Today’s Column — No Victory Garden

The first seeds have been officially planted in my family’s “Participation Garden.

“Having attempted to grow vegetables many times, I know that calling our plot a “Victory Garden,” like the Yes-WeCan-Cultivate Obama White House garden, just isn’t realis tic. A participation ribbon is far more appropriate.

True victory will belong to the weeds and weather, and to the rabbit legions. I felt their darting little eyes on us from undisclosed locations as we hopefully planted peas and lettuce and spinach Saturday. If there were a rabbit news magazine, our plot would be on the cover. “A Feast in Just Weeks.”

But it’s worth a try. And thanks to the Obamas, gardening is now a patriotic duty, like shopping or taking over the auto industry.

First Lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and school kids dug into the big White House backyard plot last week. They reportedly planted 25 heirloom vegetable varieties.

“It’s a real opportunity to reconnect with the land,” Vilsack was quoted as saying in Agweek online.

The land, I read, is in good shape. There were “trace elements,” augmented with “green sand” and “crab meal” from Chesapeake Bay and even some White House compost. (There’s got to be a great joke in that last one.) Nearby, bees are being kept to handle pollination. No word on whether the CIA will use Predator drones on insurgent rabbits.

“It educates (kids) how difficult food production is,” Vilsack added. Although a staff-tended plot with its own crab meal and resident bees does not scream “difficult” to me. But, hey, I’m glad the first family is giving it a go.

And it all plays well into gauzy American gardening aesthetic, all humble and earthy and mythic, like a Grant Wood print we have on our dining room wall.

It’s a copy of the painting “Spring in Town,” with a sinewy, tan, shirtless guy hand-cultivating his garden while his wife beats out rugs and a child plays placidly nearby.

Except gardening reality is a sweaty, fleshy Midwestern guy, like myself, who wouldn’t take off his shirt if paid handsomely, handtilling himself into a huffing, puffing lump. His wife pauses from cleaning out the hot tub to ponder calling an ambulance.

Meanwhile, his children take the first warm spring Saturday as a sign they should fill the entire lawn with colorful plastic junk, pulled from a deck box that holds roughly a metric ton of broken squirt guns, deflated balls and dysfunctional novelty sprinklers.

Now that’s a painting I’d buy. Too bad Salvador Dali’s not alive to do it.

Still, for all the woes of wilt and blight and blossom end rot and other stuff you didn’t want to know about, there’s something very cool about watching your kids plant seeds with abandon and get dirty and kidnap worms for their “worm house.”

Mine will watch excitedly for the first sprouts to break through. That’s worth something in this Nintendo-powered Nickelodeon world.

And if they get excited without stomping on them, that’s what I call a victory.

Monday Reads — Constitution, Shmonstitution

Constitution? We don’t need no stinkin’ Constitution.

The Register and others carry reports on Republican candidate for governor Bob Vander Plaats telling a crowd of gay marriage opponents that, if elected, he would use an executive order to nullify the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex unions. Never mind that governors don’t have the power to sidestep high court rulings. He might as well have promised them he would turn the justices into frogs with a magic wand.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Christopher Rants, R-Sioux City, plans to take another stab at the issue, and at raising his own gubernatorial profile, by trying to pin a gay marriage ban on to the controversial federal deductibility elimination bill. The Iowa Independent notes the opinion of a Drake University constitutional law professor, who argues the move to place an unconstitutional provision in the bill may violate Rants’ oath of office.

That seems pretty far-fetched, but still, this idea that Supreme Court rulings can be tossed aside like some two-bit press release is a troubling trend. I’d expect more from people who have committed their lives to public service.But you can’t let the rule of law get int the way of red meat politics.

Oh, and now we’ve got a death threat, according to Charlotte Eby’s piece at Covering Iowa Politics. Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, who is openly gay, got a death threat and other lawmakers have received troubling communications. The State Patrol is investigating.

So is there anything else going on?

How about some comic relief?

For that we turn to the Burlington Hawk Eye, which carries word of an unfortunate, confused man arrested Saturday for urinating in a convenience store’s walk-in cooler. It was just a really bad night for Alexander Bessenecker, 29 of Mediapolis:

The incident began when a female clerk noticed Bessenecker meander into a walk-in cooler, where customers are not allowed, according to the police report.

The clerk followed Bessenecker into the cooler and informed him it was an employee-only area.

She then allegedly noticed him urinating on the floor.

Bessenecker became upset and began shouting obscenities at the woman, according to the report.

Police arrived and found a suspicious puddle. A cautionary tale for all of us, to be sure.