They seem built for another gravity: tractors do: high and small-headed and perturbing. The kind of father-surrogate that will prowl after you in dreams: gruff, inexorable, harrowing, but never quite fast enough. And extra-eerie in contrast to that serene, self-involved, always unhelpful farmland around. Now, under the Capitol’s orange-juicesqueezer dome, they once again appear incongruous: anachronistic in two directions: not tyrannosaur, not moon vehicle. I count maybe one hundred left from the Great Farm Protest: it all resembles a prime location International Harvester lot. Here and there the Capitol Mall has been rudely cultivated: deep tread-marking like that of a three-foot-wide screw. Buses—those servile, Uncle Tom machines—have been bumper-to-bumpered around the Mall: a barricade separating someone from someone.
But the tableau is un-vivant this early March afternoon. You see, well . . . media people reported a long while ago that the farm plow-in had four-wheel-driven itself home: no news is no existence: the tractor I see has gone. And to protect those solipsists at ABC-NBC-CBS from discovering an impudent, parallel universe, the D.C. police have reaped the farmers out. Convoyed them just yesterday into Virginia or Delaware: camper and sleeping bag and Sterno. But the tractors remain. It’s as inconvenient as a case of cutworm blight: they’ve gotta commute every day to their own political demonstration.
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