Ask The Answer Man
March 2, 2009 Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with Al Gore?
Answer Man: Discounting the fact that he is a fat, overbearing, boorish, pompous, tree-hugging, limo-riding, private-plane-flying, electricity-hogging, makeup-wearing, legacy-seaking, elitist Vitalis-head, what do you mean?
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with your being fat, overbearing, boorish and pompous?
Answer Man: Well, I am. But I am not a Vitalis head.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with Jacques Chirac sticking his nose into our cotton business?
Answer Man: He’s French.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: We lost the World Trade Organization Brazilian dispute, we lost Step 2, we lost our textile industry. So what is the deal with WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy sticking his nose into our cotton business again?
Answer Man: He’s French.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with Oxfam?
Answer Man: I don’t know. Are they French?
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with your youngest daughter becoming a psychiatrist?
Answer Man: Don’t you think I need a psychiatrist in the family?
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with U.S. farm subsidies?
Answer Man: First let me say I am a firm believer in free markets. Now let me add that what we know as free trade is not necessarily what the rest of the world sees as free trade. Also let me add that I believe in a level playing field.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with cotton yields exploding?
Answer Man: With today’s technologies, why would they not?
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with global warming?
Answer Man: Thirty years ago, they said there was global cooling. Thirty years from now, they will say it again.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with module-building cotton pickers?
Answer Man: They are gooooooood! Besides, I went to dear ole Belzoni High School down in the Mis’sippi Delta with one of the designers of the Case IH version. That automatically makes them gooooooood.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: You played high school football with that Case IH guy. What is the deal with y’all being so bad?
Answer Man: Belzoni High School was not gooooooood at anything even remotely associated with football.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with corn?
Answer Man: Well, you can pop it. You can make flakes out of it. And you can make squeezins’ out of it. Ethanol is basically squeezins’. But seriously, the market is putting money on the table for farmers to grab, and that means planting corn where they can. I will make this prediction: As the demand for ethanol grows, the world will begin to scream and moan because we are putting ethanol into our SUVs which will take corn flakes out of mouths and squeezins’ out of stomachs.
Dear Mr. Answer Man: What is the deal with cotton?
Answer Man: Well, you can twist it on a stick and poke it in your ear. You can make tighty-whities out of it. And in the mouth of a certain man-eating snake indigenous to the Mis’sippi Delta, it is terrifying. But seriously, that same market is taking money off the table for cotton farmers, and that means less acreage. What it also means is the cotton pipeline needs cleaning out because there is way too much cotton in the world. If the planets align, globally we could take carryover down two million bales this year. That is a start. A good start.
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