The Arrogance of Power

God is punishing me for pretending to be a gardener.

Last Sunday, I borrowed Stan's toto-riller--a cute little tad of a thing--that runs on a cup of gasoline and a thimbleful of oil a day. I had been under the impression that the garden, inherited from our predecessors in this house, was already a vegetable delight, since we had been assured that coffee grounds from Starbucks, assiduously collected from Starbucks here and there, were what made the garden grow. And it did grow! I saw it!" But two inches down, it was as hard as a limestone pan.

That little tiller, though--while occasionally complaining--chewed its way, as if through the parking lot at Target, and when it seemed to have found detente with what was there, I added topsoil and fertilizer, and set it back to work. By god, we rotated a storm; a dust storm, and I looked at it and thought, "This is going to work!". And it did.

It did. It already had. It had buzzed up every airborne particle that had come to rest on the south side of our house, and blown it up my nostrils. As it happens, headed west, to those who pause on their trek to the new frontier to plant a garden, all that famous desert dust came to rest up my nose alongside a cold I inherited from my newest grandson, and just about the time I finished toto-rilling the garden, I began sneezing, coughing, and blowing little critters known best to the Center for Disease Control into a handkerchief.

After a few days of trying to cough myself to death, or gag on what was dribbling toward the center of the earth the only way it could, and wondering why my sinuses were able to sense single sub-atomic particles passing through my head--something the government, which is famously capable of doing absolutely nothing, not even of praying Hurricane Sandy out to sea to sink Christian Fletcher and the Bounty, or something, I went to a clinic and got stuff for sinus infections and allergies.

Can we not, at this last and critical moment, finally get rid of government enterprises that are only concerned with giving non-jobs to scientists and teachers and other public servants, and elect someone who will protect people like me from Stan's toto-riller?

Government should be small, not Hurricane Sandy or earth-wide, and focus on the south side of our house, where devious little critters float in on dust particles, not to die, but to wait for me to sniff. We need a government just big enough to deal with my sniff--because no one else want to--but not a particle bigger.

I knew you would understand. Thanks for your support!

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog