Word: agrarian
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...Agrarian Ritual. When Israel became an independent state in 1948, the dream of the Zionists seemed to be realized. But, Elon contends, the dream come true has strong elements of nightmare. A typical European Israeli is now 45 years old. He has been in and out of uniform since he was 17 or 18. He was a soldier with the British in World War II. He fought in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948, 1956 and 1967. During peaceful intervals he has watched a land of "agrarian ritual" turn into an urban industrial society...
...this Elon sees as producing an old-fashioned nationalism and a "cult of toughness." The kibbutzniks, imbued with an agrarian-romantic zeal, probably never made up more than 8% of the population; now they total less than 4%. In the past they were influential far beyond their numbers. Between 1949 and 1967, about one-third of all Cabinet ministers had worked in a kibbutz. But now the kibbutznik is losing authority as an elite stylist. The "new glamour boys," says Elon, "are high-powered technologists, scientists, management consultants." The true believers have been replaced by "hardboiled 'pragmatic' politicians...
...fancy experts to solve their problems for them. But when Karushchev's new cane cutting-machines mangled every stalk they touched, it became obvious that these experts and their machines were just Russian bears. Their pre-set ideas of development based on an Eastern European model could not help agrarian Cuba...
...country. The population drain in which 3.5 million residents fled the region between 1940 and 1950 was reversed in the last census. In a recent survey six of the ten states with the largest growth rate in new manufacturing plants were states of the Old Confederacy. The agrarian economy of King Cotton has been top pled by agribusiness. Sharecroppers have been replaced by machinery; new cash crops and livestock?peanuts, soy beans, poultry?have idled cotton gins and made rural entrepreneurs out of once hardscrabble farmers. Many of the rest simply moved off the land and into the cities...
...landed gentry from the antebellum mansions who had so long manipulated the state's agrarian economy have yielded to commercial captains from suburban split-levels. Pickpocket politics no longer sets poor white against poor black for scarce jobs; rather it works in a growing job market to depress wages and make union organizing difficult. Growth has been slowed some what by the recession, but a firm federal floor under the Southern economy has so far protected the region from wide fluctuations. Military payrolls and farm subsidies?economic buffers care fully cultivated by the South's high-seniority senators and congressmen?...