Since Nov. 5 and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Lech Walesa’s visit to Western North Carolina, I’ve been stewing about some of the things that he laid down to his audiences during that trip.

To those of us coming of age as part of the 1960s counterculture, Walesa and his Solidarity movement were models of iconic proportions upon which we based many of our own strategies and attempts to derail, or at least side-rail, the engine of the military industrial machine. Solidarity’s successes in Poland as a model for the rest of Europe were the beginnings of the demise of the other totalitarian superpower, and Walesa was the Nelson Mandela of the day. His pro-worker, pro-democracy Solidarity Party became a kind of counter-corporate model for youthful factions looking for a more equitable, socialistic structure of governance to replace the fast train of free-market capitalism with its box cars full of unchecked “progress” and “development.”

So, imagine my surprise, in fact my horror, when getting the opportunity to talk one-on-one, face-to-face with one of the heroes of my youth, and he responded to my concerns about sustainability and the environment with pre-rehearsed diatribes in favor of Reaganomics and the New World Order international policies of George Bush Sr.! There in front of me, 25 years later, was a Lech Walesa, coming off more like a venture capitalist than the trade-union activist and social reformer for the rights of working people and the advocate of local economy he was in his earlier years. He was praising Reagan and his big-business successors as being models and heroes of the Solidarity movement (the very men whom we in the counterculture were trying to unseat!) and all of this, paradoxically, sounding and feeling very much like revisionist history to me as I sat there listening to it coming from the lips of one of this century’s great revolutionaries. Walesa’s whole focus seemed to be on the importance, in fact the inevitability, of “globalization.” That globalization — NAFTA, GATT and a growing mono-culture of global capitalism (led, of course, by the WTO) — was going to save the world from terrorism, poverty and social injustice. My half-hour interview experience had quickly turned into a nightmarish, surrealistic dream, so antithetical it was to what I had expected. So much for expectations! So much for heroes!

While Walesa did have some thought- provoking things to say — that the United States government needs to stop being the police force for the world, and that Cuba is the Jurassic Park of Communism — his dream-like revisionism and his flag-waving allegiance to corporate capitalism has more than troubled my sleep these past couple of months. The allergic reaction I had to Walesa’s “new clothes” caused me, in fact, to be unable to write the commentary piece I was sent out to do, originally, by this paper. The fact of one of my political heroes having fallen from his pedestal right in front of my eyes, and so violently, was more than I could take.

The antidote to my own fall from grace came in the mail last week in the form of a thin book by the Orion Society titled In The Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World. This collection of three essays by Appalachian farmer, poet and cultural activist Wendell Berry was put together following the events of Sept. 11 in an attempt to address some of the more problematic and unasked questions surrounding those events and what has transpired since. So, thanks to this “tincture,” I have finally regained my composure, and am back on the job.

Berry, in these three essays, approaches the events of Sept. 11 from a uniquely economic perspective. Throughout each of these relatively short pieces, he addresses the potential problems inherent in the blind embrace of globalization and the acceptance of a free-market corporate economy. In this sense, In the Presence of Fear is a direct rebuttal to the ideological position laid down by Lech Walesa during his speaking tour of the U.S. back in November.

Berry counters Walesa’s concept of globalization by taking the position that it is a broad-based support of LOCAL economies that is going to save us. These micro economies will save us from a planet of depleted resources, environmental disaster, overpopulation, unemployment and a mono-cultural landscape, and maybe even mass insanity. Instead of being politically correct and praising the progress of global capitalism and the monochroming of cultures worldwide, Berrys is sounding very much like Gary Snyder in his essays on reinhabitation from the 1970s with his division of the human world of the future into (corporate-based) “globalists” and (ecology-based) “planetarlans.” Berry’s over-riding concern in this trilogy of essays is, as he puts it in the title essay “In the Presence of Fear,” that “one of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global ‘free trade,’ whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.” Using this line as a launching pad, he develops and expands in the two remaining essays his position by emphasizing the importance of a more localized economic base for the country, pinpointing the issues of sustainability and human and environmental health. At the heart of his vision for a healthier, more balanced America, is his calling into question the whole ethical and practical reality of “free market capitalism.”

In his insightful and well-written essay “The Idea of a Local Economy,” Berry asks common-sense questions, digging deep into the essence of what, exactly, is implied by the use of the word “free” in the phrase “free market economy?”

“The idea of the global ‘free market,’” writes Berry, “is merely capitalism’s so-far-successful attempt to enlarge the geographic scope of its greed, and moreover to give to its greed the status of a ‘right’ within its presumptive territory. The global ‘free market’ is free to the corporations precisely because it dissolves the boundaries of the old national colonialisms and replaces them with the new colonialism without restraints or boundaries. It is pretty much as if all the rabbits have now been forbidden to have holes, thereby ‘freeing’ the hounds.”

And he goes further, questioning the legitimacy of the very cornerstone of capitalist dogma: competition. “The ‘law of competition’ does not imply that many competitors will compete indefinitely. The law of competition is a simple paradox: Competition destroys competition. The law of competition implies that many competitors, competing without restraint, will ultimately and inevitably reduce the number of competitors to one. The law of competition, in short, is the law of war.”

At a time in history when the world is essentially governed and run by monoglot corporations which are ever-increasingly becoming the “One” referred to in the quote above, Berry, using Wal Mart as his model for this kind of cancerous collectivization, counters any would-be globalist adversaries: “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance ... It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”

Berry has his gloves off at this point and goes on to say, bare-knuckled and emphatically, that “industrialization is the mammon of injustice and is incompatible with civilization.”

To soften and substantiate his blows against the sacred cows of our present American system, Berry stages an impassioned defense of “local economy.” “It is by way of the principle and practice of vocation that sanctity and reverence enter into the human economy. It was thus possible for traditional cultures to conceive that ‘to work is to pray.’ The livelihoods of our small farmers, small business people, and workers are being sacrificed by our government. The global economy is intended as a means of subverting all these aspects of our culture.

“Perhaps the most symptomatic cost of the global economy is the loss of the principle of vocation. It is by the replacement of vocation [and one’s right to choose their vocation] with economic determinism that the global economy destroys the character of a culture from the inside.

“There are some people trying to find ways to use the consumer economies of local towns and cities to preserve the livelihoods of local farm families and farm communities. They want to use the local economy to give consumers an influence over the kind of quality of their food, and to preserve and enhance the local landscape. They want to give everybody in the local community a direct, long-term interest in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their homeland. This is the basis for the idea of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not export local products until local needs have been met.”

While we have been watching television, listening to radio and reading newspapers about this would-be “War on Terrorism,” issues of the environment (case-in-point: the N.C. Clean Smokestacks Bill), financial and social security, and basic human health have been ignored due to a prescribed hysteria and sense of urgency created by the current administration’s loyal corps of press puppies and the new Homelands Security Office. As Berry is quick to point out, all these issues of civil, economic and environmental rights are inter-related, interconnected. He also says that this is not a time for us to lose our heads to our emotions, while all our basic constitutional rights, as well as, for many, their jobs, if not their vocations, here in the U.S. are being hustled away in the shadows while we’re being entertained and dazzled by the fireworks of a modern air war overseas.

Berry thrusts home his point by saying that this is a time to be vigilant: “The Captains of Industry have always counseled the rest of us ‘to be realistic.’ Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favored minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited program, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.”

All this, for many, may be strong medicine after the shock of Sept. 11 and its patriotic aftermath, and after air raids of continuous images of revenge and “justice” by our corporate-sponsored media and government. Even so, this is a perspective and a position that needs a voice. And an eloquent voice, indeed, it has found in Wendell Berry. So, allow Berry and me one more nail in the coffin of Lech Walesa’s evangelical crusade on behalf of globalism, with one last line from In the Presence of Fear: “Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice.” And to that I say: Amen.

(Thomas Crowe is a writer, poet and editor who lives in Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com)