Writers take note of desperate times when government becomes noble and necessary

The Forgotten Man, A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes; Harper, New York, 2008, 468 pages, $15.95.

Granddaddy fell off a two-story house and broke both feet in the Depression.
It was the era of The Forgotten Man. Before workmen's comp. Before Social Security. Before government cared about occupational safety or about family or, really, about the common man — grandfather or not.
The natural wisdom of Americans elected a leader in 1932 for the most desperate of times. They chose a government to preserve ordinary, everyday folk.
We're testing the limits of economic endurance again today.
Back then no one held the safety net for my Grandpa Jay. He was a big, loving-in-his-own-way, rough-laughing workingman in the tough prairie town of Lawton, Okla. Frontier rules still prevailed — make your own way.
Buffalo nibbled grass around ruts left by horse caissons out on Fort Sill. If it hadn't been for the artillery garrison, the U.S. government would have had no presence at all in my grandparents' lives.
Military demand for housing gave granddaddy work as a housepainter — until he couldn't climb a ladder. Yet he was the sole support of a wife and three school children of his own and two others taken in from family down on their luck.
Grandma Essie had spooned the last cornmeal into the cast iron skillet. Her children were going hungry.
What happened next was the defining story of my family. Manna fell from heaven. Well, potatoes actually.
My Daddy was tall and skinny but didn't miss a stride as he scooped up the bulging, burlap bag on the railroad siding as though he was paid to unload the boxcar.
You do what you have to do for family, when you literally are "The Forgotten Man."
The original use of the phrase meant the worker who never went on the dole. The person struggled but somehow made it with no more help than a providential sack of spuds the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe never would miss anyway.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked the name up like stolen taters for his presidential campaign to use about every common American. God love them, heaven made so many who needed a handout or a hand up.
FDR's brain trust got to work. The president's and wife Eleanor's skillful use of media cranked up. And the specter of a nation going under created a social experiment out of every working class American, forgotten no more.
The Amity Shlaes account is revisionist history — not original, but well-told: The line has it that FDR didn't end the Great Depression with the New Deal; that his anti-business vigor and monetary policy vacillation made things worse; and that only World War II ended the country's worst downturn ever.
The trouble with her view is the nation did sense a rescue mission and regain hope as a result. The government sun did come up again every day. The light around FDR's jaunty visage and sparky effort did counter the dark economy.
The vigor of Roosevelt's government dispelled even fear itself. His fireside chats made the White House a comfortable home for the nation to visit on the air. Lasting institutions such as deposit insurance reformed and protected banking.
Shlaes is right to remind us government can get in the way as FDR's did, creating a depression within the Depression. She is right about politics too easily diverting public works spending from its mission to rebuild the economy. And she is right that government takes steps in a national emergency we don't want from it all the time —— such as the current nationalization of industries.
But heroic measures electrified rural America. Americans went to work building roads and bridges and schools. Government organized writers and artists to make us sensitive to the desperate times, represented by Dorothea Lange's photograph of a migrant mother.
Those were noble and necessary acts of government we should not forget.
To say otherwise is like telling President-elect Barack Obama to stay in Chicago. Yet our once again fearful nation counts on him to avoid another Great Depression in the unforgettable FDR-style.
Sometimes you just have to scoop up the potatoes.

Sketches of grandeur: Why journalists should dip into Middle Earth and other fantasy literature to come down to this earth

The Children of Húrin
 By J. R. R. Tolkien with illustrations by Alan Lee; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2008 pbk. edition, 313 pages, $14.95.

We have an Ent living in our meadow.
Why not?
We are of the generation who popularized J. R. R. Tolkien in this land. We read The Hobbit to our children. We gave them The Lord of the Rings trilogy when they were ready.
Why wouldn't one of the ancient race of walking, talking tree giants take up residence with us?
Fantasy is serious business. Even for journalists. Lighten up, gang. You'll be more conversant with real people.

There's the Hollywood version of fantasy. But even bigger are the motion pictures of the mind that inspire us, steady us between good and evil on our personal quests and endear otherworld creatures to us as a comfort of the imagination.
Middle-earth is far less comfortable since the passing of Tolkien and the co-opting of his creation by movie moguls and the electronic gaming set who owe their pastime to literary fantasy.
So posthumous works by the master become bestsellers. His son Christopher Tolkien edited the squibs and scraps and notes that became The Children of Húrin.
You take what you can get. Isn't endurance the message of Middle-earth?
This is a dark and bloody work without much redemption, though. It's like sitting down to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is at least majestic in its cosmic tragedy, and discovering you picked up the grisly Titus Andronicus by earthbound error.
First you wade through genealogies and set-up. Think of all the begats in the Bible. Or the penance Tolstoy exacts before getting you to the action in War and Peace.
At last you strike storyline like a vein of gold. But the ore plays out when Morgoth, the First Dark Lord, captures Húrin to crush the hero's spirit of rebellion in the First Age.
So attention shifts to the nobleman's children, Túrin and his sister Niënor. But they live lives of unquiet desperation, dismay and disaster that lead ever downward.
Finally comes closing confrontation with Glaurung, the worm-dragon of fire sent to fulfill hellish curse.
Just another day at the office in Middle-earth. Or perhaps where you work.
Túrin is no Ranger destined for the kingly triumph of the later works. His sister is no princess royal. Not yet on scene are Bilbo Baggins or Gandalf the Grey and, of course, Treebeard the Ent living in the woods of Fangorn during the Third Age of Tolkien's more popular works.
His son and literary executor opened a view into his father's mind as it sorted out the world that would become the Hobbit's and ours by extension. It's like seeing Michelangelo's chalky sketches for the Sistine Chapel instead of the finished work.
Read it to see how the grandeur came to be.
How grand?
Ask any of us who have an Ent living in our meadow.

Journalists love to find the special places, such as going to France in our deepest South

Poor Man's Provence — Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana By Rheta Grimsley Johnson, New South Books, 2008, 221 pages, $23.95

Crawfish. Always the crawfish. And zydeco music, which is different from Cajun.
It's all special.
The language too, which is regionally accented English for us outsiders. Among the residents of 22 parishes — one-third of the state — however, the lingua franca really is Franca, except you'd hear the distinctive patois more often in similarly rural Provençal France than in urban Paris.
Cigarettes hang from lips like cantilevered bridges to Acadiana, named after the French Canadian exiles of the Maritime Provinces who settled this corner of the American South in the 18th century.
So much makes the cultural landscape so special. So much provokes fascination.
Along with the houseboats and pirogues. And gumbo, étoufée and boudin — that rice dressing stuffed in pork casings. And tiny, juicy little round satsumas that give oranges a good name.
And the lilting mon cher and mais oui that sound like a verbal two-step version of the breakfast dance steps we bravely tried after Bloody Maries, garnished with pickled green beans alongside early morning whisky shots for braver dancers in an antebellum cotton warehouse turned hotel turned cultural icon in downtown Breaux Bridge — "Crawfish Capital of the World" — which you'd call quaint except such trite adjectives sound too touristy and you'd rather project something better for this c'est la vie Brigadoon of lower Louisiana.
Down the road is the Tabasco-famous McIlhenny Island, actually a salt dome in the distinctive oil and mineral rich Louisiana coastline. Up the road is Angola, the infamous prison and site of a legendary inmate rodeo. And over yonder a piece, past the drive-thru margarita bars and truck stop casinos, is Lafayette, home of the possibly misnamed Ragin' Cajuns at a laid back university that works just enough to keep the music, language and cultural treasures on life support in America's bubbling social pot of jambalaya.
Just over the 20 miles of causeway on an Interstate west out of New Orleans and past Baton Rouge and through the visually lyrical Atchafalaya Swamp — pronounced "Ah-CHA-fah-lie-a"— which is the largest tract of forested wetland in the Mississippi River Alluvial Plain, is the heart of this most distinct of French outposts.
There lies Henderson, a town so truck-on-cinder-blocks homely that Rheta Grimsley Johnson finds it charming enough in reverse to make it a second home. She and her husband are Alabama-Mississippi-Georgia journalists, and her book of Cajun discovery actually is a collection of newspaper columns.
Frankly they are poorly gathered and edited for continuity and seamless reading compared to most narrative journalism. But she's a good and familiar Southern writer, introduced in a foreword by the NPR-famous storyteller Bailey White.
If the jammed-up collection is flawed, well, "What the hell!" would be the attitude down on the Bayou Teche. You oughta read this book to satisfy curiosity, they'd say on the levee, not for great literature. Get yourself another beer, Thibodeaux! Slice off a piece of that deep-fat-fried turducken, Boudreaux!
For me it's a matter of learning about this place our son recently moved to with his family, including our first grandbaby, to be embraced by warm-hearted folk with names right out of the original Provence.
Cajuns never meet an infant they don't love, turns out, calling them "cha" with a preciousness from the French cher.
That's enough to make me love their special place even without a Bloody Marie. Even without crawfish.

This news is not exactly just in: The latest word in the trees is all about this good earth

The Green Bible HarperCollins, New York; 2008; 1,311 pp.

Earth is a Holy Bible. Her trees are the chapters, each leaf a page of scripture. Water is living theology. And every breath of air is a reminder of the love of God who made us.
I speak no idolatry.
Symbiosis is the biological term for two living organisms so entwined with one another they become one. There's no separating creation from the holy word.
The Green Bible affirms that simple truth. Journalists, who love the truth, should be at least a little familiar with scripture. 

This green version in this age of ecology gives them a reason to delve regardless of religious skepticism.
Curiosity after a change in family lifestyle sent me to the environment-friendly New Revised Standard Version published last year. The cotton-linen cover over recycled paper, soy-based ink and water-based coating is stamped with a spreading oak.
My wife and dog and I moved out to the edge of town for the acreage, for the semi-rural peace, for the trees. Always the trees.
They make me wonder why many religious folk cannot see their mission to renew, refresh, rehabilitate the planet.
God created humankind in his image, turned creation over and asked us to be good caretakers. From that start of civilization, we have God's very own word — this is the good earth (Genesis 1:31): "God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good."
A lot went wrong.
We live now in environmental crisis. You may count the ways for yourself, unless you live in denial as even some churchgoers do.
The solution lies with us. God swore off interference when he promised Noah he wouldn't send another flood. Damage to the planet comes from humankind.
People of the earth will reclaim our eternal stewardship one family at a time and one society at a time.
At our new house we built a compost bin before we moved in. A kitchen pail collects all the green-making stuff.
Sunday's ritual is a trip to recycle newspaper, plastic and cardboard collected all week in garage bins.
Energy efficient light fixtures brighten the house. The thermostat stays on a moderate setting. Brrrrrr. Cars are high mileage.
Blessed with trees, we planted more — an entire orchard.
The garden fed us all summer. We give away preserved food. And we contributed a squash casserole from our plenty when we sat down to a potluck Thanksgiving with friends.
But I'm brought up short by a quote from then-President-elect Barack Obama. We're not going to save the planet just by changing light fixtures, he said.
We need community change on a continental scale to meet our spiritual duty to God's good earth. Science matters, as Al Gore reminds us, but equally comes faith.
The Green Bible can inspire the movement person-by-person, congregation-by-congregation. Clearly it's designed for individual study and Sunday school, temple and parish hall study groups.
Evangelical, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Jewish thinkers and ministers, ethical scientists — all have essays between those ecologically correct covers, including useful concordances, study guides and proposed action plans for discussion.
My favorite section — besides the Bible text itself with pertinent passages literally printed in green — is a collection of short "Teachings on Creation through the Ages." The compiler of quotes and aphorisms is J. Matthew Sleeth, M.D. He reminds us of the great commissioning when Jesus last spoke to his disciples (Mark 16:15): "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation."
There's material aplenty for a church revival themed on earth and grace. There's need aplenty for another historic Great Awakening in America and beyond.
I'd let the trees preach. And harmonize. As in Psalm 96: "Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy."
The tree of life in the midst of the garden is the religious symbol at the center of our being. It is the spine that keeps us erect, the dream we share with Nebuchadnezzar of reaching to heaven, the story we believe of life everlasting despite the crucifixion of a worker with wood and with our world soul on, of all things, a tree.
The tree of life opens The Green Bible in Genesis 2:9 and closes it in Revelation 22:2 — "And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations."
I can't speak for others who see the need for saving the planet. But as for me and mine, we listen when we hear the trees call us to grace.