We Feed the World!

I have a close friend named H., who lives down the road and across the river, about half a mile away. This will most likely not be the only time that I will speak of him.

Out of respect for H.'s wishes I won't use his full first name, though there is about as much chance that he -- or the many enemies that he apparently dreams of having -- will read this weblog as there is for a dog to sing the National Anthem. In my opinion he is amazingly paranoid for a guy whose weaponry and stores of ammunition compare favorably with that of the 82nd Airborne Division. In short he's a stone gun-nut, and I have so informed him, in case no one else had. He likes to call himself a redneck.

You have already decided that our friendship is on the very unlikely side.

A few days ago our discussions turned from gardening, pickup truck repair, house repair, inconveniently closed bridges, amassing firewood, and our numerous other usual topics to the price of gasoline. H. was outraged about the recent rise in that price. In our area it is now a little over $1.80 per gallon for regular. I didn't think that qualified as being so obscene, but then I don't have an itch to hit the road every day as he does. I don't even hit it every week. And EVERYthing is a long drive from here. I pointed out that gas is probably higher in other states, like California, and it has been considerably more expensive in Europe for years now.

That didn't matter, and H. knew exactly what he would do about it.

"We feed the world!" he bellowed, "and if I were in charge I'd lay down the law to those Arabs! I'd tell them that if they don't straighten up on the price of gas, they had better get ready to go hungry. We feed the world, and we don't have to put up with this shit! Usually I don't care what those dipsticks in Washington or anywhere else do, but this is hitting me directly in the pocketbook, and I won't stand for it!"

I told him that I didn't think we exactly fed the world, and that instead, just off the top of my head I had the impression that large parts of the world get their food from other places as well. If pushed I might've brought up factors like the Green Revolution in India and elsewhere, and the fact that we run a very large trade deficit, and the decrease in recent decades of foreign aid -- a practice that H. bitterly opposes.

I was glad, however, that H. didn't threaten to hold one of his numerous guns to the heads of those greedy Arabs -- though that is exactly what GW Bush is doing at the present moment in Iraq --and that he settled for only cutting off their Ronald McDonald burgers.

Also I wondered where H. had gotten that info. Due to the huge number of categories in which food exports and imports break down, it's not easy to arrive through research at making any general statement, but it seems to me that the value of our food imports comes close to equaling that of our food exports. In any case I read a lot about international considerations and the various means that the U.S. might use to bend other nations to its will, but I have never read that a food weapon is one of them. If it was that simple, GWBush wouldn't have found it so necessary to cluster-bomb Iraq.


I would bet that H. is only one of numerous Americans who think that we do so much for the world, including feeding it, that the planet is just a bunch of wretches who are showing their extreme ingratitude when they balk at returning to us oil at dirt cheap prices, and that as long as we insist on driving our bloated vehicles, the sheikhs are obliged to keep those behemoths rolling.

My moral for this story: the arrogance that is induced by being fortunate and powerful is a terrible burden to bear, even when its crushing weight is not yet apparent to us.