Vermilion Club
will paint the
town incarnadine
by David Giesen
Where do georgists go when they dye? Why to the Vermilion
Club to silk screen T-shirts, of course. Now that you’ve got something
of the theoretical sense of georgist analysis in mind from reading
this newsletter, perhaps you’re wondering what you can do
besides objecting to friends’ and acquaintances’ half-baked
explanations for outrageous housing prices, a shoddy economy, and
the need for social interventions to keep kids and their families
out of poverty.
Join georgist-minded San Francisco Bay denizens for a monthly
Action Pow Wow where performance pieces get brain-stormed,
letters to the editor get written,
magazine articles get designed, and both legislative and political campaigns
get underway. Georgist advocacy is not mere rhetoric. It has a living pulse
that quickens when there’s a quorum. So join HGS graduates and georgist fellow
travelers in a group known as the Vermilion Club.
The Vermilion Club? The name is a pun, you see. Vermilion is
a bright red, and red is for revolution -in this case, a revolution
in thought. What’s more,
buried in vermilion is vermi, the Latin root for worm -in this case the red worm
which excavates whole cities! What’s that, you say? Well, yes, the humble
earthworm has excavated whole cities, or so thought one Englishman some time
ago I was reading a selection from Charles Darwin’s backyard observations
and came across his hypothesis that in chewing through earth and depositing the
tailings at the surface, earthworms might well, by infinitely modest turns, undercut
abandoned cities, interring them as gently as the proverbial unwitting frog is
heated and cooked in water slowly brought to a boil.
What a masterful image for georgists, thought I. Earthworms slowly
deposing the entire absurd edifice of private property right
in the earth and its rent. And
so was born the Vermilion Club. A place where high-minded, creative folk expound
a vision which appears to the dulled of heart as just a shaggy-dog story.
But wait, there’s more punning yet (punning, sometimes referred to as the
lowest form of humor, puts the lie to georgists’ extended family claims
that they’ve no time for small talk but are forever heavy-breathing their
land squawk).
The Latin word for land is terra, isn’t
that so? Which could confuse certain folk into believing georgists
are terra-ists!
The Vermilion Club meets every Tuesday at 5 PM at 6th Street Books
& Cafe (144 6th Street).
