re: #641 Cato the Elder

LOL. I just went out for a rare treat - breakfast at McDonald’s. OK, sometimes I get a yen for some real nasty comfort food.

So what was on the radio while I was pigging out on a Sausage McMuffin and hashbrowns?

Barbara Kinsolver talking about her book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, in which she describes living “sustainably” as a “locavore” for a year with her family in Arizona.

Maybe it was the combination of my un-PC breakfast and her tone of voice, but I have to say that seldom in my life have I heard a more self-righteous person talk about anything. Here she is, a well-known, wealthy author with a bloody book contract paying her to do what she insists everyone else should be doing - and, pray, how am I supposed to get away with raising chickens and turkeys and slaughtering them in my urban backyard? - and talking about it in a way so dripping with self-congratulation that I nearly choked on my delicious fast food.

But where I really almost punched the radio through the dashboard and out into the engine compartment was when she somehow managed to bring her patting-of-self-on-back prattle into relation with her take on Hurricane Katrina. The implication being that if we could all just get a nice house in Arizona and have a publisher pay us to do like she did, the weather would change.

I still may puke up my breakfast.

Who was that idiot who wrote “nickel and diming”? Another wealthy trust-fund douche who was paid by a publisher to live like “the humble folk” so that we can all learn what it is like to be poor?

I couldn’t afford to buy that book.