A clown and two romances

A commenter under my last post wrote ‘all eyes on Gaza from now on’. I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but recent world events suggest that all eyes also need to be on Washington, DC as well as Tehran and Jerusalem. Probably Moscow, Kyiv, Beijing and the Straits of Hormuz as well.

It’s hard to keep your eyes on all these places all at the same time. And, even if you do, there’s very little impact you can have on the decisions that are made in and about them. In fact, I’d argue that giving our attention to the power plays of global political centres can help feed their pathologies, which is one reason I don’t write about them much anymore. That and the fact that I don’t have much to say about their specifics that other more expert commentators don’t say better.

I do have some things to say about the generalities of political power centres, and I say them in my forthcoming book. So enough on that for now. Perhaps the only opinion I’ll venture on current world events is that the view I’ve often heard about Donald Trump being different from other US presidents in his domestic focus and refusal to play global war games is now safely in the bin.

Okay, perhaps just one other opinion – current events aren’t really helping the case of those who think nuclear energy has a big role to play in tackling global environmental problems.

But instead of all that, I’m going to focus in this post on more local and parochial matters, emerging from this comment from Walter under my last one: “By the way, I don’t know what a clown farmer is. Perhaps it is someone who has to have a second income and goes to festivals and the like?”

My intention isn’t to single out this remark for criticism so much as just to use it as a point of departure, but I guess I’d say that in my experience most farmers across most scales have a second income of one sort or another – part and parcel of the desperate economics of the food sector and, by extension, the modern world. Going to festivals and the like I confess is rarer within the profession, and perhaps a little more clownish. I’m not much of a festival goer myself, so I’d have happily been able to ...