Agricultural Policy
Agricultural Policy
In composition class, I used to use this excerpt from O'Rourke's brilliant Parliament of Whores for three purposes: first, to demonstrate the most delightful use of metaphor I've ever seen in argumentation; second, to demonstrate how they could write interestingly about virtually any topic; third, to thoroughly offend my more Puritanical students.
The government began formulating agricultural policy in 1794, when the residents of western Pennsylvania started the Whiskey Rebellion in response to an excise tax on corn liquor. The agricultural policy formulated in 1794 was to shoot farmers. In this case, the federal government may have had it right the first time.
Like that of most Americans of the present generation, my experience with agriculture is pretty much limited to one three-week experiment raising dead marijuana plants under a grow light in the closet of my off-campus apartment. I did, however, once help artificially inseminate a cow. And you can keep your comments to yourself—I was up at the front, holding the thing's head.
This was a dozen years ago. My old friend George, who'd done all sorts of madcap stuff such as join the Marines, go to Vietnam, learn to fly a stunt plane and get married, decided to raise cattle. To that end George bought a farm in New Hampshire, along with some cows (the technical term for female cattle), and now it was time for the cattle to fructify.
Getting a cow in a family way is not accomplished, as I would have thought, with a bull and some Barry White tapes in a heart-shaped stall. It's like teenage pregnancy, only more so. The bull isn't even around to get the cow knocked-up. Instead, there's a liquid-nitrogen Thermos bottle full of frozen bull sperm (let's not even think about how they get that) and a device resembling a cross between a gigantic hypodermic needle and the douche nozzle of the gods.
George got a real farmer to come by and actually do the honors. So while I held the cow's head and George held the cow's middle, the real farmer, Pete, took the bovine marital aid and inserted it into a very personal and private place of the cow's. Then Pete squirted liquid dish soap on himself and inserted his right arm into an even more personal and private place of the cow's, all the way up to the elbow. Pete did this not in order to have Robert Mapplethorpe take his photograph, but in order to grasp the inseminator tube through the intestine wall and guide the tube into the mouth of the uterus. It's an alarming thing to watch, and I'm glad to say I didn't watch it because I was at the cow's other end. But I'll tell you this, I will never forget the look on that cow's face.
The same look—and for the same reason—appeared on my own face when I began reading the 1990 omnibus farm bill. Every five years or so the U.S. Congress votes on a package of agricultural legislation that does to the taxpayer what Pete and George and I did to that cow.
The last farm bill cost American taxpayers over $100 billion in direct out-of-our-paycheck-into-the-feed-bag costs and another $50 billion in higher prices we paid at the supermarket. This was the Food Security Act of 1985, which got its name from the fact that it left America's food supply about this secure: "Yes, officer, the stereo, the TV and the coin collection are gone but, thank god, the refrigerator wasn't raided."
The new farm bill will only cost about $50 billion, although there's no telling what any farm bill is really going to cost. The 1981 farm bill was budgeted at $12 billion and ended up costing $60 billion, and the 1985 bill was supposed to represent a substantial cut of 1981 allocations. You see, if the weather's bad and we have lots of droughts and freezes, we'll have to give disaster aid and crop-insurance payments to farmers, and the farm bill will end up costing us more. On the other hand, if the weather's good and we have plentiful harvests, we'll have to buy up surplus commodities and pay farmers to cut down on planting, and the farm bill will end up costing us more yet. And if—God forbid—the weather is good some of the time and bad some of the time—if, in other words, the weather is normal, then we can all just start backing towards the barn door and mooing for frozen bull sperm.