Calhouns Can(n)ons

WORLD ENDS!

Well, we all knew it would come to this. And we knew it would be awful, but few had any idea just how hideous it would be.

No, not the Swine Flu. Yesterday, in Iowa (It had to be the God-fearing American heartland, now didn’t it?) same-sex couples lined up to get married.

The beautiful blue Iowa sky didn’t fall. All over the state farmers were revving up their John Deers, fixing to be ready for the spring plowing. In Normal Rockwell farmhouses, and huge agri-business factory farms, it was business as usual. The swine rooting around in their pens, those with no flu, were rooting happily, totally unaware that the world had just ended, while chickens scratched in farmyards as they’ve scratched for hundreds of years.

There were no riots in the streets, no sturdy Salt Of The Earth Iowans lined up outside county courthouses with pitchforks and fire brands to call down the wrath of the Almighty as gay Iowans trooped inside to get their marriage licenses. In short, the republic didn’t fall, the state didn’t dissolve in a rage of fire and brimstone. In fact, nobody gave a foodle.

Yes, indeed, it was the end of the world, alright.

WORLD ENDS, PART II

While everyone’s running around in a swivet over the latest Crisis du Jour – the Swine Flu outbreak – here’s a modest proposal: If we want to avoid these cross-transmissions of mutating viruses from animal to human, we need to stop living with, raising, factory farming and eating pigs. Ditto chickens, ducks and other domestic fowl, which would eliminate one of the biggest vectors for avian flu.

I know all this cross mutating is a kind of delicious karmic justice at work: we eat the animals, they kill us with cross-species pandemic mutated viruses. But, if we want to eliminate a HUGE, living, mutating virus stew-pot, that’s the way to go. I mean, who’s heard of a lethal pandemic of mutating . . .Walnut Flu? (Salmonella from mishandling of food products is another story).

Plus, by reducing cow consumption per capita to the more realitic and healthier smaller amounts the body may actually need versus the GINORMOUS amounts we Americans regularly shovel down our gullets (Quarter Pounders for lunch! for Din-Din! for Snacks!) we could eliminate a HUGE amount of greenhouse gas (flatulent cows), thereby solving another enormous danger threatening our planet.

And for those pork lovers who just can’t live without their bacon, heck, here’s the beauty part. Americans love their guns as much as they love their bacon. So, get the pigs out of their hideously cruel, disease-ridden, factory-farmed concentration camps and back into the woods where they were originally meant to be. In a short time, they’ll return to their tough, feral ways, then all the gun-loving, shoot-‘em up Americans can strap on their bandoliers, grab their assault rifles and go out in the woods and bring home the bacon. Two guilty pleasures with one shot!