The problem with John McCain Twittering “pork” that, if he ever bothered to look at it, would turn out to be worthwhile, and Maureen Dowd thinking that it’s so funny is this: McCain and Dowd are making the “everyone else is just like me” error. Because Maureen Dowd and John McCain are silly, stupid, mean-spirited people who think that working hard on something worthy is stupid and a waste of time, they assume everyone else thinks that way, too. Because Dowd takes a hefty paycheck to engage in idle gossip and pass that off as political analysis, she probably does think the people receiving these funds must be doing the same thing. (McCain probably doesn’t even care—-things like research and helping people aren’t real work. The only real work is screwing over the poor and patting yourself on the back.) Dowd’s column is especially lazy, as half of it is just copy/paste examples of McCain’s misanthropy, anti-intellectualism, and the hatred Dowd shares for people who do real work.
• $2.1 million for the Center for Grape Genetics in New York. “quick peel me a grape,” McCain twittered.
• $1.7 million for a honey bee factory in Weslaco, Tex.
• $1.7 million for pig odor research in Iowa.
• $1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah. “Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?” McCain tweeted.
So, he’s against science, against environmental protection (which I suspect is part of the honeybee thing—-diminishing bee populations in the U.S. have flown under the radar, even though our entire agriculture system depends on bees), pro-pollution (pig odor is a major pollutant in many part of the Midwest, due to enormous factory farms), and wow, he seems to support burying us all under a pile of rotting corpses.
Yes, rotting corpses. I have second-hand experience with exactly why it might be smart to control cricket populations, since a couple years ago in Austin, a combination of weather factors created this massive surge in crickets and then this massive dying-out. This was no small thing—-they shut off the tower lights in an attempt to stop it, and the story made it on NPR. When they say “unpleasant odor”, however, what they mean is the unmistakable rot of millions upon millions of wee corpses piling on top of each other, like a thicket of death many feet deep. The smell drenched the tower, creating a miserable work environment for all the people there, and it was probably a health hazard to boot, since some people got headaches and had to get out of there. Since this was the result of a really anomalous summer—-it barely touched 95, because of all the clouds and rain, when usually Austin sees summer highs from around 105-110—-I don’t imagine we need a big government-funded research project to stop the problem. But perhaps conditions in Utah are a little different, and they have an annual cricket problem of the same sort. If so, then $1 million to stop it is a drop in the bucket compared to the loss of worker productivity and other social costs (car accidents, agricultural issues) that come when you are visited with this level of cricket infestation. Matt does the quick research required to find out that Mormon crickets are in fact such a massive issue that $1 million in prevention is likely a small price to pay.
Look, if you don’t believe modern people, remember that plagues of locusts were sufficiently awful enough to be included in the horror show sections of the Bible. So there you have it—-faced with a plague that they should remember from the Bible, if nothing else, McCain and Dowd both are too busy Twittering and twittering to do something as hard as think or remember. Which just makes Dowd’s ridiculous comparisons of McCain’s tweets to King Lear’s speeches even more irritating, because she apparently is too important to give a shit about understanding the works she cites. Yes, Lear and McCain are both cranky old men. That’s where the comparisons stop. If anything, McCain’s vicious tweeting in protest of government spending on our people, our infrastructure, and our future is the direct opposite of Lear’s famous speech in Act 3:
Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
The other thing I remember about Lear that pro-cricket storm Dowd seems to forget is that the play takes a dim view of devastating natural events like storms (thunderstorms and cricket storms have much in common), as well as barren, desolate landscapes, of the sort that you get if you allow a plague of crickets to eat everything in sight.
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That can’t be him twittering, his computer is still blinking “12:00”