a child during school recess is now banned because organizations such as the National Program for Playground Safety deem games in which kids are “running into each other” as too dangerous. Someone might get hurt.

Until a few years ago, just about every American boy, and many girls, played dodgeball. No more. This joy, too, has been eliminated from American life. “We consider it inappropriate to use children as human targets,” said Mary Marks, physical education supervisor for Fairfax County, Va. And it may hurt the feelings of kids who are eliminated. For the same reason — potential hurt feelings of those eliminated — musical chairs is no longer played in some schools.

Some might argue that these bans are not because of Leftism but because of fear of lawsuits. But in light of how leftwing the trial bar is, that only reinforces my argument.

Read the whole thing.

Steve Tuttle, in Newsweek, nominates his frugal parents as ideal role models for the Age of Obama, the new era of poverty and scarcity in which thrift is a survival skill.

Last summer I was at my parents’ cabin in rural Virginia and I noticed a dead mouse in a rusty old trap. I tossed it in the trash. Later that day I told my dad about the mouse, and he asked, “Where’s the trap?” I told him it looked as though it were falling apart, and I’d thrown it out with the mouse still attached. He looked at me as if I’d punched him in the face. My mom chimed in: “We’ve had that trap since we got married!” I wasn’t sure she was joking, and they got married almost 50 years ago. I sheepishly dug it out of the garbage and loaded it up with cheese again. Now it’s become one of those perennial things they bring up every time I go home: “Remember when Steve threw out the mousetrap, mouse and all!?” This is followed by shuddering and head shaking, as they silently wonder where it all went wrong.

What Tuttle doesn’t seem to realize is that his parents are simply typical representatives of an older, working-class life style in which cash was in severely limited supply and in which one’s own time in the form of labor would routinely serve as a substitute.

My generation always blamed our parents’ resistance to our own preferred high consumption economic style as the product of the psychic trauma of living through the Great Depression.

A lot of people on the left these days seem to be rejoicing in the arrival of economic bad times the same way many Britons and other Europeans welcomed the outbreak of the First World War, as a purifying fire that would sweep away corruption and decadence and which would ennoble those who passed through the flames. Well, we all know how well things worked out for those Europeans of the WWI era.

Andrew Stuttaford comments on Michael Phelps’s apology for pot smoking.

In the meantime, I merely note that this broken wreck of a man’s failure to win any more than a pathetic fourteen Olympic gold medals (so far) is a terrifying warning of the horrific damage that cannabis can do to someone’s health—and a powerful reminder of just how sensible the drug laws really are.

Meanwhile, Radley Balko, at Reason Online, offers his own alternative version of Phelps’s letter of apology.

Washington Times:

Companies seeking to cut rising health care costs are starting to dock the pay of overweight and unhealthy workers.

Clarian Health, an Indiana hospital chain, will require workers who smoke to pay $5 out of each paycheck starting in 2009. For workers deemed obese, as much as $30 will be taken out each paycheck until they meet certain weight, cholesterol and blood pressure standards.

Clarian employees will also be required to take part in a health risk appraisal that will inform the company which employees smoke.

Such appraisals are becoming a popular tool for businesses to determine the health of their work force. The type of health benefit program Clarian is setting up could become a model for businesses in coming years, analysts say.

On the one hand, one can argue that smokers and the obese can justly be assessed higher insurance rates because they are statistically more likely to have health problems resulting in claims. But, on the other hand, the precision of the statistical basis for those extra assessments may well be doubted, and Clarian Health’s policy seems more obviously based on the biases of the community of fashion than upon actual eagled-eyed bottom-line accounting.

I would support this kind of discrimination against groups I belong to myself if it were really based on cold, hard accounting, but the inclination of businesses to set up in operation as petty governments reaching out to regulate and improve the outside-the-workplace private lives of employees on the basis of pure busybody-ism demands resistance.

Even George Monbiot (whose name is the source of the derisive term for an irrational leftist: moonbat) recognizes what chic and expensive environmental gestures by the haute bourgeoisie are all about.

Last week, for instance, the Guardian published an extract from A Slice of Organic Life, the book by Sheherazade Goldsmith – married to the very rich environmentalist Zac – in which she teaches us “to live within nature’s limits”. It’s easy. Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word. You can save the planet from your own kitchen – if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment, and then summed up the problem in seven words: “This is for people who don’t work.” …

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts, partly because they love gadgets but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious and how rich they are. …

The Telegraph has a story illustrated the price of free socialized health care.

Smokers could be denied routine operations on the NHS unless they quit a month before surgery.

Christopher Booke reports that Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt has issued a strong condemnation of Iran’s propaganda photographs of captured British hostages.

It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.

Hat tip to Chuck.

Jean Alexandre Joseph Falguière,
Le Vainqueur au Combat de Coqs
(Victor of the Cockfight), 1864
Musée d’Orsay

The sport of the cock fight is said to have been introduced into Ancient Greece by Themistocles. The latter, while advancing with his army against the invading Persians, observed two cocks fighting, and, stopping his troops, inspired them by calling their attention to the valor and obstinacy of the feathered warriors. In honor of the subsequent Greek victory, cockfights were thenceforth held annually at Athens, at first in a patriotic and religious spirit, but afterwards purely for the love of the sport.

In England, cockfighting rivaled horse racing in popularity. The prohibition of the sport by Cromwell during the Protectorate was traditionally viewed as a high water mark of Puritan tyranny.

Cockfighting has an extensive literature and sporting tradition, and its own technical language and ethos. Cockfighting was historically one of the few sporting activities where the different classes of society mingled. The ground on which matches between gamecocks were conducted was traditionally referred to as “the sod.” An old saying holds that: “On the turf and on the sod, all men are equal.” Implying that only there does such equality exist, of course.

Cockfighting was extremely popular in early America. The founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, were devoted to the sport. Andrew Jackson bred gamecocks. Even Abraham Lincoln refereed matches. But the spirit of Puritan intolerance has always struggled for the suppression of all of modes of the expression of humanity’s fighting instincts and natural love of sport.

Cockfighting was banned in Massachusetts in 1836, and the bluenosed bigots gradually got their way in every US state, with the exception of Louisiana and New Mexico where the sport remained protected as a highly prized cultural property of local non-English-speaking communities.

The sport now has been sacrificed in New Mexico, however, to the calculating political ambition of the current governor, Bill Richardson, who decided he needed to get in-line with the Puritan left on an “animal rights” issue, and who feared being identified in a campaign for national office as governor of a state so primitive and retarditaire as to tolerate the existence of a fighting sport. Richardson broke campaign promises to constituents that he would protect the sport as long as he remained governor.

Let’s hope that Richardson’s scheming treachery is not rewarded.

Jean-Léon Gérome, Jeunes Grecs Faisant Battre de Coqs (Young Greeks Conducting a Cockfight), 1846, Louvre

Petition to Legalize Cockfighting in the US

Reader Kevin writes Vin Surynowicz:

“Here in rural Hillsboro, Texas, people still smoke openly, many of them indoors; many inside their own shops. … All our restaurants allow smoking. There are public ashtrays at the front doors of the county courthouse. Tobacco puritanism just hasn’t caught on here.

“My explanation for this is twofold: 1) Pompous people from Dallas, 65 miles away, can’t afford to move here and commute, and b) the masses of economic refugees from socialist California aren’t impacting Texas quite as badly as Nevada…

“You say the gang of New Puritans will not drain and strangle Vegas within five years, and you project a lengthy decades-long death rattle for the city. I disagree. I visited Vegas roughly a year ago, and I was disgusted by how much the Strip has morphed into a pricey Galleria, a giant boutique. In five years, I predict Vegas will already be feeling the pinch of a severe tourist downturn.

“I don’t think it will require better flights to Amsterdam or the Caribbean. One smart U.S. city with gambling could supplant Vegas pretty quickly, especially if it’s an established poker haven.

“My money is on Biloxi, which will be aggressively rebuilding itself soon.”

I can see the TV ads now, Kevin, suitably illustrated with color footage of tourists happily engaging in the specified activities on the sparkling Gulf Coast, while their opposite numbers are shown in grainy black-and-white footage here in Sin City being clubbed to the ground by Metro’s “New Year’s Eve Squad,” shot down by the Baby’s Daddy Removal Team out in Southwest 11, or herded into Paddy wagons: “Tobacco: banned in Vegas, still welcome in Biloxi! Prostitution: illegal in Vegas, recently legalized in Biloxi! Hashish bars: still banned in Vegas, recently re-legalized in Biloxi! Handguns: registered in Vegas, welcomed in Biloxi!”