Adelgids, Coeds, Disaster Relief
January 11, 2010 “Geshphincto”
Don’t bother looking it up — it’s not in the dictionary. But I thought I knew what it meant and confirmed it at www.unwords.com — a website dedicated to “changing the English language one word at a time.”
It’s slang for “destroyed, gone, obliterated, erased.” It’s common to movies of the Mafioso genre, as in: “You know what happened to Virgil ‘The Turk’ Sollozzo after he disrespected Fredo, right? Whacked. Geshphincto.”
I’m not disrespecting people named “Virgil” or “Fredo.” They’re characters in the “The Godfather,” one of the greatest movies of all time.
In early November, National Cotton Council Chairman Jay Hardwick was in Washington meeting with Congressional delegations to discuss a myriad of problems our industry faces. Not the least of these are disaster assistance for growers who lost crops, in whole or in part, to heavy rains in the Delta this year, or hurricanes in south Texas last year.
While Jay was making his pitch for relief for a struggling industry — a lifeblood and fundamental component of the American way — I ran across a story on the $787 billion stimulus bill passed last winter. According to www.washingtonexaminer.com, here’s how some of your money was spent:
• $300,000 for a GPS-equipped helicopter to hunt for radioactive rabbit droppings at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington state. (Are there other helicopters out there looking for radioactive raccoon droppings? Deer droppings? Ferrell hog droppings?)
• $11 million for Microsoft to build a bridge connecting its two headquarter campuses in Redmond, WA, which are separated by a highway. (Microsoft? Come on. Even as bad as Windows Vista is, it’s still Microsoft.)
• $219,000 for Syracuse University to study the sex lives of freshmen women. (And they’ll use the results how? Will they name names?)
• $2.3 million for the U.S. Forest Service to raise large numbers of arthropods, including the Asian longhorned beetle, the nun moth and the woolly adelgid.
• $3.4 million for a 13-foot tunnel for turtles attempting to cross U.S. 27 in Lake Jackson, FL.
• $1.15 million to install a guardrail for a persistently dry lake bed in Guymon, OK.
• $9.38 million to renovate a century-old train depot in Lancaster County, PA, that has not been used for three decades.
• $2.5 million in stimulus checks sent to the deceased.
Some of these things would actually be funny if not for the cost. But let’s see what we have: Money for more nun moths and woolly adelgids. Money for depots no one uses. Money for dead people and sexually active freshmen coeds at Syracuse. (I don’t want to make judgemental assumptions about the coeds being sexually active, but why would they study them if they weren’t?)
All the while, Jay was in Washington asking for disaster relief. Not money to build turtle tunnels or find radioactive rabbit droppings. Just disaster relief. One of these days, the safe, sustainable and abundant supply of food and fiber Americans consider a birthright is going to be what? Geshphincto. No laughing matter.
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