Posted on 01/08/2019 11:02:46 AM PST by yesthatjallen
Since 2005, the Nebraska Center for the Book has had its annual “One Book One Nebraska” selection recognized by the governor.
Not this year. The book selected was “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Family Farm,” which follows the life of Rick Hammond, a York County farmer.
“The book that they are proposing was written by a political activist that really seemed to be out of touch,” Gov. Pete Ricketts said Monday. It “was not going to be something that was going to unify Nebraska.”
The author, Ted Genoways, voiced surprise and concern in a Twitter thread Monday morning, when the proclamation ceremony would have been held.
Genoways told The World-Herald, “I think it’s really disappointing and shocking that the governor would say he doesn’t want the people of Nebraska to hear from a farm family that’s been confronting major issues, and to hear their thoughts as they work through them and try to keep the farm in the family for the next generation.”
SNIP
The Lincoln-based Genoways has done other reporting in Nebraska. For The New Republic, he wrote that environmentalists joined forces “with xenophobes and racists” to oppose a Costco chicken plant being built near Fremont. Ricketts also probably didn’t like Genoways’ reporting on a Nebraska execution, the writer said, or that the family in “This Blessed Earth” opposes the Keystone XL pipeline, which the governor supports.
ETC...
“Ted Genoways is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, an editor-at-large at Pacific Standard, and the author of This Blessed Earth and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Award for Writing and Literature.”
- Wikipedia.
He’s a frothing-at-the-mouth Trump hater.
Check out his Linkedin page. That’s even better.
No, but I know Nebraska, and like many others it has a majority that are traditional, conservative, and a mostly urban liberal minority who think everyone agrees with them. They push for crap like to this to show their liberal friends in more progressive States that they are at least trying to educate the ignorant s#itkickers they have to put up with.
Well said, bigbob.
I am going to side with Ricketts on this one. This book does NOT seem to represent the typical Nebraskan or Nebraska farmer.
There you have it: “. . . contributing writer at Mother Jones and The New Republic, an editor-at-large at Pacific Standard[.]
The family farm lies at the heart of our national identity, yet its future is in peril. Rick Hammond grew up on a small ranch, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in York County, Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their small family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege. Rising corporate ownership of land and livestock is forcing small farmers to get bigger and bigger, assuming more debt and more risk. At the same time, after nearly a decade of record-high corn and soybean prices, the bottom has dropped out of the markets, making it ever harder for small farmers to shoulder their loans. All the while, the Hammonds are confronted by encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies. Far from an isolated refuge beyond the reach of global events, the family farm is increasingly at the crossroads of emerging technologies and international detente.
Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores this rapidly changing landscape of small, traditional farming operations, mapping as it unfolds day to day. This Blessed Earth is both a concise exploration of the history of the American small farm and a vivid, nuanced portrait of one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.
Probably so. In the early 70s, liberals in Kansas were embarrassed to have Bob Dole as their Senator and ridiculed him as “Pineapple Bob”. Libs in red states feel inferior and act out to try to prove they’re just as nuts as their blue state idols.
Idiot author: the Governor did not say or imply that he didn’t want “the people of Nebraska to hear from a farm family that’s been confronting major issues...”.
The author has been a far left advocate his entire life.
Not the typical Nebraska family....
It is entirely the governor’s prerogative to recognize this book selection or not.
In this case, not. Deal with it, weenies.
He’s a communist.
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