November Purple Rain
"“Even white folks are talking about the hurt”"
Every so often, I like to go out into the back roads to take my neighbors’ temperature—or maybe their blood pressure.
It rained all Saturday morning from the last vestiges of Hurricane Isaias. Tennessee is where the monster came to die, and its last exhalations were subdued, but the Gulf sent us up a steady, soaking kind of rain we hadn’t seen in months. I drove to the farmers’ market anyway, it being Oktoberfest, but the usual yard sales and traffic tie-ups from slow-moving gawkers were all rained out. Only the usual Saturday farmers market was in the gravel lot beside the Amish store, with fewer vendors than normal and a scarce few customers, mostly antique-hunting retirees in rain gear.
I was waiting out the downpour under the roof when Dale came in, shaking water off a cap that had once been red. He is a hay and cattle man in his sixties with two trucks, a long trailer, and a skid steer, and I knew him slightly from other visits here. He skipped the pleasantries.
“Diesel’s killing me,” he said. “Filled up Thursday and it was like handing the man a kidney.”
I said I’d noticed the price.
“It’s not just the price. It’s that I can’t do anything about it. Somebody in Saudie Ay-rabia or Moscow sneezes, and I pay for it in the Tractor Supply.”
This struck me as a fair summary of petroleum geopolitics. Farming runs on stored sunlight, mined, shipped, refined, and burned at a price no one can plan for, even though airlines try, fail, and sometimes need a bailout. Dale had stumbled on the central fact of the modern economy: he is at the end of a very long hose—one that can kink.
At a nearby stall I could overhear a large black woman whisper to her smaller husband, “Even white folks are talking about the hurt.”
“So my nephew’s got me looking at Bitcoin,” Dale went on. “Says it’s money nobody can print. I don’t understand the computer part, but I understand not wanting to get cheated.”
I was composing a reply about data centers and electric demand, roughly the amount a mid-sized country uses, much of it generated by burning the very thing Dale was complaining about, when a third voice joined us.
“Son, you’re about to trade one idol for another.”
This was Brother Wendell, who sells cedar birdhouses, honey and beeswax candles two stalls down and, I learned in the next twenty minutes, also holds a few firm views on monetary policy. He was somewhere past seventy, with a white beard and a Bible so swollen with rain and notes it had taken on the shape of a small loaf of bread.
“The Lord has told us what money is,” Wendell said. “Proverbs, eleventh chapter: ‘A false balance is abomination to the Lord, but a just weight is his delight.’ You know what a Federal Reserve note is? A false balance. Since Nixon shut the gold window in ‘seventy-one, it’s been a promise to pay nothing, signed by nobody, backed by the full faith and credit of men who’ve never done a lick o’ work!”
My mind was busy running the literal meaning of Proverbs 11. In ancient times, merchants used beam scales with stone counterweights to measure silver, gold, and goods. Dishonest traders cheated customers by using rigged scales or keeping two sets of weights (a lighter one when selling goods and a heavier one when buying). The Old Testament verse cautions against deceit, skewed standards, and double-dealing. I had to be cautious saying that though, because both Dale and Wendell worship an orange-haired charismatic who stands strong and proud for double-dealing.
“Well,” Dale said, “I don’t—”
“And the communists know it,” Wendell continued, warming up. “Karl Marx said the way to destroy a people is to debase the currency. Or Lenin did. One of them. Point being, the central bank is plank five of the Communist Manifesto, and they put it in the Constitution by the back door in 1913.”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that 10-point program in 1848, outlining the measures a transitional socialist state would take to dismantle capitalism. Plank five called for the “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” That is basically how every nation manages its currency.
Wendell was right that plank five does call for a state bank with exclusive capital, that the Federal Reserve Act was indeed passed in 1913, and that the line about debauching the currency is a popular quotation with no confirmed source in either Marx or Lenin. The rest of me decided the rain was too heavy to start an argument. I was here to observe.
“Gold and silver,” Wendell said, tapping the Bible. “Genesis. Abraham was rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold. Nobody has ever inflated away a silver shekel. A man holds a Morgan dollar; he’s holding something God made, not something a committee made.”
I could see Dale liked the mention of cattle. Likely he holds his share of physical gold and silver as well.
I’ll give Wendell this: he has history on his side more often than most prophets. Rome did shave its denarius from nearly pure silver down to a coin with a silver wash. Debased money has toppled kingdoms and made the monetary arrangements of the last fifty years look short-lived by comparison. His case is stronger than the one for any token whose chief virtue is being on your phone.
But I couldn’t resist a quip. “Brother Wendell, silver mining is one of the dirtier industries going. Cyanide heap leaching, tailings dams, mercury in the old days. And gold: it takes about a ton of ore to make a wedding ring.”
“That’s the fruit of man’s greed, not the metal’s fault,” he replied, unbothered by my environmental advocacy.
“Fair enough,” I said.
Dale looked back and forth between us like a man at a tennis match he hadn’t bought tickets for. He wasn’t sure about that cyanide and mercury stuff, but he didn’t want to go there. “So I should buy silver. Or Bitcoin. Or neither?”
“Dale,” I said, “I’m not a financial adviser, and Brother Wendell isn’t either, so far as I know. But if I were you, I’d notice that your real problem is running on diesel. Whatever you do with your savings, the best hedge against higher prices might be using less fuel, or growing some of it, or getting an electric truck that costs $5 to charge. There are farmers around here running a lot of equipment on biodiesel from their own soybeans, or alcohol from corn, and others cutting their input costs by building soil carbon with cover crops, manuring and biochar.”
“Biochar,” Dale said, as if tasting a new brand of chewing tobacco.
“Charcoal. You put it in the ground. It stays there a few thousand years and holds water and nutrients. It saves on fertilizer costs. That might just keep you from having to go to the bank for a loan.”
“Huh,” said Dale. “That’s more or less what the Indians did, ain’t it?”
“The Amazonians, yes.”
Wendell was shaking his head. “You can’t eat charcoal, brother.”
“Neither can you eat silver,” I said, “but I’ve got no quarrel with either.”
The rain thinned out. The man on the other side of the squashes and pumpkins, who had listened to it all in silence, cleared his throat. “Anybody buying anything?”
On the drive home, I passed two logging trucks and a school bus, all running on diesel, and thought about what we’d actually agreed on. Nobody under that metal shed roof, clanking under the downpour, trusted the people who control the money, and nobody liked being at the dry end of a kinked hose. That’s a lot of common ground for a Saturday, but it won’t likely change how anyone votes in Tennessee next month. They want the lady at the Fed put in jail, and they want some people put on her board who will lower diesel prices. They want the communists to stay up North where they belong, or out in California, but not Washington.
I found my neighbors’ temperature—and their blood pressure—reasonably low. Maybe it’s the rain. They might have guns and canned goods in their basements, but they are not spoiling for a fight.
And given half a chance, they’d vote for the orange-haired guy a third time. Come election, they’ll settle for Marsha Blackburn.
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