Juice Economy
"there's no unemployment on the land" - Peter Maurin
“I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I’d spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them…it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. No desperate men [he] ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store chasiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about.
— Demon Copperhead
“Poverty today is very different. In our economy you can’t get by without a regular flow of money and that’s because just about all the necessities of life today, besides air and water, are commodities…So, to get money, the lifeb lood of our world—the Guys on the Hill wew utterly dependent upon begging, state or institutional handouts or wage labor. This is poverty of a brand new kind. to single it out, dorothy called it destitution, becauyse it’s poverty without any recourse
Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver, has been a very popular book since it was published in 2022, even more so after it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023.
Whatever the prize, it is highly deserving. I could not put it down and read it in three days flat. It is an absolutely gorgeous novel. Barbara Kingsolver really finished reading Hillbilly Elegy eight years ago and said to JD Vance: hold my beer.
Demon Copperhead is a re-telling of David Copperfield, which I have never read, because Dickens (outside of A Christmas Carol and one-half of Oliver Twist) is a large gap in my cultural education.
But I can’t imagine David Copperfield himself facing any more adversities and cruelties than our hero Damon (nick-named Demon). Reading his story, I realized I was reading the story (approximately) of the guest who was plaguing me. How could I sit and sob with compassion for a boy who only exists on paper and have no compassion for the person in front of me? The story of being not only let-down by a system but downright exploited by it is far from fictional, but just isn’t usually presented from the inside out, with an articulate and sympathetic narrator.
This novel is full of gorgeous, mountainous language—it is grounded in a shared culture and geography, it is lush and vibrant, pictorial and truly eloquent. It’s one of those oral culture books—come from a time before our type-writing and click-clacking did away with our more luscious ways of communicating with our neighbors.
It reminded me of a conversation with my Mexican and Colombian co-workers a year ago, in which we decided that American English lacked many of the more colorful, geographical idioms that peppered Latin American Spanish. But Appalachian English is rooted in a culture that seems to exist in defiance of the rest of the United States. The way that Kingsolver articulates Appalachia reminds me of Peter Maurin’s efforts to establish an “American peasantry.” It exists, it seems, in Appalachia. And they have been hemmed in on all sides by extractive industry.
And you know who echoes Demon’s critique of a life threaded together from the desiccated connective tissues of cars, concrete and cash?
The author of the latest book about the Catholic Worker.
If you are looking for a book to introduce you to the Catholic Worker movement or learn a little bit more about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, my recommendation from now on will be Colin Miller’s We are Only Saved Together.
Although I’ve never witnessed the community that Colin writes about in his book, we love the Millers and the community they have made in Minneapolis. I also had the distinct joy, when spending the winter at my grandmother’s in Raleigh to experience some of the fruits of the community Colin writes about in his book in Durham. He writes about planting the tree, and I’ve seen its fruits.
Colin’s thesis is simply this: the bonds of a Christian community must be the Sermon on the Mount and the practice of the works of mercy. If not, Christians are just a bunch of individual capitalists who go to a building to pray alone, together on Sunday. If Christianity doesn’t challenge the way we form the fabric of our daily lives, then is it really Christianity?
Colin goes through the book, substituting the Sermon on the Mount and the Works of Mercy for the two ordering principles of our current society: technological dependency, which really means we are dependent on vast structures of industrial organizing outside of our control, and money.
It’s a critique Demon Copperhead would resonate with—that we need more to be human, to be alive, or to be together than just an apartment building in a high rise (he calls those “doom castles”) and a salary. Belonging somewhere, to a place, is about more than just an address. Maybe not all of us will move to a holler in the Alleghenies, but we have to begin rethinking our connections to our land, to the way we get our food, to sustaining ourselves. As part of that rethinking, the first order of business will be to look up and see who’s around us—the people we can become a people with.
This is something Demon Copperhead knows well. He eventually comes to see the addictions killing everyone he loves too soon as part of a larger system—a system that is diametrically opposed to the sharing economies, based on real goods, on exchanges of labor, on the fruits of the earth and one’s own land, that he grew up with.
“It took a lot of emails…telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor,” he writes. Demon calls the Appalachian economy the “juice economy.”
He notices that the people in a city aren’t what Colin Miller would call “a people.” They barely interact with one another. One of his roommates explain that the people passing one another in the streets are saving their juice for their real lives back home. Meaning the sidewalk world is sort of a woods between the worlds, where people pass one another but never encounter one another. They’re zombified, Demon thinks. They’re saving their juice. But saving their juice for real life and living a zombie life half the time doesn’t really work. You either have to be in the juice economy or out of it. No servant can truly serve two masters.
But do yourself a favor: run, don’t walk to your nearest bookstore and see what Demon Copperhead has to say about it. And Colin Miller as well. You can order Colin’s book online here. (There’s even a Labor Day sale going on!) Or, if you’re in the Twin Cities, I’m sure you could stop by his office or one of his book talks and get a copy in person.
Sweet Unrests
Little pieces of news.
This little write-up by John Dougherty about a fun time we had at the end of July with Jesuit Media Lab. The Jesuit Conference’s Media Lab is doing great work trying to form, connect, and inspire artists and makers who have some Ignatian spirituality and heritage of some stripe.
I talked for two hours about Peter Maurin and voluntary poverty and the mystery of hospitality and how we wrestle with the Gospel like Jacob with his angel. Which is a good reminder you can still come to the Peter Maurin Conference this upcoming weekend in Chicago!
Another book to read, especially if you’re introducing a young person to Dorothy Day (or someone who prefers graphic novels to thick tomes)—Jeff Korgen’s “Radical Devotion.” I review it in U.S. Catholic here.