THE FAMINE

 

Looks like the Chickens are coming home to Roost, which is a good thing—at least we will have something to eat.  Food commodities have doubled, a catastrophe for underdeveloped nations that, despite the lack of the basic necessities of life such as computers and cell phones, would normally be able to depend on a basic food supply. Reliable food supply is occasionally interrupted by drought or some other circumstance, but usually the problem remains local, and circumscribed. This time things are different affecting even the underclass of the wealthier nations. The Philippines are importing rice and in Thailand local militias are patrolling the rice fields to prevent theft. The problem spreads like oil on the polished veneers of developed nations. Food riots are funded by food shortages. Recently the World Bank gave Haiti $10 million as a poultice for prospective hunger after rock throwing rioters yanked a United Nations Peacekeeper from his car and shot him to death.  The good news, this time he wasn’t eaten.

 

While populations are going hungry grains are taken from the food supply to produce an ethanol supplement to our gasoline. Wilhelm Leibniz would be proud from the grave to learn that future generations finally caught on. Energy is conserved and interchangeable.

 

During the depression people used to say “Money can’t buy happiness”, designed perhaps to make the poor feel better and to pursue  a career  in happiness rather than bank robbery. However, they soon learned that happiness wasn’t helpful because they couldn’t buy money with it.

 

Candide was taught by his friend and tutor Professor Panglos that this was the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps it is, and after numerous trials and tribulations through war and gore, travel and travail, Candide came to realize that a home on half an acre of fertile soil that could be farmed for food really is all one needs in order to be “happy”. The assured availability of food and water breeds contentment but all of this could be taken away by a little nudge from nature, At the post office I am besieged by solicitations for money, but last week the world was there asking for a handout.

 

Luckily I had a package of bird seed that satisfied the world for the moment. “ Does Bird Seed produce birds, Daddy?”

 

“No sweetheart, birdseed produces food—but we’ll get to that when you are older”.

 

The Follies

 

So now that we have settled this famine business we can get to some serious stuff.  Namely the election follies starring  Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Both want to become President of the United States so in order to get the nomination they are telling the country why each other should NOT get the nomination, which  pleases John McCain. Hillary is dodging sniper bullets at the wrong airfield in the wrong country at the wrong time while Obama is in the wrong pew listening to the wrong Pastor named Jeremiah Wright at the wrong time.

 

Hillary brought her camera crew to either a bar or a movie set to slug down some booze and beer to show the coal miners, steel workers and country boys in the Pennsylvania hill country that she was a reglar fella just like them which apparently got a better reception than did Barack’s descriptive remarks about these same guys clinging to God, booze and hunting to take out their frustrations about being unemployed. To repair the damage Barack took up bowling but that didn’t work, he ended up just where Hillary wanted him, in the alley. Now it was Hillary’s turn. Trying to  tried to ingratiate herself with the National Rifle Association, she said her father taught her to shoot a rifle when she was three or four years old. At that point, Barack put her in a duck blind and renamed her Annie Oakley. That’s when Charlton Heston died.

 

Hillary displayed an ad that asked us to make a choice – whiuch one of us would you want  in the White House to answer the red phone at 3 in the morning? Me or Barack?  Barack was gentlemanly enough not to point out the obvious. He left that job to Bill Clinton. 

The ex president, trying to defend Mrs. Clinton said, in effect, it wasn’t such a terrible error –after all, what do you expcect from an exhausted 60 year old woman---?.  

 

Which raises questions about Bill. Some say he subconsciously doesn’t want Hillary to be President.  That’s doubtful. Clinton  more likely than not suffered some degree of brain damage as have so many others who have undergone open heart surgery.

 

While Hillary and Barack are whacking each other two other pols await silently in the wings  for this internecine folly to clear the way for them. The “dream ticket” might just turn out to be, in alphabetical order Bloomberg and Gore.