Drinking And Fighting Proper

The Thesis

Terror in Terms of Terroir

"Once established, this empire, [a pan Islamic state], could then turn its attention to the subjugation and conquest of the rest of the world, particularly the liberal West, as the Ottoman Turks did in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries... Our Fight [therefore] is against those who want to turn Islam into a terrorist creed preaching global violence and revolution..." Thomas McInerney and Paul E. Vallely

In order to understand how I will allow viticulture and terrorism to converse I need to know where to cue in terror, terrorism, and terrorists.

Where, for instance, is the terrorist's vineyard? Clearly the reign of terror extends throughout national borders and over international waters. Because the fruit of a terrorist's labor is as simple as seeds, meat, and skin it is vulnerable to the elements it encounters. In the New Order of day (post 9/11), such encounter answers to the name "Counterterrorism". (In the days of our elders the encounter reeled through public policy as "Counterintelligence" or "Counterstrategy".) As the seasons change so too change the threats.

Working within the progression of climate--be it political, economical or societal-- a terrorist must understand the preparations demanded by the sow of his labor and essential to the structure and resonance of his or her final product. What fruit is good to preserve the terrorist should next consider which bottle best carries out the job. ZEALOT Considering the tangible realness of simple materials mingling and tingling, leavening from such basic constituents as the heat of light and willingness. The mild experiments that take place throughout the season just after curing the juice of the fruits of terror reveal to those who planted the seeds and tended the fruit a kind of satisfaction as well as engage with those who unknowingly import the fruits of terror into their harbors and ports. As the cured fruit of terror ages it also is also likely to establish itself as a vintage or as a reserve blend. In regard to the former, that of terror as vintage, the events of 9/11 made an example of terror locked in time. In regard to the latter, that of terror as a reserve, it is not unlike the actions made by the United States or the Soviet Union during the cold war to create stockpile after stockpile of nuclear weapons. While such an action plays on the palate like a simple table wine, it does not pertain to an immediate engagement, but rather to a foreseeable threat. While the effects of cured fruit are no different in a vintage blend than a reserve blend, the effects are lucid, palpable and do not leave the body quickly.

To even stand a chance of passing the fruit of terror, the body requires an enzyme. In the event that a terrorist pours you a glass of his or her finest yield, he or she demonstrates the first submission of control over the fruit: the ways in which terror is circulated, internalized, and digested within another human body now propagates and regulates the future of terror. Without the enzyme necessary for proper digestion of terror, the side-effects appear in the face as the consumer becomes flush with embarrassment and anger. (The enzyme required to properly break down the alcohol in wine is called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2 and indeed any indulgent consumer who has a deficiency of this enzyme will appear flush in the face.) Not only is the future determined by those who directly consume cured fruit. Control also plays a hand with the community, with those whose children attend school with children from the vineyard, with those who shop with or cut the hair of the wily and willing producers of terror. Such says the passage of McIreney and Vallely as they continue the thought posed at the beginning of this essay:

"...Ultimately, it is up the world's Muslims to make a commitment to peace, freedom, and tolerance; to determine how they will reconcile their religion with modernity..."

Sure terrorism is a trade as characteristically Old World as wine, and it is easy to see A in terms of B. It is also easy to understand the urgency that extrapolates the need to develop a defense against terrorist attacks; to counter terrorist attacks. While my position in Boone as a student allows me enough distance so as not to feel that urgency to counter terrorism, allowing me, on the other hand, room to play, it also excludes me from resources and networks. For example, I have not been able to track down any one who grows and makes a biodynamic wine, nor do I know any one to talk with about terrorism at the scale of 9/11, which apparently threw the United States into a watershed.

Sorting Thru Suicide

I want to talk about Osama bin Laden because in 1998 he issued a fatwa against the United States and her allies for her "declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims", he issued the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and he predicted that the U.S. could only avenge the attack by dissolving her system of government. Essentially, in regard to the latter, the values and backbone of democracy would fracture and spoil on the fulcrum of the War on Terror. In the name of National Security the retaliation required of the U.S. would expose the depth of its evil. The wealth of democracy would in other words, remain unseen in the face of death and destruction. The military might of which a superpower would use to restore justice would render the power and reputation of its authority and democratic beliefs impotent in the end. Strategically futile and inept, the potential of the U.S. to lose face is not only among Muslims, but among her European allies as well.

"Amid the rift that opened over the Iraq War, Europeans began to question whether they could still look to the United States to provide responsible international leadership." (4, "How Enemies Become Friends," Kupchan)

The United States did not invade Iraq with the blessings of the United Nations. Further, the ways in which she handled her suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp became the object of international disgust. The endgame of her conflicts in the Middle East and Asia seems to alternate between the lesser of evils. The United States had international support after the atrocities that befell the country. The ways in which she responded however made that support run scarce and they played into the ideal endgame of the very villain she sought.

When the air is poisoned with horror, fear, pain, suffering, and grief, only one deep breath of it would be enough to kill. Osama bin Laden used 9/11 to expedite the suicidal path of democracy. When bin Laden sold the noose on 9/11, the U.S. just had to put her head in. And by his regard, America did not disappoint. This is what I mean by the expansion of the battleground into the environment. My generation is witnessing a case study of our country indulging in assisted suicide.

More context: Caught in The Middle of an Expanding Battleground

In 2009, 2 days prior to Labor Day, and just a day shy of the Day of Rest, I shared a day with my mentor family as arranged by the International Rescue Committee over the summer. Although my experience with this family extends through my employment at the IRC, the event I wish to illustrate took place between 10AM and 3PM Saturday, September 5th in a room outfitted within the metro atlanta suburb.

The family includes the mother, Rajaa, the father, Abdel, a little girl, Marianne, and two young boys, Yousef and Ameen. While the family seeks refuge from the quarrels of Iraq, the children were born while Rajaa and Abdel were stationed as asylees in Jordan and most recently, in Syria.

Our morning progressed through puzzles, pretzels, and tea. The mother, Rajaa, has a limited understanding of English, and invited a Sudanese woman living in the same complex to come over. Our guest worked in several embassies as a translator for Arab-English conversations after attending college some years ago. Her disposition was kind and very intentional, and her presence was of great help for our conversations.

As the children plowed through the puzzle I brought in tow, Rajaa, her friend (whose name I cannot recall), and I "met as women". The Sudanese woman shared with me that it is common place for the women to talk over tea, and that our visit was to carry on in no exception. Mostly, we talked about our families. While I thought my family of six to be of impressive size, Rajaa's family took trump. To paint a picture, Rajaa is a very strong Arab woman and she currently stands to match her husband barrel belly for barrel belly--she's pregnant! The urgency of a woman to have children comes from Iraq she told me. Rajaa's mother and household matriarch stands with 85 grandchildren to her name. 85! I thought such number to be serious misunderstanding--a number mixed in translation, but our tea-time translator confirmed the remark.

Well, morning turned to noon and Abdel returned to a house laced with the smells of slow-roasting lamb, fried rice and potatoes--lunch! By this time our morning's guest had returned home to prepare lunch for her husband, the children had showered and dressed for lunch, and Rajaa had bowed in prayer. Since I was well aware of the income of an unemployed refugee I intended to leave before lunch. Also, I was a vegetarian and quite unsure about how to explain such reality without being disrespectful and within the margins of her limited vocabulary. Although I thought my pre-lunch departure was an act of kindness and respect, Rajaa felt just the opposite and insisted that I stay for a meal.

She adorned the table with plates, platters, onions, and olives ("veryyy old, from Syria" she explained) while Ameen, age 3, serenaded us with a song and dance routine. He was quite the charmer and ever so entertaining! When his song ended, we sat down for lunch with Rajaa and I seated at the table's ends. Even though the smell of meat still filled the air, Rajaa aborted the dish -- much to Abdel's dismay.

As we finished our plates the children ran upstairs for an afternoon nap, and Rajaa begin to clean the table. Abdel waved me into the living room and Rajaa later joined us equipped with three cups of orange soda. We talked about Iraq, about starting a new home in the United States, and about the soon-to-be new addition to the family. After some time, Abdel rose in excitement and retrieved a film depicting the crucifixion of Christ. He placed it in the old VHS player at the end of the room and pressed play. The video was confusing for several reasons:
1.) I'm not Christian, and neither are Abdel and Rajaa
2.) The language was Farsi--one in which was foreign to all 3 of us
3.) Why now?

At the close of the film, I had the impression that I was imposing uponAbdel's nap time. I packed away the puzzles, books, and colored pencils, and Rajaa and Abdel saw me to the door. Sharing smiles of pearly whites, we said our goodbyes and good evenings.

The global scope hones in on and concludes with one thought. In the few visits I have shared with this family I have come to articulate a question:
How do I act among a family displaced in a country that invaded, now occupies, and promises reconstruction for their own country of origin?
While I never felt like the question was at the forefront of our relationship, it was indeed the parameters for our introduction. Thus far, I have not an answer.

Viticulture

While viticulture describes the cultivation of grapevines, biodynamic viticulture narrows in on cultivating grapevines for the production of wine under the authority of the cosmos, to the life giving forces of the universe. It barters with the land to yield a high quality wine, revealing not only the character of the soil in which it grew, but also a total embodiment of the energies that filtered through from roots to must. Those energies are archetypes for “anything under the sun”. Forces of gravity, of magnets, of light, and of heat; follies of weather–droughts, humidity, floods; and faculty of objects or ideas of higher sophistication such as the use of the cow horn as an for growing bacteria–the quintessential elementals that influence and motivate every living organism. Biodynamic viticulture does not like weak or passive adherence, and those certified by the Demeter Association rarely cite market incentives as reasons for adherence. Rather, the strict practice and belief of Biodynamics files under one general motive: Return earth to the Earth.

By its own right, Biodynamics claims that certain forces of the universe have been numbed so that the cavity of a growing population could be filled quickly as well as to reconcile the pain of hunger and war that might ravage such a future if those desperate people maintain such a path. While wine could not sustain a hungry civilization, it heeds to the same soil as wheat or corn and shares a common language with the science of the intangible elements of the human experience. Aromas, tastes, and harmonies are among several nouns --be them reminiscent of places or things-- cited in a glass of wine. Laws of light, gravity, and time lollygag in the relatively basic theories and conversations that people have with the universe. True, the fact that we can bottle wine to a certain level of stability and preservation as well as maintain light by a bulb and switch indicates a fairly clear example of an understanding worldly and intentional in temperament. To say a bottle of wine is your finished product however, is as silly as saying that the infant is the finished product of a man and woman: Both wine and an infant are living organisms, interacting and engaging with their self and the environment, forever developing until death do them part. Wine indeed sours into vinegar and children wrinkle into raisins. While the processes between wine and vinegar and child and elder are no enigma, the capacities that give rise to life at all are rather mystical.

Go on..

My ideas are indeed the bastards of curiosity and ignorance. At the point where my curiosity with terrorism and viticulture gained authority I approached a single question, "What have you learned as an undergraduate?" The right by which ignorance named the dance was the very same right that asked me to take another step.

Restoring revolution: Wahhabism is to fundamental Islam as Biodynamics is to the cosmos.

Reorder: Jihad is to foreign and domestic encroachment on Islam as "preparation 500" is to sterile soil on the vineyard.

Restart: Osama bin Laden is to radical Islam as Nicolas Joly is to alternative agriculture.

Voilá the return to the constitution of being. Now to write without sounding like two girls chit chatting on a long, hot bus ride ("She said..." "He said..." "She was like..." "He was like..." "I can't believe he said...!").

Buh-buh-buh bold

The origins of two green revolutions anchor on the historical harbors of the early 1900s: Biodynamics and Wahhabism. The former is a response to the use of those chemicals that were advanced as weaponry and sustained on the farm. The latter speaks to the taint that resides in interpreting the Koran and applying that personal interpretation. Together in history, Biodynamics and Wahhabism penetrate our present in a very real way: Together, they show our role in the environment; seperately, biodynamics is a reproach to using chemicals as "an expansion of the battleground in the environment," and Wahhabism was most recently used to show the demise of democracy by the hands of democrats. Industrialized farming and radical Islam dictate the value of and play a role in the assisted suicide of its members and audience.

Viticulture and Osama bin Laden are casted as major characters in these revolutions at large and my endeavor at small. They are the "Life Forces" of my research.