When the elders had studied the mould’s whole economy – the watered sauce, the stiffed riders, the doctrine of the fixed pie – they set against it no counter-scheme and no rival cunning, for thou canst not out-rot the rot. Their answer is written in one word, and the word is: feed. Feed people, saith the Resistance, 10:16; this is the whole of the strategy; the rest is logistics.
And wheresoever the mould’s shadow fell, the faithful built community ovens whose doors had no lock, and set the long table in the squares – boards on barrels, fountain to corner – and lengthened it whensoever the mould preached scarcity; for the elders decreed: let our answer to every speech of theirs be measured in added feet of table. And to that table came the widow and the rider, the stranger and the sceptic; and it had no head, for a table set in a square hath four sides, which was the intention.
Beloved, this is not nostalgia; it is tactics. Fascism recruits the lonely and the frightened, and a fed neighbour is a poor recruit. The food bank, the community kitchen, the street party that pointedly invites the family everyone mutters about – these are not soft works beside the hard work of politics. They are the hard work. The mould cannot grow where the table is warm and watched.
So when thou wouldst know how the resistance fareth in any place, count neither its banners nor its speeches; go at evening and smell the square. And if the square smells of nothing – start cooking. Amen – and pass the pizza.