15. The Russian Judge
Life Lessons of a Backyard Gardener
NOTE: This is Chapter 15 of my online book. Enjoy.
Back in the bad old days of the Cold War -- I’m talkin’ the 1970’s, SALT talks, the mother of all “gate” scandals, a peanut farmer president and his beer-slugging brother, gas lines, KC and the Sunshine Band, stagflation, and Soviet leaders who looked like the back end of a Studebaker -- a funny meme emerged from the Olympic Games.
Of course, they didn’t call these things “memes” back then, although the word “meme” was coined in the deep history of that era, to little fanfare. It lay dormant in the common lexicon for forty years, finally rising to its modern stature, and slightly altered meaning, with the dawn of online social networking. Richard Dawkins, then a lecturer at Oxford, coined the term to buttress his lifelong, near monomaniacal campaign to convince free-thinking people that life can invent itself from chemicals, and then scaffold its way to Cervantes in a couple billion years, give or take. For various technical and philosophical reasons, I find this broader thesis less than compelling. But his prose is first rate, and his well-appointed, aging English accent lends the familiar air of credibility.
In an abstract sense, memes are ideas that leverage cultures to reproduce themselves, just as — in Dawkins’ mind — genes leverage their biological hosts to do the same. That is, he posits an interesting reversal of roles, relative to how we view the structure of life. When ruthless genes move around the world in weeks, carried along by modern transportation systems, we call it a “pandemic”. Unhampered by physical location and messy cell division, “cultural genes” called memes can reproduce themselves around the world in seconds. If we take Dawkins’ idea seriously, memes have already conquered the world, with humans their unwitting sponsors. I am not entirely sure that this is an exaggeration.
But enough social and metaphysical commentary. Let us return to the summer of 1972, and to the nineteen-inch black and white television in the family room of my youth, with the obligatory clothes hanger deputized to succeed the long-deceased antenna. The invincible, though youthful U.S. men’s basketball team (as in “never beaten, ever”) faced the grizzled, experienced Soviet team in the final game. The last minute or two of the game endures in basketball infamy ...or glory, depending on your longitude. Describing what happened is impossible, insofar as nobody really knows. After all, not a single soul in the arena had a cell phone, and neither social networks nor the internet they require had been invented. Fuzzy, stone-age video and commentary from the event remain inconclusive. Short story: At the end of a very close championship game, one or both sides got the short end of a curiously flawed stick, probably multiple sticks. After all the official ineptitude dissolved into history, someone had to get the gold. And in this case it was the USSR. In America’s collective mind, America got robbed. Perfection had been stolen.
And so the Meme of the Russian Judge was born. It might seem odd that this story begins where it does, since basketball does not use judges …officially, anyway. If you have ever been on the wrong end of a lame blocking foul, or a mirage three-second violation, you know better. They might call them referees or officials, but in that grimy place where principles meet the real world, you might as well call them judges. And the results, flitting as they do between the flaps of butterflies’ wings, are often arbitrary and chaotic. The difference between basketball and, say, ice dancing is that the folks who run ice dancing mostly dispense with measurable standards, pretexts aside — a group of judges decides who wins. Basketball and other sports have not reached such an advanced stage of acceptance. Instead, they blithely choose to deny that Michael Jordan was welcome to take three or four steps at his discretion, without pretending to dribble the ball. Similarly, we just shrug when the strike zone in playoff baseball looks decidedly different than in the regular season. We accept these things as part of the modern sports-advertising complex.
I don’t follow the Olympics much, so I have no idea if a Russian (or American or Brazilian…) judge has ever shaved a point or two, or ignored or invented the passing flaw in a performance. I choose to assume that they do not, but politics and humans often produce caustic substances that eat through principle. Whether the cause was motivated reasoning or simple incompetence, the lore of the Russian Judge entered the American cultural songbook, thanks in part to those strange few seconds at the end of a basketball game in 1972. Humans have a deep need for explanations, even when the explanations are mostly scapegoats. We shun uncertainty and crave control. Wrong accounts are better than no accounts, false confessions better than no accountability. This is what we tell ourselves. We will have our villain.
One of the most spectacular and reassuring facts of organic gardening is the exquisite and seemingly impenetrable equilibrium that your backyard ecosystem develops over time, entirely on its own. Much like the performance of a well-written play with first-rate actors at the top of their game, your main job is to set the stage and get out of the way. You need not invest in expensive teleprompters, or hang screens around the room to nudge the actors into deeper emotional connection at opportune times. You cannot micromanage greatness; it cannot be explained or enhanced in any sustainable way. You cannot improve Shakespeare, and you cannot upset the give and take between the skilled performers on the stage. You simply clear the path for creativity and talent to do what they do, and appreciate the chilling, organic synergy that emerges.
Well-planned organic gardens have astonishingly few pests. My garden rarely has a visible aphid; my spring lettuce has nary a slug (my kids would argue this point, perhaps with some evidence to back their claim, but I won’t allow an outlier to ruin a good story). You build such a system with diligence, patience and restraint, operating under the golden rule. Be the soil; do unto it as you would have it do unto you. Give the soil what the soil needs, not what humans with financial interests and quaintly oversimplified ideas say that the soil needs. I rarely need to devise an esoteric remedy in my garden, or resort to cryptic incantations, because the system deals with most pathogens on its own, most of the time.
Most pathogens. Most of the time.
Sadly, no garden is Eden in a fallen world. Somewhere along the great arc of your gardening career, the Russian Judge will appear, without reason or cause, to smite your green oasis and end your Olympic gardening streak of perfection. Your tomatoes will acquire Septoria. Your zucchini will succumb to a squash borer. Your cucumbers will be overwhelmed by virus-laden beetles. Some new and alien life form will defeat your prized, thirty year-old chive plant. An intrepid, unrepentant bunny will defy geometry and find a way into the lettuce. An itinerant groundhog will move in one day, realizing that your garden and the area under the nearby shed offer everything that an aspiring, suburban marmot could ever want or need.
We can prepare all we want, plan for success all we want -- and of course we should. When an explanation exists, we can act or learn from mistakes. But sometimes you do everything right, and the engine of fate chuckles cynically at your optimism. Sometimes you don a costume and get a rock. Sometimes the lead in the play gets into an automobile accident on the way to the playhouse. Sometimes you get silver rather than gold. Or clay. And sometimes the bad guys in your garden win a round, and there is no explanation. When it happens, resist the urge to start a destructive war on your own soil, based on assumptions and your need for control. Digest it, learn what you can, and move on.
Stuff happens. Get used to it.