March 29, 2010
 
MANN TALK: Clods and Clouds
 
By Perry Mann
 
The human condition is the same everywhere and has always been the same everywhere. History repeats, only the costumes change. An aspect of that condition is that man is plagued by the tug within himself to preserve himself and the pull to help others: the battle between self-preservation and altruism, between tribe and tribesman, between nationalism and internationalism, between humanity and family and between body and spirit.
 
The condition determines politics. Those bent more toward self-preservation generally are conservative while those bent more toward altruism generally are liberal. Conservatives are nationalists and liberals internationalists. Conservatives praise competition; liberals praise cooperation. Conservatives are pragmatists; liberals idealists. Conservatives see a tree as a deck; liberals as a poem. The former are earthbound and often hidebound; the latter cloudbound and often unbound. Simplicity warrants dubbing the former clods and the latter clouds.
 
I am a bleeding-heart, tree-hugging liberal. Thus, I took note of Senator Byrd’s finger-pointing, head-shaking, posturing polemic directed at “head-in-the-clouds individuals who peddle dreams of an idyllic life among old-growth trees.” I took note because it appeared to me that he was speaking right into my face. But I do not resent it, because truth to tell I do dream of an idyllic life among old-growth trees. In fact, I have spent most of my life trying to arrange to live just as he described. And I suspect that many miners lie awake at night thinking how nice it would be to live an idyllic life among old-growth trees instead of among the remnants and debris of what were once mountains with old-growth trees.
 
Byrd continued: “They seem ignorant of the fact that, without the mines, jobs will disappear, tables will go bare, schools will not have the revenue to teach our children, towns will not have the income to provide even basic services.”
 
What he said is in fact what exists and has existed for decades. Whereas there were 150,000 miners a few years ago, today there are 20,000. Poverty lives by, if not with, everyone in the coal counties. Schools are underfunded and relative to the best, sorry. And after a hundred years of capitalists making millions from coal some coal towns still flush their toilets into the streams that run through them.
 
Further, Senator Byrd seems ignorant of the fact that mining will end some day. Not even he with all his oratory and Ciceronian affectation and all of Congress in consensus can create a lump of coal. One day it will be gone and all that will be left is the sickening sight of seeded remnants of mountains that once soared and supported old-growth forest. Then what are the children of miners going to do?
 
Byrd is on a roll: “But what do they care? They will have already thrown down their placards and their banners and gone off somewhere else. These dreamers ... have been carrying their banners around some of the meetings that I have addressed. They might as well talk to the trees. I am speaking for the coal miners.”
 
If “care” had been a quality or a quantity in the coal fields and congress since black gold was discovered, most miners would have long since realized the dream of an idyllic life among old-growth trees. Or if they had been allowed to pocket the value they produced they could have chosen to live in any Xanadu or Shangrila wherever. John L. Lewis had to move heaven and earth just to get them decent wages and benefits after generations of unconscionable exploitation by clods while native politicians did nothing but benefit from the outrageous expropriations. Where has “care” been all these years before environmentalists came along and didn’t care?
 
Clouds might as well speak to trees as to clods for all the good that it will do, and, God knows, it is more pleasurable. Also, it might surprise Senator Byrd that “these dreamers” not only speak to and for the trees but for the miners as well. It takes some imagination to understand that they do and imagination in congress is a rare ingredient.
 
The earth is God’s Temple, on which man is privileged to sojourn. His stay, measured by all of time, is not much more than that of a cicada. He arises from the ground, eats, drinks, dreams procreates, dies and returns to the ground. Though the sojourn is short it can be pleasant if the Temple is not so fouled and polluted by previous sojourners, so devoid of idyllic places among old-growth trees, that it is not conducive to the good life, a life that is more than the ingesting of bread or of milk and honey. Miners will go and mining will go, sooner or later. Their children and children’s children should have more than bread. They should have God’s Temple to live in in its pristine condition, not a logged, mined, mountain-topped, paved, mall befouled, man-made-over thing. Eden, or what’s left of it, should be their inalienable legacy. The clouds carry banners and speak on their behalf; for this generation seems blind and deaf except to the sight of Mammon’s ware and the voices of false prophets.
 
Byrd and others, in a more conciliatory mood, advise putting “aside whatever animosity exists between the coal mining industry and the environmental movement.” That is, compromise. And compromise is just what Judge Haden has done. He has ruled that the mining industry can keep on mining but that it will have to stop the outrageous practice of filling in streams that flow six months a year. But the inflexible clods and those that support them consider any restrictions un-American and communistic. They question the loyalty to country of those who oppose them, a time-tested demagogic ploy.
 
Byrd says that divisiveness is not the road to prosperity, implying that overturning Judge Haden’s ruling is. What is prosperity? Can there be prosperity in a world in which the Temple is sacked and pillaged by clods, in which no cloud or clod can dream of an idyllic life among old-growth trees because there are nothing but mined-over land and scrubs left? If man is worth anything in the eyes of God it is because often he has his head in the clouds instead of at the trough of gain and profit.
 
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.