As the 4th of July holiday approaches, we should eat. We should also stop to celebrate the independence of our country from the tyrannies of the past. We should remind ourselves this weekend that Joint Stock Companies colluded with the Crown to extract resources and taxes from our nation's forebears without granting them any say in the matter. For too long, we ate what they served with no complaint. This holiday, we should also think of beer and barbecuing, which brings me to chicken (that's a segue).
There are two kinds of chicken on the menu this holiday weekend.
The first is Debt Default Chicken, perhaps more aptly served as beef, specifically bull. For this recipe, two cooks turn up the heat hoping that one side will be done before the other. This game of chicken should never be served as one side is inevitably charred, the other side nearly raw, and the whole thing will taste terrible, perhaps to the point of making us all gravely ill. Anyone who would play chicken with our nation's credit rating over an empty principle is a fool and should never be allowed near open fires.
The second is Flaming Base Chicken, a delicacy enjoyed by few where only the right wing is seasoned and prepared with loving attention, paying far less attention to juicy bits in the center, and ignoring the left side, which was just as important to the chicken as the right. Most people couldn't care less about the subtleties surrounding Flaming Base Chicken. They're just hungry. The only reason for this kind of chicken is because of a fear that the right wing will flap away without the chef. No cook for the barbecuing masses would ever recommend this exotic dish to a variety of tastebuds.
It's July 1 and I've had enough chicken already. Our leadership should never have allowed the festivities to carry on this long. Debt Default Chicken is such a mess that it could kill us, and leaders who resort to Flaming Base Chicken out of irrational or petty fear do not deserve the complements of the vast majority of the voting public who find right wings disagreeable or unimportant.
As we approach this holiday we should think about our representative democracy, where we leave the cooking to trusted experts, who must work in a large institutional setting and still cook well, but also healthy food that's palatable to most tastes. We should have no time for leaders who seek notoriety by stuffing people of similar tastes with their own fatty pleasures of endless tax cuts, throwing out the fresh vegetables in the face of spiraling debt, and shunning everyone else to cook for themselves, even as profits and obscene wealth are protected by the cooks as a matter of gustatory principle, while our nation's food bill is the lowest it's been over 50 years.
As we sit down for dinner, and tuck into the courses served to us by our leadership, the policies around revenues and spending, we should consider not whether this is the most amazing meal we've ever had, everything we ever desired, but rather whether we find it nourishing, the company pleasant, and the experience of eating these cooks' meals one worth repeating.
As we stop to think about the freedom we enjoy, we should look towards the modern-day collusion of wealthy interests with government to end all public benefit, like Medicaid for the poor, or not important to their bottom line in old age, like Medicare is for everyone else. We should question the wisdom of those chefs who tell us that this is the only way to prepare chicken, even as most of us find it repulsive. We should ask why we need to eat what they serve when there are so many other options.
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