Cooked Goose

Long before there were telecommuting and home offices, there were—and are—American Farm Families. No 40-hour work weeks for them. Instead, a routine of daily chores, animals to be fed, a future to be planned for. Farmers are the ants of the economic biosphere.

The rest of us? Mostly grasshoppers.

Well, gather round, grasshoppers, as we contemplate the benefits of foie gras vs. golden eggs.

Foie gras—that oh-so-elegant and pricey paté for the have-mosts, goose liver to the rest of us—is basically force-fed geese forced to give up their lives for a moment’s rest on the tongues of the one percent crowd.

Don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a lot like those geese for a few—oh, let’s say seven-plus—years now. Force-fed a steady diet of propaganda packaged as public relations on everything from the food we eat to the way the White House spends our money—profligate son, anyone?

The White House Bush Administration practices a kind of economics most of us at the kitchen table wouldn’t recognize. Laissez-faire. Let the capitalists do what they do without restraint. We don’ need no steenkin’ oversight. Cut the funding and the people [that would be jobs] for sensible regulation and monitoring of the [you fill in the blank] industry. The unseen hand—that would be the one up your skirts—will make sure things work the way they should work.

Tell that to the school districts across the country who are gathering up their beef from Hallmark Meat Packing in California. Or tell yourself, but check your Progresso soup can against the recall list before you do it over lunch.

Watching video of downer cows being scooped up by front end loaders to become part of the food supply, well, makes me contemplate going vegan.

Also pretty much sums up the philosophy of how the Bush Administration thinks about government and how little it thinks of ordinary Americans. Just throw everything into the meat grinder, offal included, and serve it up to the people. Hey, if they’re dumb enough to buy it….

For quick, short-term profits and profiteering and crony capitalism, you can’t do better than the Republicans who have run this economy aground the past seven years.

There’s a better way. Instead of killing the geese that lay the golden eggs, let’s sustain the economy and the country, lay the nest-full for future generations, build a strong, thriving flock that will keep our tummies healthy…and our country, as well.

That takes planning, and candor to the American people, and sensible monitoring of where the food supply and the propaganda supply both are coming from…and, yes, each of us thinking thru what’s being served up for us and separating the foie gras from the golden eggs.