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| Yes, I'm getting into this. So kill me. |
Irritability has been my default position for more decades than most of you who are reading this have lived, kiddies. All the same, I must say that I’m feeling more irked than usual these days.
My teeth are gnashing. My head is about to explode. I’m ready to throw a chair through a window — preferably somebody else’s window.
A case in point has been prompted by just one stinking issue of the New York Times — today’s issue. I'm talking about hamburgers.
I mean, trust defensive Republican strategists to take a more-or-less mild suggestion and blow it into a near-nuclear meltdown. In the past few days the hysterical right, from the Trumpster to Sebastian Gorka, have been raging that Democrats want to take away….No, not your guns. Not your so-called religious freedom to insult and exclude from public accommodation anybody you personally don’t like. Not even your God-given right to enjoy the next fatal and fiery NASCAR collision.
The Republicans are ramping up the hysterical notion that Democrats want to take away your hamburgers.
What sparked all this is a goal, propounded by Democratic Representative Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, and Democratic Senator Edward Markey, calling for “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas omissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.”
Get that? "working collaboratively" “as much as” “technologically” “feasible.” Hardly a demand to call out the dreaded, armed, and infamously murderous Hamburger Swat Squad.
I keep looking for buzzwords like “confiscate” and “hamburgers” in the OAC-Markey manifesto. Or even for a mention of sirloin, T-bones, filet mignons, flap steaks, well-marbled chunks of stewable chuck, or grandma’s pot roast. I find nada. Not even the forced purchase of Hamburger Helper.
What AOC and Markey are really talking about, it would appear, is better agricultural management, and by implication, the problem of farting cows. It seems that cows emit a fairly significant dose of the greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere every time they fart or belch.
I’ll hazard a speculation that one possible solution might be to trap a good portion of those gasses and convert them into fuel which we could use in lieu of fracked “natural gas” to heat our homes and cook our, uh, hamburgers.
Overlooked in this brouhaha is the fact that we humans also emit our fair share of methane by farting and belching, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are cows.
Population reduction might make a considerable contribution to a less overheated planet, not only by eventually eliminating billions of daily farts and belches, but also because the fewer people we'll have, the less fuel we'll need, and the few farting cows to feed us. Moreover, we’d better do something about population before Mother Nature does it for us. As somebody — I forget who — once remarked, “Nature is a hanging judge.”
But how can we begin?
I modestly propose that we start to ameliorate this situation by converting the biggest gas bags in government into hamburger, thus, uh, killing two birds with one stone.
“Trumpburgers,” assuming they were the actual thing, might be the first product in America with the Trump name on it that is both honest and socially useful. Ditto all the other Republican gas bags (and a few iffy Democrats whose names I shall not mention here to avoid a digression into intramural outrage.)
This could turn into a game — not that I’m suggesting we have to play it — in which we nominate various Republicans, neo-Fascists, and other ethics-free legislators to be converted into various dishes, for the sake of diminishing gas emissions in the halls of Congress.
Oh what the hell, as long as I’m on the subject, I might suggest that Mitch McConnell could be converted into Mock Turtle Soup.
Just sayin’.
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