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Letter to the editor: History of world exploitation
A Response to David Moats’s insightful guest editorial in the Addison Independent on Dec. 27, about the decline of rural America and Vermont.
My response is a response to a friend about her concern about a 15,000 cow dairy farm in Indiana producing milk for Walmart.
Everybody wants everything cheaper. That’s why they go to Walmart. Even I go there.
It’s all the fault of the first invaders of the Americas 15,000 years ago. They came over from Russia, Just walked across. Needing something to eat they started killing the native wildlife. After eating up all the mastodons and other critters, they got hungry so started growing food. This was better anyway since it was the men who had to go hunting and drag home heavy loads, because the women could do all the work of planting and reaping and gathering fire wood and the men had the repetitive and industrial and laborious job of thinking up religion and more demands and limitations on women.
So Andrew Carnegie sicked the law on striking workers and killed many and in every way treated them like dirt, so he could produce steel cheaper and make more money. Meanwhile the masters bred their Slaves to the strongest men so to have a good product to sell. And then Trump refused to pay workers and contractors for goods and services delivered. And now refuses pay increases to those “greedy” federal workers.
Then to top it all off, some time ago, farmers couldn’t get workers to milk cows by hand ‘cause it was a miserable job so they invented milking machines and put the hand milkers out of business. Which was healthy for the men and women doing the milking. Hand milking cause one’s hands to stiffen up so they could hardly move. To get started milkers milked out a little milk and then dipped their hands in to warm them up so they could move their fingers and milk.
Then Woody Guthrie sang ‘This Land’ and tons of farmers went west and grew wheat on dry prairie that was too dry where wheat should have never been grown, but they did and created the dust bowl. Wheat was high in the market before the dust and worth nothing post-dust.
Then FDR created farm programs and encouraged more food production. The preamble of the 1935 Farm Bill, to paraphrase, said it was to help farmers and to keep the price of food low so that all the voters would feel good and vote for Dems. The last part of that wasn’t in the preamble, but the part about keeping food plentiful and cheap was.
So then WWII came along and there was a great need for food. Farmers expanded and made money. In Virginia farmers grew orchard grass. It doesn’t grow in an orchard so don’t know why the name, but this grass has a very fluffy seed, called orchard grass seed. Farmers grew and sold to the Army tons of orchard grass seed for use in packing and cushioning ammunition. After the war farmers couldn’t give orchard grass seed away.
So now the Virginia company Smithfield Hams or Pork or whatever they call themselves, owned by the Chinese are growing pigs in shameful and immoral ways and shipping a good deal of it to China. North Carolina gets the pollution and the misery and China gets the bacon.
Then we buy other stuff from China, they get the pollution and the misery and we get the cheap stuff that makes us happy. It doesn’t take much for us to be happy. Lots of TV, games, frozen food nuked in the microwave and what else do we need. Look at our prime example today in D.C.
So this China thing started in 1535, per the book “1493” by Charles Mann, when Europe started sending patterns of clothes across the Atlantic, by mule or camel or something across the isthmus of Panama and then across the Pacific to China to be made into fine silk clothes and shipped back the other way to land in Europe for Charles the 5th or whoever to seduce any female getting too close.
So today we are being homogenized. That is, the world is becoming one. Culture is passé, gone, by the way of being not profitable. In 1971 we ran across a Burger King in Manila. Now there are Walmarts everywhere, all selling the same thing cheap. Originality gets in the way of profit.
So damn those goat cheese farmers in Vermont and that dim popcorn farmer in Orwell. Too small. Too dull. To narrow a view of the world. Homogenize, put pressure on to make all people the same. We need customers, customers, customers. To buy buy buy. Do it on line. Fight on Black Friday. Turn every holiday into a buying spree. Christmas is the biggest dollar consumer spending holiday, Halloween second.
But, keep your fingers crossed, Thanksgiving is not there yet. Just eat more turkey and the world will be very alright.
Since the China trade was so slow in 1535 we had to speed things up with computers and GPS and data collecting and we, at this very minute, are madly giving all our data and personal tastes, like what kind of ice cream we like, to the big boys, few girls involved, in Silicon Valley, and the next time you Google something, any old thing, then in seconds some damn ad comes up trying to sell you the very same thing or “here is what other customers bought when they bought that thing” something that you had no damn intention of buying.
So the keepers of the internet and the electronics and the amassers of information are king and who cares about a little ol’ 15,000 cow dairy farm in Indiana? And who cares even less about my acres acres of popcorn?
So you have to blame it on the women, ‘cause they are the cause of everything terrible. You know the men ate up all the critters and the women had to grow wheat to keep the men busy eating, and from wasting most of the day forcing sex on the women. That’s a new theory that just popped into my horny cranium, so since it was so easy it must be true.
I’m telling you if Eve had been smart she would have sicced the snake on Adam and gone on and had kids by parthenogenesis and that sure would have pacified the world. You see, as always, it’s the women’s fault for bringing on misogyny, misogamy, and falling off the roof and post menstrual stress. But no matter, Walmart has a cure in the pharmacy department.
Had rhubarb been the forbidden fruit,
A very full Adam could really toot,
Eve can cook,
God’s finger shook,
Rhubarb stuffed snaky smiled as they got the boot.
PAS 2015
So there you have it in a nutshell. The nut being on top of our neck. We just go along. Romans called it, bread and circus, just keep the people fed and entertained and all is well, no need to think, or dream, or ponder, just relax and let the Fulfillment Center stuff us.
Today I had OJ from Florida and Brazil. Blueberries from Salinas, Calif. Bread, the wheat from I don’t know where. Ice cream from Friendly’s in Wilbraham, Mass. Salmon from some ocean. Bananas from Guatemala. Apple from a neighbor in Shoreham, Milk from Monument Farms in Weybridge, egg from Maple Meadows in Salisbury, turkey from, well, guess, and squash from my garden.
And this is all true, that’s the sense of it. I attest to it. Even though it’s forbidden to end a sentence with it.
Paul Stone
Orwell
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