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Bigger Than the Bacon Explosion "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning comes to mind for two reasons these days, one having to do with food, the other politics — with both, if you can believe the coincidence, falling under the heading, "Pork.”
First, to the culinary world, where for the past month, the Internet has been atwitter — sorry, the temptation was irresistible — over a recipe for a creation called The Bacon Explosion (the timing of this extravaganza clearly the work of Irony himself and not one of the elves to whom the Master assigns lesser tasks).
Here are the basic details about a dish that has set the hearts of the nation’s pork lovers aflame:
A two-pound square of sausage meat is topped with a pound of crispy, bite-sized bacon pieces and rolled into a cylinder. The cylinder is then wrapped with a lattice made of intertwined raw bacon strips and cooked in a smoker (preferably) or oven.
There, except for the seasonings, you have the Bacon Explosion, or, as the Romans would have called the dish, porcus omnes porci ("the pork of all pork”).
Well, despite the great variety of tasty pork dishes, the purpose here is not to review the culinary genre whose offerings range from humble chitterlings to a regal crown roast.
Thus, it is time to turn to Barack, Nancy, Harry, and rest of the shameless gang who can’t stop themselves from dreamily repeating Browning’s line regarding the porcine "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” any more than they can resist the compulsion to ceaselessly kiss and caress its 647 pages (each of which has been lovingly pig-eared).
The reason for this Niagara of amorousness? Simple. While ordinary pork is the food of the false and lying gods called politicians, Reality dictates that an insidious porcus porci of the kind Madam Speaker honored with the title H.R. 1 can be cooked up only once in a piggishly pink moon.
By the way, that fact explains why, in truth, Democrats can’t count all the ways they love the rare and wondrous gift that reduces the Bacon Explosion to a puny, pitiably pallid puff of porky scraps.
But enough about a trillion dollar larding of the nation that is sending visions of a century-long liberal hegemony dancing through Democratic heads; for the question demanding immediate attention from the rest of us is, "What should we do about it?”
Well, we should do a lot of things; but among them is the crucial job of creating a website that will serve as our university and town commons in the fight to preserve the America bequeathed to us by the Founders.
Briefly, here are some observations about the task:
The site must stand beyond the reach of politicians. Therefore, it should be constructed and run by an independent organization, perhaps one created by a consortium of conservative think tanks.
It must be funded imitating the "Obama Model” — that is, it should solicit contributions from wealthy donors as well as from millions of ordinary Americans who will become its most important stakeholders.
Initially, it should direct its focus on the stimulus and bailout bills, serving as the "go to” place where the American people are informed and called to action by researchers, investigative journalists, whistleblowers, politicians, bureaucrats, and other Americans in possession of facts regarding the following issues pertinent to recovery and bailout spending:
...fraud
...political corruption, illegal and legal
...tax consequences, including those at the state and local levels
...the wages of exploding debt — especially inflation, erosion of sovereignty, and declining standard of living
...the destruction of our free market system
Eventually, the site can take up the fight against other attacks upon American democracy that result from an increasingly rapacious federal government — including its insatiably power loving judiciary, which, like Dante’s wolf, is always hungrier after eating than before.
First, however, it must earn the trust of the public by distinguishing itself as a new and essential force against the ever-increasing power of the level of government most remote from the people.
And there is no better way to achieve that goal than to provide the invaluable service of informing Americans about a porkish explosion that threatens far more than the nation’s economic well-being; for if it is true that "The truth will set you free,” it is equally true that "The truth will keep you free.” Let us hope, then, that those who have the expertise and the means to make such a website a reality will act quickly out of their love for the true American Experiment, their belief in the genuine American Dream, and their knowledge that no human act that endangers those two noble ideas is inevitable or irreversible. |
