Menace In Europe Part 6

In 2001, Bove took part in a large-scale destruction of genetically modified crops in Brazil, the land of his father's genetic modification triumph. He popped up again in Porto Alegre for protests during the conference of the World Social Forum, and in Mexico at the end of the Zapatista March. He was sighted in India, leading an enormous demonstration against a conference on GMO plants organized by the transnationals, and spotted again in France, urinating on a bale of imported wheat. One might wonder how he found the time to farm.

Later that year he was arrested again for destroying genetically modified rice and maize samples at CIRAD, a government-sponsored biotech research station in Montpellier. His Confederation Paysanne took crowbars and sledgehammers to a CIRAD greenhouse, then pulled up and burned a thousand genetically modified rice plants, simultaneously destroying computer files holding the company's research data. When in response the police yanked Bove from his bed at sunrise and whisked him off to jail by helicopter, the Confederation Paysanne began issuing press releases within nanoseconds: it was outrageous, they protested, to arrest a farmer just before the morning milking.

One of the more inexplicable aspects of Bove's activist agenda has been his agitation on behalf of Ya.s.ser Arafat and the Palestinians. In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada-when the random ma.s.s murder of Israelis was a near-daily occurrence-Bove was found in Ramallah, protesting the Israeli occupation. This was not his first visit to the West Bank. A June 21, 2001, story in the Independent of London described an earlier confrontation between the Israelis and Bove's international activist colleagues: "'No violence! No violence!' chanted Mr. Bove and his friends. A group of Palestinians nearby took up chanting but maybe misheard the French accent as they shouted, 'No peace! No peace!'" 5 Throughout France, Bove's devotees have followed his lead on this issue. Not long after Bove's visit to Ramallah, I spent a week at a yoga clinic on a biodynamic farm in Provence run by two members of Bove's Confederation Paysanne. Prominently displayed in the dining room, interleaved with brochures describing the farm's organic pate, were tracts calling for the interposition of an international police force in Occupied Palestine. The link between pate and Palestine is at first blush unclear, but Bove explains it thus: The occupation is an agricultural issue at heart; the Israelis, he says, are "putting in place-with the support of the World Bank-a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East into globalized production circuits, through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labor."6 It is of course difficult, by means of this ideological framework, to explain why the Israelis keep razing those Palestinian olive groves.

THE SECOND LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

Jose Bove was born again in Antwerp, less than a century after the turn of the millennium. Tanchelm of Antwerp, a failed diplomat for the county of Flanders, entered his second career as a wandering preacher and heretic in 1112. According to the Chapter of Utrecht, his eloquence was extraordinary. He began, like so many propheta of the era, by condemning corrupt clerics, then broadened his attack to the Church tout court. Churches, he said, were no better than wh.o.r.e-houses. Like other Boves throughout the ages, he adroitly attached his followers' sense of spiritual unease to their most pressing economic grievance: according to the chapter, "He easily persuaded the populace to withhold t.i.thes from the ministers of the Church, for that is what they wanted to do."7 The area from which Tanchelm preached had for many years been swept by communal insurrections. From the Rhine Valley to Utrecht, from Flanders to northern France, town after town had risen up against its feudal suzerains. The historian Norman Cohn tells us that these movements were organized by the merchants, and that the merchants' goals were more worldly than transcendental: they were particularly exercised by high dues and tariffs. When unable to achieve their aims peacefully, they organized insurrectionary societies, setting fire to cathedrals and attacking Church officials. Tanchelm's rhetoric about priestly corruption proved quite a convenient accompaniment to this species of vandalism, much as the present-day Bove's rhetoric about corruption quite usefully matches his followers' frequently violent demands for protective trade barriers against foreign compet.i.tion. The words the modern Bove uses to describe capitalists, elected governments, multinationals, and the World Trade Organization are from the same lexicon: Parasites. Vampires.8 But this is not to describe the Boves's followers-then or now-as ideologically disingenuous. On the contrary. They were and are true believers. Tanchelm's charisma was legendary; his flock, according to the Chapter of Utrecht, was blindly devoted, rushing to make offerings to him, throwing their jewels in his coffers.

Tanchelm, like so many of the Boves, had a gift with women. Many of the millenarian sects encouraged a kind of s.e.xual libertinism not generally a.s.sociated in the modern mind with the Christian tradition; Tanchelm's was one of them. Because he was G.o.d incarnate, Tanchelm avowed, intercourse with him was a sacred act. It appears that many women agreed. The canons of Utrecht were powerless to put an end to his agitation and troublemaking, so great was his influence, until, at some time around 1115, Tanchelm was helpfully killed by a priest.

Messiahs of this kind, Cohn observes, typically arose in Europe not among the poor as such, but among those in the lower strata of society who faced a challenge to their agrarian way of life, and who had lost their faith in traditional values. Europe experienced just such a social crisis in the late eleventh century, and from this moment, we see Boves born everywhere; indeed, in the Valley of the Rhine there is an unbroken tradition of revolutionary millenarianism until well into the sixteenth century. The circ.u.mstances in which the Boves thrived appear to have been quite uniform: They arose in areas where economic and social change was rapid, and where living circ.u.mstances had come to differ significantly from Europe's customary, settled agricultural life. As the population grew throughout the Middle Ages, so did the cities. The newly urbanized, particularly the displaced peasants, found themselves bewildered by the demands of the primitive capitalism of the town, and disoriented by the loss of their traditional social and kinship networks. To them, the Boves were irresistible. For these people, Cohn observes, "Any disturbing, frightening, or exciting event-any kind of revolt or revolution, a summons to a crusade, an interregnum, a famine, anything in fact which disrupted the normal routine of social life-acted on the people with peculiar sharpness and called forth reactions of peculiar violence."9 Then and now, the Boves's followers came from the same cla.s.s, and as the present Bove has remarked, the current movement is "understandable, given all the agricultural and workplace traumas that are happening." 10 Salvationist cults, led by charismatic, messianic prophets, gave these lost souls a sense of belonging and a mission-a mission, no less, of transcendent, global significance: the total transformation of society into a utopia based on a mythic Christian past.

They still do.

THE MODERN PROPHET OF CROP WORSHIP.

I should put my cards on the table: I am not unsympathetic to Jose Bove. The questions he raises about modern agriculture are not trivial or easily dismissed. I cannot disagree with him when he argues that we know too little about the long-term environmental and health effects of GMO crops to permit the corporations that manufacture them- and stand to profit enormously from them-to be the chief arbiters of their safety.

Nor am I sure that I trust our governments to make these judgments, either. I lived in England during the Thatcher era, when worried consumers first began to fear a link between mad cow disease and its human a.n.a.logue, the deadly and ghastly variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob. I distinctly remember the British agriculture minister appearing on television, shoveling a burger into his bewildered four-year-old daughter's mouth. See? It's safe. Several years later, a British health secretary announced the probable link between cattle and the human form of the illness.

I am sympathetic, too, to Bove's indignation about the cruelty and inhumanity of modern factory and battery farming, and to his charge that ma.s.s agricultural production techniques endanger both our health and the environment. The mad cow epidemic appears to have been the direct consequence of the grotesque practice of feeding unsanitary animal remains to herbivores. Animals' immune systems, Bove holds, are weakened when farmers rely overmuch on antibiotics and growth hormones; disease is easily spread among overcrowded animals. Epidemics are the inevitable consequence. The British were forced to torch more than a million farm animals during the 2001 hoof-and-mouth crisis. It was a revolting spectacle. Bove says he is against that, and I am against that, too. Nor can I disagree with him when he says that ma.s.s-produced junk food does not make for an optimal human diet.

The man is charming, I'll give you that. "The first thing you notice about Jose are his eyes-a luminous blue, full of warmth. His smile is never far away-the lines around his eyes always seem to herald it,"11 gushes Gilles Luneau. There is that charisma. All the women have a crush on him. He recently left his wife of more than thirty years for a younger woman. (Before then, the media was much taken by the strength of the couple's bond and their long-standing shared pa.s.sion for activist causes. Now she denounces him as a dangerous demagogue. Journalists have been inclined to ignore this awkward development.) I am not at all sympathetic, however, to Bove's stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor to his enthusiasm for the unfortunately named Kongra-Gel, the newly reconst.i.tuted PKK, a loathsome rabble of Kurdish separatists who const.i.tute one of the world's most disgusting terrorist groups, and I say this in full awareness that the compet.i.tion for claim to this t.i.tle is stiff. The members of Kongra-Gel are child killers and beheaders with the best of them. Bove recently declared his intention to join Kongra-Gel as a protest against its inclusion on the EU's list of terrorist organizations. Nor have I much sympathy with Bove's cliched, thoughtless opposition to U.S. military policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which involves the inevitable wearying collection of neo-Marxist claims. I don't need to spell them out- you've heard them all before.

But it is not through any reasoned position-certainly not on these issues-that Bove has achieved his celebrity. As Eric Hoffer rightly remarks in The True Believer, a rising ma.s.s movement attracts a following "not by its doctrines and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence."12 Just so. The real source of Bove's popularity is this: He has managed to transform a scientific question-What is the best and safest way to produce food?-into a quasi-spiritual one. Bove is the modern prophet of crop worship.

Bove is, in fact, a neo-Christian heretic, just like all the Boves before him.

A PERENNIAL EUROPEAN PERSONALITY.

In the popular imagination of farmers in the developing world, Bove looms large, to be sure, but larger still looms the figure of Norman Borlaug. His name is unknown in the developed world, though he is the greatest hero of the poor in all of human history. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased agricultural yields in the 1960s and 1970s. In Mexico, India, China, and beyond, Borlaug is credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation. For this, he won the 1970 n.o.bel Peace Prize.

Borlaug, who is now in his nineties, views GMOs as the future of the Green Revolution, essential to boosting crop production as the world's population-projected to be more than 8 billion by 2025- increases. Without GMOs, he believes, starvation will ensue. He is intensely contemptuous of Bove and his a.s.sociates, whom he holds to be pampered European imbeciles who know nothing about hunger. According to Borlaug, and to many of Bove's critics, there is so far very little evidence that GMOs are dangerous and much evidence that they are not. Indeed, the development of pest-resistant crop varieties appears to be beneficial to the environment inasmuch as it reduces the need for chemical spraying.

Who knows? I certainly don't. This much is clear, though: As a direct consequence of Bove's activism, France in 1998 p.r.o.nounced a two-year moratorium on certain types of transgenic plant research and production. The producers of GMO crops have lost the enormous European market, and it has cost them a fortune. The repeated destruction of their experimental plants has left them hesitant to continue their research. The effect of Bove's campaign has been to delay significantly the development of genetically improved crop varieties. Because of the publicity Bove has generated, consumers in the Third World are intensely fearful of GMOs. Some states of Brazil have forbidden their import. In 2002, as 6 million Zimbabweans faced famine, their government rejected an American donation of 10,000 metric tons of whole-grain corn because the shipment might have contained genetically modified grain.28 Farmers throughout Africa are reluctant to plant GMO crops because they cannot be exported to European markets. Bove's critics charge that he has therefore already doomed many in the developing world to hunger and death, and I am not sure they are wrong.

My point here is not to resolve the question. My point is that Bove is an ancient historic figure, a perennial European personality, who has adapted himself splendidly to this modern debate. In this sense, he is much more (and much less) than he seems.

THE THIRD LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

Jose Bove was born again sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century as Jacob, a renegade monk from Hungary. Preaching in Picardy, the Master of Hungary led the Crusade of the Shepherds, the first of the century's great anarchic movements. By all accounts he was a prepossessing and vastly eloquent figure. He declared that G.o.d was displeased with the vanity and ostentation of the French n.o.bility and had chosen the shepherds, instead, to carry out his work. (Boves throughout history have had an affinity for sheep.) Peasants rushed to convene under the Master's banner; soon they were joined by a motley a.s.sortment of criminals and rabble-rousers. Together they became known as the Pastoureaux-the original Confederation Paysanne; the word means the same thing. They marched, armed with pitchforks and pikes, into the villages of France, intimidating local authorities. When they ran short of provisions, they resorted to pillaging, but often the locals put all their possessions at the crusaders' disposition, for they were much admired. The French singer Francis Cabrel has described the current Bove as "one of the last courageous, natural, honest voices left in a world where the rest are tarnished by compromise," and this is exactly how the Master of Hungary and his disciples were perceived. 13 Much of the Master's vitriol was directed against the merchant capitalists in the towns. We see now the emergence of a kind of cla.s.s consciousness the current antiglobalists would readily recognize, particularly in its agricultural angst. Among proverbs and miracle plays written by the poor, we find sentiments that would not have been out of place in Millau or Porto Alegre: "Magistrates, provosts, beadles, mayors-nearly all live by robbery. . . . They all batten on the poor, they all want to despoil them. . . . They pluck them alive. The stronger robs the weaker." "Good working men make the wheaten bread but they will never chew it; no, all they get is the siftings from the corn, and from good wine they get the dregs and from good cloth nothing but the chaff."14 From the contemporary Bove, we learn something similar: "The multinationals are taking over, denying large numbers of farming families access to the land and the possibility of feeding themselves."15 One might wonder if the rhetoric is not the same because the conditions are the same: Is it not the case that then, as now, the poor are exploited by the rich? Not quite. In India and Pakistan-thanks to the same free market and the Green Revolution that Bove deplores- GNP has in fact been rising steadily-by as much as an order of magnitude-since the formation of the World Trade Organization's progenitor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as have per capita income, living standards, and life expectancy. Hunger has markedly diminished. So has infant mortality. If the industries mentioned by Bove are suffering, many more are thriving. In fact, I'll just get this out of my system right now: The free market is the only economic system in history that has ever succeeded in providing basic standards of living for large populations, at least without herding the bulk of them into forced labor camps. If in doubt about this point, consult footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Notice in which direction the people are running. No, Bove's complaint is not about fact; it is about ancient-and I do mean ancient- force of habit.

The Master of Hungary preached against the clergy, attacking them for their hypocrisy and greed. He promised his crusaders they would be received with miracles when they reached the Holy Land. His bands marched through Paris and Tours and Orleans, putting clerics to the sword and drowning them, all to the enthusiastic approval of the watching crowds.

At Bourges, the Master of Hungary preached against the Jews and sent his men to destroy the Torah scrolls. In this regard, he was typical of Boves throughout the ages; they have traditionally been anti-Semites. In the eyes of the crusading pauperes, the final battle against the Prince of Evil-believed to be soon at hand-was to commence with the smiting of the Jews. The popular imagination of the Middle Ages cast Jews as terrifying demons, perverted ingrates who refused to admit the divinity of Christ, inheritors of the monstrous guilt of his murder. Inevitably, then as now, Jews were a.s.sociated with trade, capitalism, and usury. A particularly venomous and unremitting hatred of the Jew gripped the imagination of the millenarian ma.s.ses at the time of the first crusades; the eschatology of the Second Coming a.s.sociated Jews with the Antichrist himself, with the peoples of Gog and Magog, who fed on human flesh and corpses. In popular art Jews were portrayed as l.u.s.tful torturers who castrated children for sport and ripped babies from their mothers' wombs to drink their blood. Their power was held to be growing, their sins and sorceries more and more untrammeled, more and more outrageous. This was to be expected, for the End was nigh. In the next half century, nearly all the Jews in the southwest of France were to be ma.s.sacred.

Shortly after his speech at Bourges, Jose Bove, the Master of Hungary, was pursued by irritated burghers and chopped to pieces.

A FAMILIAR TASTE FOR VANDALISM AND VIOLENCE.

We see in the present Bove's movement, and the personalities of those who surround him, much that is familiar. (Bove, an avid student of European peasant revolts, is well aware of this.) First, there is the remarkable fact that the hero of the peasants has chosen to make his case through vandalism, rather than through legal organs of political persuasion. He justifies this by arguing that the dangers posed by GMOs and by h.o.m.ogenized, modern farming techniques are so vast that he has no moral choice. But again, the dangers of GMOs are abstract and unproved. This does not mean they are not real, but it does suggest that they may not be the true source of the emotive power Bove has managed to harness.

Consider this: We have known for more than fifty years that tobacco will kill some 25 percent of its users. No one in Europe takes to the streets about this, or ransacks the offices of the corporations that promote this lethal product. Bove, populist champion of the public health, is rarely seen without his pipe, which he is forever stoking and tamping and puffing. His followers find this very charming. If Bove were concerned above all about disease and health, putting that pipe away would be the more rational place to start. There are no protesters rioting about France's rate of vehicular homicide, one of the highest in the First World. We see no protesters in Europe demanding greater public (or private) funding to combat AIDS, even though AIDS is the biggest threat to global health in the history of the human race, particularly in the developing world. Clearly, this isn't just about rational fear and real risk.

And why, precisely, does Bove believe that he has no means of political expression beyond the destruction of private property? "When," he asks, "was there a public debate on genetically modified organisms? When were farmers and consumers asked what they think about this? Never." 16 But this is patently untrue: The public debate on genetically modified organisms has been endless; a quick search on Google will prove this. In 1999, for example, scientists extensively debated the dangers of GMOs in Nature and The Lancet. Throughout Europe, GMOs have been discussed in newspapers, in scientific journals, in women's magazines, in government commissions convened specifically to investigate the issue. They have been discussed on television; they have been debated on the floor of most European parliaments. And throughout Europe, people have been given a chance to vote for candidates who champion their views about GMOs, in regular elections that are generally agreed by observers to be relatively free and fair. The fact that voters have not elected candidates who embrace Bove's philosophy would suggest that they don't agree with him.

Bove hasn't much use for the franchise. "I myself wonder whether one should vote at all," he says. As for the suggestion that he himself might run for office, and use the power of persuasion to pursue his agenda democratically and legally, he replies, "Never." 17 In the courtroom in Montpellier, Bove concluded, "Yes, the action was illegal, but I lay claim to it because it was legitimate." 18 He did not, however, specify the source of this legitimacy, and it is certainly not clear what it might be, if it is not the popular will. French voters may be wrong about GMOs-even catastrophically wrong-but surely it is an error to suggest that the remedy for this is the rule of the mob. We know what lies at the end of that tunnel.

"It was the Americans who led the way in all this," Bove says. "They were the ones who threw the tea overboard in Boston Harbor because they were fed up with taxation without representation. That was an American example."19 The comment contains its own reb.u.t.tal. The Boston Tea Party was a response to taxation without representation. France has enjoyed universal manhood suffrage since 1944. Bove, like every man and woman in France, has the right to vote. His is most certainly not the American example.

But it is quite a good French example, as we are seeing.

THE FOURTH LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

Jose of Flora, or Joachim, as he is more commonly known, was born in Calabria in 1145 to a middle-cla.s.s family, as Boves are usually born. Joachim was the most significant apocalyptic thinker of the Middle Ages-a more intellectual Bove than most. He began his career unremarkably as an official in the Sicilian court of Palermo. After a spiritual conversion, he set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; when he returned, he lived as a hermit for a number of years before joining the Cistercian Order. (It is striking that so many of the Boves were hermits before they were activists; the current Bove, at the age of twenty-one, hid from the police in an isolated farm high in the Aspe Valley, part of the Basque region, for nearly a year. There he made yogurt.) Joachim's linear theory of history was the most complete known to Europe until the advent of Marxism, and was in many ways Marxism's precursor. His inspiration was to find in the Scriptures concealed clues to the pattern of history itself, which was to unfold in three progressive stages, the Age of the Law, the Age of the Gospel, and the Age of the Spirit. The final age would be a utopia of enlightened consciousness and freedom. This inadvertently subversive doctrine-he was not consciously heterodox-has been the clear inspiration for Continental theories of trinitarian historical evolution ever since; it has reappeared, for example, among the German Idealist philosophers, and in the theory of historic progress espoused by the French proto-fascist Auguste Comte.

From the Scriptural clues, Joachim determined, the future could be predicted, and that future was the Apocalypse, near at hand (it was due in 1260, he thought). By the late twelfth century, he had become known throughout Europe for these views, which acquired by the end of his life a decidedly anticlerical l.u.s.ter. Joachim prophesied the replacement of the Roman Church by a universal monastery to which all men would belong. This egalitarian, anti-elite vision of the future proved particularly inspiring to a new generation of revolutionary millenarians. Widely circulated throughout late medieval Europe, his texts furnished a vocabulary by which to indict the increasingly corrupt bureaucracy of the medieval Church. Joachim himself never attacked the papacy directly, but others, particularly radical Franciscans, drew from his writings the conclusion that the pope was none other than the Beast.

Was Joachim truly a Bove? At first glance it might seem not-no rabble behind him, no sheep to speak of-but his sense of history is Bove through and through. The recent Bove, too, sees inevitable, sequential phases of history characterized by particular inst.i.tutional structures, all leading to a final, universal expansion of consciousness. "History shows," says the new Bove, "that each phase of political development has a corresponding inst.i.tutional form: France's response to the Industrial Revolution was the nation-state; the WTO is the expression of this phase of the liberalization of world trade."20 His manifesto, cowritten with his confrere in activism, fellow farmer Francois Dufour, is t.i.tled The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food. One section is t.i.tled "A New Consciousness." That new consciousness, the authors believe, is now dawning. If Jose of Fiore saw the portent of the new era in the emergence of Saladin, the current Bove sees one in the events in Seattle: "Seattle was a historic event, marking the emergence of a new awareness on a world scale." As Joachim predicted, this new consciousness heralds a clearer apprehension of the Antichrist. "In Nice, Prague, Genoa, there has been a real sense of a different sort of consciousness," says Jose of Millau. "With the movement against a monolithic world-economic system, people can once again see the enemy more clearly."21 As Joachim insisted, the new consciousness will not be restricted to the elites. "We are witnessing the rise of a new awareness on a world scale," echoes Dufour, and "confronting issues. .h.i.therto only dealt with by experts."22 If Joachim's followers were heartened by his message, so are the contemporary Bove's: "The struggle is giving them renewed confidence in the possibility of changing things," says Dufour. "They were waiting for a sign." 23 A sign from what? It is as if this vocabulary were programmed into the genome.

"Each new rally," Dufour adds, "holds out hope, is proof that the worldwide challenge is being maintained. . . . It's an odd sort of militancy, with no specific political project."24 Of course there is no political project. That is because this is a spiritual project.

RITUAL, RELATIONSHIP, FAMILY, LOVE, TRADITION.

The foreword to The World Is Not for Sale is written by the prominent antiglobalization activist and author of No Logo Naomi Klein. "Jose Bove and Francois Dufour," she writes, "have come to stand for a way of life in which our relationship to food and nature is grounded in respect. For them, food is more than bodily fuel; it is ritual, relationship, family, love, tradition, and so much else."25 It is?

Ritual, relationship, family, love, tradition. A potent aphrodisiac for people longing, if obviously unconsciously, for the revival of ancient social and kinship bonds, for a religious tradition they have lost. In the same book, interviewer Gilles Luneau lowers the level of discourse, theologically speaking, to the frankly neopagan: "Wheat, maize and rice are more than just crops. They are the outcome of a fusion of sun, water, and soil. In eating, humans inscribe themselves in the cycles of the universe, and this is far more profound and basic than making money." Bove agrees that his activism represents a quest for some kind of sustenance beyond the material: "We eat," he laments, "but don't nourish ourselves, even on the farm." He mourns "the vacuity of much of modern life," and the way even "our deaths, like our food, have become standardized." His program, he admits, goes "beyond the defense of working conditions, incomes or jobs to challenge the social and ecological purpose of work and human activity." The spiritual yearning in these comments is palpable.

Bove does not really deny that the free market and the globalization he deplores have brought unprecedented prosperity to Europe. The downtrodden of Europe are not physically oppressed, he says. They are mentally oppressed. "These days, in our post-industrial society, social awareness against alienation is more likely to come from thinking things through than from experience of more traditional overt exploitation." 26 The emphasis is mine.

I know what he's talking about. I, too, sometimes find myself uneasily thinking things through, late at night, when everyone else is sleeping. I wonder what it all means. I suppose you could call it alienation. If I cannot really bring myself to believe that the cure for this is the purification of the food chain, it is perhaps because I am not a natural mystic.

THE FIFTH LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

Sometime in the middle of the fifteenth century, Bove was born again in what is now southern Germany. Hans Boheim, the Piper of Niklashausen, was-again-a shepherd. Before his visitation by the Virgin Mary, in 1476, he had also been a popular entertainer, hence his name.

The Virgin conveyed to him a message: G.o.d was greatly displeased, but would suffer Himself to give the people one last chance. The Piper was to abandon his pipes and burn his drum, then bring the pure Word of G.o.d to the people. All men were to journey on a pilgrimage to the Virgin of Niklashausen. A dreadful punishment awaited those who failed to heed the summons.

The formerly half-witted and inarticulate peasant found himself suddenly possessed of unnatural eloquence. Adoring crowds streamed from great distances to hear him preach. He claimed miraculous powers for himself, teaching that his intercession had prevented G.o.d from killing all the corn and vines. Inevitably, he turned against the clergy, p.r.o.nouncing them worse, in their corruption and avarice, than Jews. He enjoined his followers to withhold from them all taxes and t.i.thes. This message was, as usual, well received.

The Piper's innovation was his vision of the coming Kingdom, which would not be a heavenly Jerusalem but a return to an imaginary past, a primal and egalitarian State of Nature. Wood, water, pasturage, fishing, and hunting would be enjoyed equally by all in this earthly paradise, as they had been, he imagined, in ancient times, before they were usurped by the n.o.bility. Rulers of every stripe would be overthrown. All would live as equals and brothers.

Vast hordes of the urban poor and peasantry abandoned their workshops and their flocks to follow him. Camps sprang up around his village, with tents. The bishop and town council, greatly alarmed, plotted to have the Piper arrested, seizing him in the early hours and whisking him off to prison on horseback, no doubt outraging the peasants by disrupting a farmer before the morning milking. The next day, thousands of his followers marched to the castle where he was imprisoned. They drove off the bishop's emissary with stones, then tried to storm the town, shouting the Piper's name. As in Seattle, their protests provoked a violent response from the authorities, who brought out the cavalry and responded with cannon shots. Some forty demonstrators were killed. The rest fled in a panic.

The Piper was tried and found guilty of heresy and sorcery. He was burned at the stake. The current Bove, recalling with nostalgia the "shining crowds" in Millau, has remarked that "our journey from the farm to the court on the tractor trailer was like a trip to the scaffold."27 Boves in the past, I imagine, also found themselves likening their journeys to trips to the scaffold, probably because they were taking trips to the scaffold. By the standards of his predecessors, the current Bove must surely count his sentence lenient.

THE GREAT EUROPEAN AFFLICTION.

Malbouffe. This concept is important. Bove coined this neologism. As Gilles Luneau correctly observes, there is no word in English that captures its full meaning. It is generally translated as "junk food," but that dismissive, vaguely ironic Americanism does not capture the full horror of bad bouffe, with its intimation of contamination, pollution, poison. The word mal in French should in this case should be translated as "evil," as in Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. "The sound of it provokes a feeling of nausea," writes Luneau. The word, adds Bove, has "become universally accepted to express a confused unease, a mixture of guilt and accusation."28 I know that feeling, too, although again, I am not convinced it has anything to do with impure food.

There it is, in example after example: To his followers, Bove stands for meaning in a meaningless world. "In its rush to make life as fast, efficient and wealthy as possible, many overlooked humanity's hunger for dignity and a way of life that fills oneself with something other than meaninglessness," writes one of Bove's admirers on an Internet webzine aimed at students.29 From another admirer on the Internet: Jose's battle is not merely a battle of farmers. Jose's battle is one of people and the earth. Tracy Chapman once wrote a song with the line, "All you have is your soul." Now we have the makings of a political alignment. The 50,000 people who came to the trial in Millau, following on Seattle, represent a global search for meaning, a global need to live in our hearts and bodies, grounded in the soil and sun, using our intelligence to re-create modern society as respectful of us and our sustenance. 30 Just look at this vocabulary! Souls, global searches for meaning, the re-creation of the earth itself! Clearly in using these metaphors of food and hunger, of sustenance and nurturance, Bove has tapped a deep mine in the collective unconscious, a profound longing for something that combats meaninglessness-the great European affliction. But what, precisely, does Bove propose as the remedy? I have no doubt that anyone who believes an abundance of local sheep farms will cure his sense of aching emptiness will think again after inspecting a herd of sheep at close range over a period of several months.

Curiously, these very same people, according to survey after survey, are apt to declare themselves deeply concerned that George W. Bush prays a lot.

THE SIXTH LIFE OF JOSE BOVE.

The next Bove's name has, like the first, been lost in the mists of time. The antique madman has come to be known as the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine. This Bove, I'm afraid, is distinctly unpleasant. He lived in the beginning of the sixteenth century in the Alsace (we think), and wrote in German. His Book of a Hundred Chapters was the most complete expression of the millenarian eschatology of the Middle Ages.

As usual, it all began with a personal visitation from G.o.d, who as usual was vexed with man's sinfulness, but had as usual decided to give him one last chance. G.o.d charged the Revolutionary with the task of organizing an a.s.sociation of pious laymen; soon, G.o.d a.s.sured him, a savior would come to establish a messianic kingdom, where bread, barley, wine, and oil would be distributed at low prices. First, however, the Revolutionary's a.s.sociation, the Brethren of the Yellow Cross, must stamp out sin, which in practical terms meant slaughtering sinners, a prospect that aroused the Revolutionary greatly: "Go on hitting them!" he urged. "From the Pope to the little students! Kill them all!"31 The Revolutionary was clear upon this point: the Brethren were the poor; the sinners were the rich, and the Millennium was to put an end to capitalism. Church property would be seized and distributed among the poor. Income derived from property or trade would be confiscated. Private property would be abolished. All goods would be held in common. The emperor (whom he hints would be himself) would urge his subjects to inform on sinful neighbors; sinners would be enjoined to come forth and criticize themselves at special tribunals, to be established in each parish. The judges would punish them with "cruel severity." Jews, of course, would be annihilated.

The Revolutionary was a pa.s.sionate German nationalist. He envisioned the restoration of Germany to what he imagined was its utopian past, from which it had fallen as a consequence of capitalism and a conspiracy among the inferior, non-Germanic people. He prescribed a complete program for the purification of the German race, to be followed by German conquest of the globe. It has been remarked that his vision did not die with him.

He is a dark Bove, to be sure. But he is a Bove nonetheless.

BRINGING MEANING TO AN INDIFFERENT UNIVERSE.

And what, exactly, does the current Bove's objection to "globalization" signify? It is hard to say just what he means by globalization, or what anyone means by the term, which has come to comprise more or less every complaint one might have about modernity, and certainly has nothing to do with that which is global per se, since the movement itself is both quick and proud to describe itself as global. As Bove has said, though, his is a fight against free trade and global capitalism, and that, probably, is as precise a definition of globalization as we'll get from him.

Here, too, some of the specifics of Bove's lament are not thoroughly unreasonable, or at least, earnest people of good will might debate them. For example, he opposes the United States' unfettered agricultural dumping-the practice of exporting commodities produced under high levels of government subsidization, which in turn drives farmers in developing countries out of the global market and destroys local agricultural traditions. And indeed, dumping is a real problem, and it does jeopardize food security in developing countries. That is precisely why Article VI of the GATT allows countries to take action against dumping, and why the WTO's Anti-Dumping Agreement clarifies and expands Article VI.

So why does Bove view the World Trade Organization as the problem, rather than the solution? It is not as if these international agreements were toothless: Most recently, the WTO ruled with Brazil in its dispute with the United States over the dumping of American cotton. Moreover, the WTO is the only formal, coherent forum in the world that exists for the resolution of these disagreements. How does Bove propose that these disputes be resolved instead? He doesn't, but the strong suggestion-from his example-is that he would prefer them to be resolved on the street, with victory awarded to the loudest and most threatening mob. I urge his followers to think this through with care. A world thus governed may not be one in which you wish to live.

It is puzzling, too, that Bove does not seem to grasp a key theoretical point: Dumping is a violation of the principles of free-market economics, not their logical outgrowth. Dumping occurs because government subsidies distort the mechanism of the market. The practice is fundamentally anticapitalist. French farmers are among the most highly subsidized in the world-and Bove likes it just that way-so there is a certain inconsistency in his views.

The peasant uprising, Dufour adds, has come to pa.s.s because people are beginning to understand the sinister forces "lurking behind the opacity of these international inst.i.tutions."32 These inst.i.tutions are actually extremely transparent: the deliberations and judgments of the WTO may be consulted by anyone, in paralyzing, minute detail, at www.wto.org. Dufour's comment to the contrary is puzzling, until we see it for what it is-a vestigial anticlerical reflex.

There is, again, a long historic tradition evident in Bove's wholesale denunciation of the WTO. Boves throughout history have always been intolerant of imperfect, earthly organizations. By the standards of medieval Christianity, for example, the record of the Church was far from deplorable; despite corruption and abuses, most of the clergy led relatively austere lives; they, far more than any other category of medievals, were the caretakers of the poor and the sick. But the revolutionary millenarians, certain of the imminent Second Coming and terrified by it, held the world to higher standards. Norman Cohn writes, It was because of their inordinate expectations that eschatological movements could not-as the Church itself could and did-simply condemn certain specific abuses and criticize certain individual clerics, but had to see the whole clergy in all its doings as the militia of the Antichrist, bound by its very nature to strive for the spiritual and material ruin of Christendom and striving all the more ferociously now that the End was at hand.33 Subst.i.tute global capitalism for the Church (or in the case of the Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, subst.i.tute global capitalism for global capitalism), and think of the clerics, perhaps, as the modern government officials who are presumptively in the pockets of the multinationals. You'll see that the result sounds very similar.

I do not wish to resolve an argument about agricultural dumping here. I mean only to suggest that the degree of emotion that accompanies this debate reveals an underlying agenda that goes well beyond the ostensible message. For all his concern about food security, after all, Bove gives nary a thought to what is overwhelmingly the single greatest cause of hunger today: the use of famine as a military weapon. The Sudanese government has been attempting systematically to annihilate the inhabitants of the Darfur region not by flooding them with underpriced food but by intentionally starving them to death. This is a deliberately conceived, carefully planned, explicitly genocidal, man-made famine. Crises like these are the globe's greatest threat to food security, but where is Bove, and where are the antiglobalization protesters? Their eerie silence suggests, again, that feeding the world may not, in fact, be their chief concern, and is certainly not the source of their pa.s.sion.

Considered in this context, certain comments made by Bove's admirers seem particularly unhelpful. Following Bove's arrest, one antiglobalist organization called Food First declared in a manifesto that Bove's "only 'crime'" was fighting "for the rights of consumers to have access to food that is adequate, culturally appropriate, and produced in a sustainable way."34 If recent history is anything to go by, the "culturally appropriate" food of Sudan is no food at all. Perhaps a graduate student in the school of Edward Said would like to have a look at the grotesquely patronizing idea of "culturally appropriate" food. I leave it as an exercise.