I have good news and bad news. Good news first: I think I have found a decent way to cross-promote my China/Divide posts on this blog without doing all this ad hoc reposting.

Bad news: it’s a technical solution that will need to wait for a site overhaul, although that is not too far off, time permitting.

Conclusion: for readers of both this blog and China/Divide, have a little patience and this will all be over soon.

For other folks, here is an exerpt and link to my last C/D post, “Et In Arcadia Ego: Romancing the Countryside,” which covers the topic of romantic notions of the countryside and farmers. It’s an interesting cross-cultural phenomenon. If you’re a liberal arts type especially, you should enjoy the post.

Let’s face it. We all do it. Every­one has an image tucked back into their brains some­where, an ide­al­ized notion of the pas­toral life. So many peo­ple in so many coun­tries share this roman­tic idea that it must be a com­mon human trait, some­thing that hear­kens back to the time we all put down those flint weapons and picked up those first prim­i­tive plow­shares. As it turned out, grow­ing crops leads to a much longer life, as opposed to hunt­ing wild beasts (includ­ing each other) for a liv­ing. Good call, forebears.

But the way that we roman­ti­cize our own pri­vate Gar­den of Eden varies con­sid­er­ably around the world. Dif­fer­ent coun­tries have dif­fer­ent roman­tic notions of the pas­toral life, or as I like to call it,  farmer fetishes. In the U.S., where the small farmer is prac­ti­cally an obso­lete notion, the fetish is used quite suc­cess­fully by rent seek­ers in the great farm sub­sidy racket (USD 15 bil­lion plus went to fake yeo­man farm­ers last year).

(Read the rest of the post here)