Friday, February 27, 2015

What is a summary of "Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation Front" by Wendell Berry? What is the social commentary in the poem?

In
"Manifesto: the Mad Farmer Liberation
Front,"asks people to "denounce the
government and embrace the flag," meaning
live by the constitution that made the country
great rather than the current
leaders that are destroying it.

It starts in a
sarcastic
tone when he suggests that we should "love the quick profit" and ignore our

neighbor. He turns this on its head when he states "every day do something that
wont
compute"believe in God, embrace people, work for nothing, and don't live
for money. Instead
live for the "free republic" for which America
stands.


Give your approval to all you
cannot

understand. Praise ignorance,
for what
man

has not encountered he has not destroyed.


Ask
the questions that have no answers.

Invest in
the millennium. Plant
sequoias.

One
thing that comes across strongly is the
suggestion that we should learn to
find joy and laughter in everything we do. It's ok to be
happy as long we are
not hurting anyone to achieve it.

Though he calls on

women"please women more than men"not to go for what he calls the cheap option
of
power, he calls for men to help maintain a woman's interest in life and
suggests they take their
love to the field and swear their allegiance to
them.

The poem ends with
Berry saying that as soon as the
powers start to sniff out what you're doing leave as a fox
would do and don't
leave any signs that you were ever there, apart from signs of misdirection.

When they are gone you can go back and continue your lives. Or as Berry says,
"practice
resurrection."


href="https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html">https://cals.arizona.edu/~steidl/Liberation.html

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