I Love Nuts

Fall is my favorite season of the year. Fall temperatures dip downward, the air gets dryer, and all the delicious foods growing over the summer are harvested and put on rainbow display in the markets. Fall triumphs in my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, when family and friends gather. Thanksgiving doesn’t require presents to be exchanged or gaudy lights to be hung. Thanksgiving does softly encourage good food, good cheer, and good times to be shared by all. One of my favorite foods of the Fall season are nuts. Chestnuts, walnuts, hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, every kind of nut, bags and bags of nuts, wonderful nuts, nuts, nuts!

While reading the letter section in the local newspaper last week I came across the opinions of Dennis Myer, Bill Welch, and Arthur Rice. I don’t know who these fellows are but they seem to be members of an ideological junta secretly meeting in a almond grove. Myers tells us our town should get rid of its zoning laws and let “property owners” (a euphemism for big Capitalist), ravage the country side in their pursuit of maximum profits because the abstract market place is far more important than the real live community and it’s “suffocating regulations.” Bill Welch, blows more smoke in our direction by skewering Limousine Liberals (as opposed to what, Limousine Reactionaries) for promoting government interference which may crimp the unfettered pursuit of profits by the “greed is good” Goebbelites. Arthur Rice, kicking up another pother, while at the same time running away from what passes as an intelligent argument and, instead, taking refuge in his delusions and sentimentalities, weeps copious crocodile tears because the “ultra liberals’ of Hollywood are responsible for 9-11, the collapse of the sub-prime market, the 9 trillion dollar national debt, religious fanaticism, and the disappearance of honey bees.

But if Rice bothered to read the publications and newspapers he accuses the rest of us of not reading, he would discover all of these troubles began when Hollywood’s Ronald Reagan and the cravenness George H.W. Bush got elected President and VP twenty seven years ago. Because Rice et.al. have blinded themselves by their own prejudices, they can’t see that by the end of that grotesque mediocrity known as George H. Bush’s term as President of these here United States, the Republican Party will have ruled this country twenty out of twenty eight years.

During the Fall I really hate it when I crack a nut open and find nothing inside.

October 2007