Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
The difference between a small plot of corn with other crops intermixed and a massive fucking endless field is made of eldrich fucking horror.
you know that feeling when you’re on your period and you take a shower and you feel so clean and relieved and nice but then as soon as you turn the water off it’s a race against you, gravity and time
I swear the last line made it feel like the plotline of an action film
@SaraSoueidan: Dear men, This is how you greet a veiled Muslim woman (a Hijabi). Hand on your chest, not offering to shake hers. 🙋
so prominent BLM activist deray mckesson just retweeted this which i think is super cool for various reasons :)))
I did not know this. Is it OK for a non Muslim woman to shake hands with a Hijabi? Or do we do the hand on chest thing too?@popcanpoli
hey so i don’t wear a hijab and i’m not muslim so i definitely don’t have the authority to answer this question (or any other questions i’ve been getting abt this) (i’m just a lil canadian politics blog i didn’t expect this to blow up lol)
BUT here are some tweets by the original tweeter (who wears a hijab) that clarify some things
one:
two:
three:
This is also good if you’re meeting an Orthodox Jewish person who’s not the same gender as you! Not all Orthodox Jews hold by this restriction, and many consider it a permissible exception to shake hands in a formal greeting context; I’d guess this is parallel to Ms. Soueidan’s last-quoted tweet above. And as that says, the sensible thing is to wait for initiation.
Villains in Addams Family movies go to really unnecessary lengths to defraud them of the family fortune. These people just give it away on whims all the time. If I just walked into the house and started wearing their clothes and spending their money, they wold start introducing me as Cousin Intruder and forget there was ever a time I didn’t live with them.
quelleflemme's blog 