Meat and post-classic America

If we all became vegans, there would be an agricultural crash; it would last just long enough for all the meat interests, corporate and family, to get more subsidies from the government. Farm lobbyist are more influential than anybody save the NRA.

Most of the howling about factory farms is about meat. Long experience growing meat animals has led to the livestock, including poultry, being penned; production is much higher if animals are closed in. Cattle grazing on the plains, the round-up, cattle drives, all the staples of Westerns? Gone, just gone.

Contemporary family farms do have huge barns, filled with agricultural machines; grain is the big product on family farms and most grain is produced on family farms. Family farms aren't the quaint 160 acres of yesteryear, though. A combination of leasing, futures contracts, and subsidized bank loans has led to family farms becoming huge. The owners may be related, but most of the work is done by managers and employees; the family lives in Miami, maybe. Or Paris. Use your imagination.

Who cares? What about those factory farms, that we all should hate? Factory farms produce four fifths of the meat in the US. Factory farms are sheds full of penned cattle or huge buildings full of caged chickens. They are notorious for disease, waste problems, animal cruelty. Dealing with waste is a sensational problem. Each cow, or pig, is a living poop machine. A 4.5 pound hen produces 2 pounds a week of chicken poop, a 1400 pound cow, 350 pounds, a 180 pound pig 90 pounds. Those pigs eat like.....

An example: In 2000, a feedlot in Nebraska had 85,000 cattle on 600 acres. That's about 142 cows per acre. Not exactly 2 acre zoning. If you figure that a third of the 600 acres is devoted to transport, processing, storage, and so on, you get about 212 per acre. They would need to be put in rows, side by side, nose to butt. Surprise: they are. One of the first cruel oddities is that the tails of the cows are amputated lest they bother the cows in back of them.

How do they spend their day on the feedlot? Bo-ring. Eat, then sleep, then eat. Eat really a lot. No exercise; exercise makes the meat tough. Oh, I forgot: Eat, then poop, then sleep, then eat, then poop, then sleep. That's 29,750,000 pounds of cow poop on our Nebraska feedlot -- every week. Every week. Cow poop stops for no man. Yipes. That's a lot of cow poop. And that's just one feedlot.

So what? Well, a couple of things. The poop has to go somewhere. Where? How does it get removed from the sheds? Turns out there are many competing belt systems to haul the poop out of the sheds. By the time it reaches the outside world, half the weight is evaporated as moisture. Down to about 15,000,000 pounds for this feedlot. Then it is dried further, processed, and ultimately becomes a solid ten percent of what was originally pooped. Fine. We are down to 3,000,000 pounds. The manure is then put on trains or trucks, and taken to grain farms, where it is used for fertilizer. Turns out the cow pee is a much more difficult problem, and requires several more steps to make relatively safe.

Ah, the cycle is complete. Zen stuff. Simple ideas, complex systems. Santa Fe Institute ideas. But this poop thing is just an interesting diversion from whatever the point of the essay is.

Each step in the cycle consumes stunning amounts of energy, in a lot of forms. Who knows how many gallons of gas or diesel we are throwing at each pound of meat? The systems have grown up without any real planning, and are not very efficient. Surprise. American energy costs have been so subsidized, and farming so subsidized, that both grain farms and feedlot operations are largely government-sponsored operations. Strange. "Keep your gummint hands off my Medicare" writ large. Like the defense industry. Strange.

Pretend that we all became vegans. Hell, pretend that half of us become vegans. I can certainly imagine a holiday dinner with no meat, and no fake meat. And less expensive than the whole turkey thing. TG dinner is mostly vegan anyway. Take away the turkey ("Oh, and it's not dry at all"), and we're in vegan territory. I actually think most folks wouldn't care much; I wouldn't. Despite the table talk, turkey is always dry. Stuffing, the dreaded lima beans, turnip, squash, mashed, sweets, yams. Even cranberries, which I loathe. More than enough different eats. Get that dry old animal away from me. Maybe I'm not the one who should be talking about dry old animals.

I would have guessed that meat consumption in the US crashed in the late 20th century. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In 1950, we each ate 144 pounds of meat; in 2005, 221 pounds. Everybody I know, though, is eating less meat. Is this a class issue? A race issue? What's going on?

Take pork; both race and class matter. In 2000, eating pork varied inversely with income. Race? Non-hispanic black folks are easily the highest consumers of pork. Hmm. If you put those together, you get the picture of poor black folks being the heaviest consumers of pork. Middle age men eat the most pork of all age-gender groups. Go figure.

Eating beef also varies inversely with income. The ethnicity numbers are about the same as pork. Strangely, though, Hispanic folks beat everyone else, easily, in the amount of beef eaten at home. Who knew?

Rural folks eat more beef and pork than their city cousins. But in age and gender, the big consumers of beef are young men. McDonald's?

Chicken? Consumption varies directly with income; the more money you make, the more chicken you eat. People living alone eat the most chicken. Odd. Families of more than eight eat the least chicken. I couldn't find more numbers for chicken. I did find numbers on exports; chicken exports have gone up a gazillion percent, to both asian and arab countries. Hmmm. What countries lend us most money?

The outcome of it all: in america, race and class strike again, this time in an unexpected arena.

By now, I have bored myself silly, and lost whatever point there was. It's always fun to look up numbers, and numbers about animal poop are the best. I'm comfortable with the numbers.

Hidden in the numbers, and in the USDA reports about consumption of all this stuff, is a nervous tone. China, India and Brazil are all chowing down on increasing amounts of meat, and on increasing amounts of energy. The train has left the station, and is coming down the track on diet and energy both. The post-classic american decline will change our diets, as well as our addiction to killing millions of brown people. We will have competition in both.

Energy will very soon cost a bunch more; we can kill all the darker-shaded folks we want. Doesn't matter. Oil is going through the roof. Food is going through the roof, because so much of what we grow is heavily subsidized by low oil prices. Obvious stuff, well known, well publicized.

So, our sins are coming home to haunt us. All the money we have borrowed from China, in particular, but also India and some of the Arab countries, will be used to buy our own cows and chickens. Meat producers will rejoice. The rest of us will sink into the dietary penury we deserve, for having worshipped at the altar of supply/demand. No turkey for you, even if you want it.

Ah, starving by our own greed. Not just sitting in the dark in the cold; now there's no food, either. Nice metaphor for pretty much everything in the new century. Well, enjoy, I guess. It just sounds pitiful. Again, the picture of having so much, and just throwing it all away. What for? What did we get in return? Everything we touch turns to animal poop.


And the promised cartoon, in the best size I could make it without blurring.
Click on it for the full size:

Health Care

Imagine that the health care reform (reform? We don't have it to reform!) was for white people only.

Well, aside from the gasp that would have gone up, I think cradle to grave would have been passed in about fifteen minutes. Everyone forgets that all politics in this country begins with race. Why call it "Obamacare" so frequently and with such a delighted sneer? Maybe to connect it to a black president?

What if the Tea Baggers were folks of color? The National Guard would have been recalled from killing people in the Middle East, and pointed toward our own people.

I sent an email to the National Rifle Association suggesting that I would be glad to fund a program to train young black and Hispanic men in gun safety, and buy them their first gun. I waited a long time, then they apparently recovered from their laughing fits and told me they weren't interested now, but, by golly, if they became interested, they would get in touch. I'm guessing that my time in the nursing home will have passed before that will happen. And my great-grandchildren's time.

Why is that a funny story? Why is it so easy for us to accept that the country's largest and most effective lobbying group, by a big margin, has been in at least the last 50 years so clearly a bunch of virulent race-baiters?

I'm not advancing the fund of human knowledge to make this guess: A majority of white folks would be just as happy if slavery had continued. Maybe a close minority. Way fewer than half of whites voted for Obama running against an incompetent bozo and a smiling baboon. If it were just white folks, the bozo and baboon would have won handily.

What are we to do, then? Social Security was started because Roosevelt was worried about the Commies taking over if the white working classes weren't thrown a bone. Medicare was started because white people got sick of paying granny's hospital bills. And so on. But both to buy off the white folks.

The real progressive of my time was, unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson. A Texan, born of nativist stock, he breathlessly gambled all his political capital, all his arm bending skills, and just plain bribery to get the Civil Rights Bill passed in the mid-sixties.

The Civil Rights Bill would not pass today -- it wouldn't even reach a vote. Johnson was aware of what he was doing. He knew that he had lost the South to the mouth-foaming, howling right for at least a generation. Turns out to be at least two generations, and probably three.

I don't think, though, that he gave weight to two things: one, that the Vietnam war would lose him the support of all those who didn't hate him already, the other that the progressives were a smaller bunch in the rest of the nation than he originally thought.

Toward his death he did realized some of what he had turned loose. Bush the Younger was the best and brightest (heh!) of the products of the Johnson era, at least until 2012, when the Baggers and their bagmen will come to power. Reagan was the most subtle, using his smiling senility to disguise mass murder in numbers that hadn't been reached in, well, a decade. After Vietnam (casualties: 5 million, at least), Guatemala, El Salvador, and all the rest of the benign 80s were a drop in the bucket. A big drop, maybe half cup. Surely not more than, say, two million. Staggering.

I will say, in Johnson's defense, and I don't much like defending him, that the number killed in Vietnam only picked up speed after Nixon slithered into command. The republicans -- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, have, by the nature of their virulent racial antagonisms, been just slightly more willing to murder the non-white. Just slightly.

In Massachusetts, remember that Baker is of this tribe, the know-nothings, the Baggers, the mouth-foaming racists, the folks who would have seniors begging on the street for food money. Impeccable swine, with innocent faces. Damn, how I loathe those people, the "we have too much debt" to pay for health care, but not the trillion-and-a-half bill for murdering Iraqis. As I said before, though, only slightly worse than the others.

It gets personal when I'm the one who could be eating the cat food, and crawling over the bodies of dead elders to get to the clinic. Miles the Cat better get used to being on short rations, just like the rest of us.

And that's where I started. Now that I think it through, since I'm white, the let-them-eat-cat-food advocates will always find a way to get me human food and get to the doc. If I weren't white, I'd be packing my bags and heading to Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand, some places in Africa, some places in Europe. Keep those passports handy, folks. But, I am white.

I'll eat, I'm just not so sure about you about my darker-skinned fellow citizens

How humiliating for me to say that, in my country, in my lifetime.

Religious War 4

A friend suggested that I look on the sunny side. Here goes:

If it walks like a duck, and so on. If we are constantly in the business of accumulating the corpses of dark people, decade after decade, we are ducks.

Well, then, if not ducks, what are we? How about mass murderers? I can't think of another post-WW11 country -- I don't know enough about all the previous ones -- with our mass killing credentials.

Mao and the Cultural Revolution? Nope; close, but not enough bodies and, really, too short a time to really count. Cambodia? A trifling 3 million total. Don't forget; we've gotten up to a million in just the last decade, easily. Vietnam? Well, 5.4 million total; I'll give us credit for maybe 4 million. We had all the things that made the big bangs, and used them joyfully. We really did love dropping stuff on those little brown folks.

I listed a bunch more over the last blogs. Maybe I've missed one or two; Alert Readers should remind me. Low-balling the numbers is very easy. Seeing your own country as the most murderous entity in the world is very difficult. Nonetheless. No one else is near the top -- hell, no one else made the playoffs. The numbers are the numbers. That duck thing. You are what your record says you are. Oh, nooooo! No more sports metaphors. Please.

I find myself just letting the numbers slip from my mind most times. Onward to the less awful.

We are only #24 in the world murder rate; not much to say there. Of the first world countries, we are edged out by Russia, and, surprise, Poland. Who knew the Poles were so bloodthirsty? Perhaps the alcohol use in both of those countries has something to do with the murder rates. Perhaps our own use of alcohol has something to do with our murder rate. Naw. Lots of other countries drink just as much.

On to jail rates. In 2008, the US imprisoned about 1500 of every 100,000 men, with a trivial rate of 62 per 100,000 women. Better numbers. A little more than one out of every hundred men lives in jail. By race: one in twenty African American men sits in jail right now, today. Overall, we have, far and away, the top imprisonment rate in the world. We are followed (about 20% fewer) by Russia, using numbers for both genders. No other country is on the map, as it were. Heh. A remnant of the cold war, maybe?

If I were going to look at this sensibly, I would say that we are now the world's greatest mass murderers and that we are now the world's greatest self-imprisoners. Well, of course. How else could we be? American exceptionalism.

A few years ago, at the height of the Iraq thing, a couple of connections forced themselves into my usually unreflective mind. Take the first Earth Day in 1974. I remember thinking at the time, and saying to others, that I thought trying to clean up the Earth was a response to the collective guilt over Vietnam. I was laughed out of the room.

Now, though, not so funny. The environmental movement has picked up steam at roughly the same pace as our mass killings -- and mass imprisonments. We are counting on all the Greenies to wash the blood off our hands, and, when they fail, we put a lot of folks, notably folks of color, in jail. Then we know for sure who the bad people are, and we smother them in our guilt.

When I started graduate school in psychology, there were two jokes: one was that when we read about some pathology, we would instantly see it in ourselves. The second, though, was less amusing: we were in psychology to continually reassure ourselves which side of the line we were on; after all, we knew who the patients were. Ugly, and more true than we would admit. Didn't take me long to see the pathology in my colleagues.

Now, I can look at piles of dead, dark people, and I know two things for sure. One is that I didn't pull any triggers or drop any bombs; the other, that all the bad folks are in jail. I am doubly reassured. Triply reassured, really: the bad folks aren't even the same color I am. Guess I need a lot of reassurance. Strangely enough, this kind of talk doesn't startle African Americans. Perhaps their perception is that jail is better than being murdered.

I will stick to my previous blogs. We do the killing thing to insure our social stability. We don't even bother to pretend that our victims are a threat; we aren't afraid of them at all. Nope. Hey, there is just no other way to look at the data; the only other theory is that we suddenly started these massive killings on a whim. My perception works better.

Now, though, we're also talking about what happens after the killings. The locker room showers and self-congratulations include putting huge numbers of people in prison. Slippery ideas, hard to hold on to.

I am not a Marxist. We certainly make a good buck by all the killing/cleaning cycle. I've nothing against a good buck; fortunes are made. But I don't think we get into the killing for the bucks. Nope, I'll stick to my guns: We kill because of our terror of instability. A felicitous metaphor.

Terror over instability is no small thing. My TLE has left me with a sweet sense of how easily I can be brought low by a very small blip in brain functioning. I am tricked by my struggles for normalcy, and by my own hiding of the humiliations that TLE episodes bring. I know the terror that I might shatter. Nothing unique; a lot of people know that terror. Usually it comes to them when they are children; mine came at 65. I think they have it worse; I have a strong internal life, and strong family and friends. They don't have any of that.

I don't think much about the shattering times; I just suddenly begin acting or talking in ways strange to me, which at once exhibit and hide my terror. Nothing so extreme as mass murder and mass imprisonment, but I do know the path to those places. When we are terrified, most times we don't act terrified or even feel terrified; what we do is desperately find ways to not be terrified. We mass murder, and mass imprison, without the least hint of our fear of social shattering.

Surprise! I have made it all come together. Nice job, blogger guy. Fear and killing and humiliation and terror, all in one festering ball. When our descendants look back, a thousand years from now, they will be stunned. These people, with so much.....and they did THAT?

And, still, I can't look, and I can't look away.

Religious War 3

What if it all goes the way I expect? Total, absolute isolation from the rest of the world, Muslim countries attacking us (which we will just ignore for a while, then blow them off the earth if they continue) and a booming economy manufacturing all the junk we used to import, and doing the labor that used to import itself. No more embassies. No more money, or people, going across borders. The State Department a bunch of little kids making "Go Away" signs with markers. Go back to old blog for detail.

Two problems remain: One, what about our need to kill large numbers of people? And, two, what about our freedom? Will we be let ourselves be free, or will we remain in the grip of a bizarre and vicious ideology which rewards silliness and penalizes real work?

The first one is easy. We just lob a nuke now and then at a random country. We kill a lot of people now anyway, with conventional weapons. The weak sisters among you can revert to high explosives, but I'll go with the nukes. They're cheap -- we've got way more than we'll ever need already. We don't know if the ones we have actually work any more, so this is a nice chance to test them. A little more radioactivity in the atmosphere will vanish in the middle of all the other junk floating around. Plus, keeps everybody else just a little nervous.

I'll be conservative; one very small nuke every, oh, three years or so will do. The European countries will be off limits, of course, and only folks with darker skins will be subject to our random attack. Sort of resembles the foreign policy of the last 50 years, doesn't it?

Two blogs ago, when I went down the list, I forgot Guatemala: US victims, 200,000. And East Timor: US victims, 180,000. This in the last 20 years of the 20th century, mostly in the idyllic Reagan years. First decade of the 21st? A very conservative million, and those direct, by our own hands, not by our proxies. You think a little baby nuke every few years will be any worse?

It will be cheaper and it won't harm any of our folks. We can go on being the world's greatest nation. I know that this is all true, and I don't understand any of it.

On to freedom. The news about freedom: not so good. After we throw out all the Muslims, then what?. No other possibility than a fine christian theocracy, with one exception -- for a while -- for Jews. We still pretend otherwise, but politics in this country is first about race, and then about religion. We are not ready to take on race, not yet. But religion: woo-hoo. All you Unitarians out there, you're gonna have question marks burned on your lawns. That's a joke.

No more secular humanist atheists -- we'll stone them, I guess -- and no more Hare Krishnas and no more Baha'is. No more Darwinists, no more physicists talking about relativity-- get rid of all that science stuff. Science people can return to theology school if they need to retrain. Theology will be the only "ology" allowed. Finish the list above with your favorite non-christian sect.

The Mormons are going to be trouble, as they always are. You're guess is as good as mine about their fate, but I think, in the end, their aggressiveness and peculiar theology will be their downfall.

Ha ha, you say. People have been predicting this for years, still hasn't happened. Crying wolf is, after all, crying wolf.

Not this time. The armed forces are permeated by evangelicals, particularly the officer class. Congress and the Senate are permeated by the rotting husks of ruling-class wannabees. The Supreme Court is permeated by, of all things, fundamentalist catholics. You think they won't stick together? You think they won't unite for an election very, very soon? You think the inauguration of the first openly theocratic president won't be in an evangelical church? You think there will be any elections after that? Think again, bucko. The train has left the station on this one, and there's nothing big enough to stop it.

Prosperity for all, good godly christians in every public office, mandatory church attendance, tithes out of your paycheck, complete control of all media. Video cameras watching everything. And you say we're not getting close? Ok, forget the tithe thing.

We always ignore the fact that the whole free market "ideology" is just a way to ensure a ruling class and a pretty scummy underclass. I can't understand how we've been fooled for a century with that stupid and self-serving crap. When it came to the crisis, the ruling class abandoned pretense and saved itself, got rid of the free market foolishness in maybe, what, twenty seconds. No one batted an eyelash. The free market indeed spoke; it told everyone outside the ruling class to go away and die, same as it did with health care.

Orwell? 1984? He had it a little wrong. He didn't anticipate our hoopy theocracy, really; his was more a secular nightmare. And the war stuff? Orwell saw a forever war designed for profit, and to suck up the energy of youth. Wrong. Our need to kill is more obscure, darker, a historical swamp.

We don't want wars. We want piles of dark-skinned corpses, and we'll take them any way we can get them. Profit? Sure, always good to make a buck. But what we really want are the corpses. We kill to get back to normal. Any time there is social change, class confusion, economic upset, we just kill a lot of people, and we are healed.

We have killed millions upon millions of people in my lifetime, many hidden, many televised. Hard for me to keep myself seeing through that dark glass. Why do we murder these millions? We do it to make us whole. I can't look away, and I can't look.

About 10 years ago, I had a wonderful idea. You could state your religion when you set up your bank account, and then, when you used the ATM, there would be a cheerful religious saying, personalized for your belief system, printed at the top of the receipt. Millions for me in royalties!

Now, just the christian sayings will be on the receipt. Control of thought and economy, on one little, barely legible slip of paper. Control of my life is easy, and just about finished. I have no freedom left.

Next time, anonymity. Stay tuned. Remember, I know who you are. Heh.

BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous', and I won't know who you are. Heh.

Religious War 2

The Cold War was a narcissistic engagement -- a dancing-war -- between two powerful, nasty states. Even the names were mirror images -- the US and the SU. Finally, one of them had the sense and courage to stop the dance-war. We required a new dance-war partner.

Very few candidates appeared when they were needed; the criteria were pretty tough. To get on the list, you had to be willing to kill really a lot of people, have threatening weapons, and be overtly in the grip of a wacky belief system. You must have no sense of self-satire, and be, as our former dance-war partner was, really, really vicious. You had to take great pleasure in being deeply hated by about half the world. And you had to be willing to impoverish your people. That is what we did and we were the good guys, after all.

Not so simple to find dance-war partners. We tried China, but the Chinese didn't want to play, for now. Neither did India; they apparently thought we were crazy to suggest such a thing. All of Africa was too busy. Brazil also had other engagements, at least for the time being.

Well, it all worked out and better than even the most optimistic among us could have hoped. Wasn't so easy, but at the same time we were losing one partner, we generated a new one! Imagine the skill -- and luck! Our best minds and huge amounts of money were needed to make it be so -- surely one of the great achievements of the late 20th century. The old "snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" seems to fit, but I can't quite get the mapping right.

In the previous post, I talked about my life being a series of war episodes. I also remember, in the late 80s and 90s, quaint debates about what to do with the "peace dividend". All that money, which had supported the war machine, would be turned loose, and we could do some pretty good things for our folks. Yup. Good things. Imagine that. I'm waiting.

Well, what now? A dangerous enemy, with terrible weapons, driven by alien beliefs, willing and eager to kill, and against whom no force will be big enough. An enemy who mocks our way of life, our values, who are cowards, who won't even take care of each other, who abuse their own women and children. They dress funny, smell funny and look funny, too.

And that's what they think of us.

There have been two Muslim-Christian wars before. Each one lasted at least a couple of centuries. Now, those folks are real dance-war partners. That SU thing -- hey, didn't last even 80 years. Short-hitters. Quitters. No guts and no glory. The Muslim thing -- those guys are pros. No more amateur hour. Once they get into gear, they're like the Energizer bunny; they just keep going, and going, and going.....

We can anticipate many, many more years of killing. In the last blog, I posted that killing is a normalizing experience for America. Whenever something unusual happens, or we feel insecure, or there's a slump in the economy, or there is minor social change, we kill a bunch of people, and then we feel more normal, reach some sort of equilibrium. It's a dynamic that we have played out for the last hundred years or so. It has worked well for us, not so well for our victims.

One of the personal odd moments of the last 20 years came listening to a radio interview with a former SU spy, one of a group ordered to keep an eye on the border with Finland. The Finns had their own spies, and the two groups got to know each other, had the occasional beer, and in general worked out a fine arrangement. And I remember the voice of this spy from the SU saying, with great emotion "I have never felt more proud of my country than when it abandoned the Cold War". In the seconds after hearing that spy, I was terribly jealous. I wished so much that I could have been the one to feel that pride. I wasn't. And I don't think it will be my country that has such courage the next time, or even the time after that. No.

Not in my lifetime, or in the lifetimes of my children. I don't know what it would take for us to abandon our savagery. A horrible economic depression, with complete failure of anything but a barter economy? A political awakening, as in the SU? Surely not a spiritual awakening -- hell, we have those twice a week. Maybe a grand despair, a complete loss of hope that life can possibly get better? Maybe, but my peasant ancestors stayed peasants, for maybe a thousand years before someone came out of the bogs. Is there anything that can push us into cooperating with the rest of our kind? Any way we can simply abandon the apparently central experience of the American 20th century, that we need to kill large numbers of people?

Sure there is, and maybe the green elephants flying over my house will poop elsewhere. Maybe not. I'm not giving away my shovel yet.


BTW, to comment, just click on the 'Comments' link below. Put in your comment, then click on the dropdown box. Put in your name if you wish; you don't need a url, but you can add your link if you have one. Otherwise, click good old 'Anonymous'.

Religious War

We are at the start of the third major brush between Christians and Muslims.

Arab Muslims are quite open about loathing the presence of Christians in their lands (I'm not too happy about Christians in my lands, either). We Americans have become increasingly intolerant of Muslim residents here, and it is only a matter of time -- a short time -- before Arabs are rounded up and expelled or put in camps, their property confiscated, and all that goes with being demonized. There will be resistance, but security will be evoked, as it always is. First, we'll give them national IDs with little crescents on them, and the demand "Show me your card!" will have some teeth. Then maybe we'll have them wear special hats -- the fez, for instance, would be a nice fashion touch. But I think camps/expulsion are far more likely. After all, we cannot tolerate potential terrorists in our midst.

Two other times, in the last 600 or so years, there have been long, ongoing wars between Christian Europeans and Arab Muslims. The first occurred on the Iberian Peninsula; Muslims took most of what is now Spain in 711 and stayed until 1492. The second was in the 17th to early 20th centuries, in Eastern Europe, and lasted until the Ottomans picked the wrong side in WW1.

Who cares? Within about the next decade, we will be at war with Iran, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and a few other of the Arab or Persian Muslim countries, and will have no choice but to keep outside our borders anyone who has any Muslim blood, going back, oh, three generations or so. Best expel them all while we have the chance. Indonesians and Filipinos? We'll have a vote on them, but I have a pretty good idea what to expect.

And then? Here is my very practical idea. Many will think it alarming, but bear with me. We are going to do most of it anyway.

We need to move from being a world power, and not even a regional power, to being a power at home only. Not just isolationist; complete isolation. That damn fence needs to be 50 feet high, not 10 feet high. Nothing will cross our borders: no people, no goods, no services, no money. No debt will be repaid, no further debt will be incurred. If you want to stay, fine; but once you go, you can't come back. Relatives can visit, but only for two weeks, and with a bracelet that indicates where they are at all times. Sort of like a reverse electric dog fence. The fishing industry is a problem; we may need to eat farmed fish only. Not good, but the fishing industry is doomed anyway.

All overseas military bases will be abandoned. The navy will be reduced to a coastal force -- a big coastal force. Boundaries will be 200 miles. Military airplanes will patrol up to the borders. Every inch of the borders will be bristling with arms. And, if you even think of smuggling a person or a thing or some money, we will publicly humiliate you; something to do with body functions, or whippings in the town square. No more teaching of foreign languages at any level. Why would we need that? Intense, intense weapons research. The threat, posted on the 50 foot walls, written in crayon on construction paper: Touch us, and you and your ilk will no longer be on the planet. The State Department will use the crayons and construction paper. Canada and Mexico, with long land boundaries, will be the major problems. BIG fences, not just electrified, but designed to do away with anyone who comes within, oh, a hundred yards. We will divide up the Great Lakes.

I'm willing to be humanitarian. You have until January 1, 2012 to decide where to live.

So, a great experiment? Could we really rebuild the country? Can we give up the big TVs and the tchotchkes that are made in Asia? Yipes: no more coffee. Have a nice hot cup of chicken broth for a wakeup. No bananas, but lots of oranges. Fruits and veggies only in season. No grapes from Chile in midwinter. Sigh.

No more Mercedes, no more Toyotas; all cars will be made by GM, or Chrysler, or Ford. I'm sure they and the UAW will be glad to have their pick of the Honda and other foreign factories that dot the South.

No more crops picked by immigrant labor. If we don't pick it, we don't eat it. No more nannies working under the table; we take care of our own children. No more landscaping crews invading the suburbs each day; we mow our own lawns. Restaurant prices will double -- no more illegals to hire for cash; we'll cook our own food.

The first time we built the country, we did it on the backs of Native Americans, Caribbean islanders, Asians, and, by far greatest, in number and in pain, African Americans. They did the labor that made this country, and they didn't get paid. They got murdered, instead.

Can we build America a second time, with everybody getting paid, and nobody murdered? I'm not so sure. I'm not sure that the children of the middle class will be overjoyed about working in factories, or laying brick, or any of the gazillion jobs that, not long ago, were what Americans did.

If we build the 50 foot walls, and shut down the internet and telephone lines at the border, and knock down all the satellites, surely bad things will happen. But what?

If we build the country a second time, regaining our dignity and our liberty may be worth all the hard labor. We will be able to take care of our sick and ailing, our blind and deaf, our demented and damaged. There will be plenty of jobs, millions, to make all the stuff we need. There won't be China or Saudi Arabia to enslave us. We will be working for us, not for them. We can go our own way, without consulting our foreign masters. Are we worried about China attacking Taiwan? Fine, worry all you want, but ultimately it is their problem to solve. We are Americans, after all, and we will defend only Americans. Taiwan, Pakistan, South Korea, Israel, and all the other members of the American protectorate will fend for themselves; there will be no American help. Not even remissions.

On the other hand, I, at least, think that our messing about in the world has caused way more harm than good, so not much is lost in complete isolation.

The fences need to go up, and we need to cut all ties with China, Saudi Arabia, and the others who own us. No more. They can come knocking at the door with our IOUs in their hands -- too bad. We don't need them; we don't need their oil, we don't need their tchochkes. Yes, there will be chaos. But not for long. We are a resourceful bunch. We did it once, on the cheap. We can do it again.

To almost repeat myself: God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more slaves, full price this time.

If this doesn't get comments, nothing will.

Sickening Humiliation 3

Well, doesn't THAT make your hair stand on end?

The last thing I ever expected, or wanted, is that I be dependent on medications. Not just need them for something or other. Dependent, as in, needing the little puppies to keep on going.

So, I go to CVS to pick up the latest in the long line of neurological munchies that have been partially successful in controlling the TLE -- Alert Reader will remember TLE from previous entries -- and, when I get there, turns out it's gonna cost me about $160 for the month. For one med. And I need FIVE meds. What happened, I inquired, to my prescription drug coverage? Oh, you need a new card, they replied. Eventually, I paid out of pocket for enough to last the weekend, until I could get a new card, and we parted ways.

I went out to the parking lot and just sat in the car and shook. Alert Reader will also remember Miles the Cat. I had a vision of dividing a can of his cat food three ways, and sending him off to beg food from the neighbors, or maybe catch a mouse. Unfortunately, my mousing skills have declined over the years, and we will need him to bring home the bacon. Nice metaphor.

I have no doubt that this episode will all work out, my card will be restored, and I will again join the ranks -- maybe 25% -- of Americans with decent prescription drug coverage. Note the "Americans" in that sentence.

I need these meds to live. If there were no prescriptions coverage -- or only that incomprehensible, apparently marginally useful Medicare D -- we would be able to survive economically for a couple of years, eating up whatever savings there is. And then what? The one med I needed that day was actually a very standard drug, used for almost two decades, with a huge user base. Not expensive, relatively. If the others are similar -- and I think so, given the history and the use -- that brings us to a whopping $800 each month for meds. Call it 10K a year.

And that is only one of us, and only if I don't get any more problems -- both unlikely. Fine; call the annual amount, in about a decade, of maybe 25K, in 2010 dollars. At least.

So here I am: The Perfected American. All the good demographics. The most middle-class of the middle-class, highly educated, a credit to my community, hard-working, white, home-owning, English-speaking, non-criminal, so on, so forth -- and it comes to this. Neither of our sets of parents, three of whom reached very advanced age, and the fourth of whom is still advancing, ever had any problem paying for docs, or prescriptions, or hospitals. None. I'm now 65. When I hit 90, we and Miles the Cat will be watching carefully to see who goes first. We will all be holding knives and forks.

I also know a bunch of folks who worked for big companies -- Polaroid, ADL -- who had been promised, and had contributed to, decent pensions. The funds were looted by the administrations of the companies, and folks with 25, 35, 40 years service had nothing. Nothing. No 401K. And there was no recourse. And, of course, there was nothing for prescriptions, or health care. The victims were stunned for a bit, then raging and they still are. Fortunately, the miscreants were all held accountable; they were stripped of their loot and jailed. Oh, wait....that "held accountable" thing -- never has worked.

I've always wanted, and pushed for, and been willing to pay for, a health care system that cared for all. But that was theoretical; it was for a human right, and a social good. Not any more, bucko. Nossir. Now it's me, now it gets serious.

I am fearful for my own financial future, but I am ashamed that we won't take care of each other. We won't even take care of our own, of Americans. During the excruciating debate of the last two years, all I could hear was this: No. We will not care for our own.

How humiliating that was for us. Leave the wounded on the battlefield. You just go ahead and die out there; we won't even figure a way to get you some pills, and we won't say why. And so goes our freedom, and our basic right to live.

I get the sickening feeling that we've always been this way. and nothing will save us. There is an endless supply of white-toothed, big-haired hucksters groveling for cash, babbling about bootstraps, and, by golly, doing things the American way and living out the American Dream.

From here, that sounds to me like "Screw you; I got mine. Go die." American dream, indeed.

Let's look at it this way: If I ever have to choose between meds and gas, and the meds are more expensive than the gas, I'm gonna buy the gas, and one of the lighters conveniently sold at the gas stations, and I'm gonna use the spiffy iPhone to find some home addresses.

If the powers-that-be are so vicious and craven that they cut off my life -- well, they're gonna go before I do. The folks who run things have decided against providing medical care. Bad decision. There is a large, very personal cost for making that decision. Do the powerful really think that we won't remember, and that the impoverished dying elders, and their families, will praise them for what they've done? Are they that removed? That arrogant? Do they think that they and theirs are safe from harm? That there will be no retribution? Think again.

During the closing days of the Vietnam war, an interesting episode occurred: In September 1972, a man attempted to throw Robert McNamara over the rail of the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. McNamara was one of the few who really designed that war, and had personal culpability for it. The attempt was unsuccessful, and the assailant, who identified himself years later, reported that his rage over the war led to the attempt; he regretted failure. We were more benign in 1972, despite the demonstrations and long hair and all. Now we are not so forgiving.

None of the other main players in that war ever suffered so much as a day of discomfort. Same in Iraq, same in denying health care to Americans. How can we tolerate this kind of corruption? How can we allow the same deeply malignant fools to go on, day after day, killing some of us by what they do, and most of us by what they don't do? This has gone on all of my life.

The powerful need to personally suffer for the pain they cause. Remember what happened to McNamara, and how easy it is to get a can of gas, and then listen to part of an old country song:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time.