I'll tell you later . . .

Hello again friends and family. Here’s Friday Letter #73, with our wish that you enjoy reading it.

A foreboding event

At three or four minutes after 8 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 3, we heard it and we felt it.

I was just sitting down to my cup of tea, ready to do some roadmap dreaming, as is my habit.

It was a voluminous but quiet, earthy thump. The house shook. We’ll sometimes hear a comparable sound when large vehicles collide on the nearby 85 Bypass, but this sounded even more ominous somehow.

“We should start hearing sirens any minute now,” I told Laura. Still, we hadn’t seen anything, just heard the thump.

(I couldn’t see what had happened because my neighbor has recently built a rather clever cedar board fence, hiding the skyline I had enjoyed so much for so many years.)

But my heart sank later in the day when Laura looked online and found the explanation. Leprino Foods had completed introducing itself to Greeley by knocking down the last vestige of the old sugar factory.

The smokestack, a landmark which could be seen from many vantage points around Greeley, was gone. Thump.

No more sugar factory. With the demise of the smoke stack, the entire edifice has been wiped from the face of the earth. Was the sugar factory building of historical value? Not particularly. Was it beautiful? Not really.

Then why did the thump and the subsequent news bother me so? There are a number of reasons.

Primarily, that was the point at which I realized that the election was not going to go well. Democrats would get elected, and Harry Truman and Frank Church would roll over in their graves. Likewise my Dad and my Grandfather. The Dems have gone far astray, and this is not the way things should be going.

Secondarily, the demolition was proof positive that Leprino Foods doesn’t give an obese rodent’s posterior about Greeley, or its history, or its people.

Make no mistake. Leprino Foods is not your friend. Leprino Foods is a jealous new lover, vengefully going about destroying all signs of a previous lover’s presence.

Operation of the Leprino Foods cheese factory will require huge amounts of water, donated so unselfishly by Greeley politicians. Leprino Foods will require huge amounts of dairy product – supplied by farmers who will thus be enslaved by the arrogant company that brings their businesses into existence.

The product will make a profit. The farmers will not. Neither will farm workers. This is the way it is done.

You citizens won’t see a dollar of it, but Leprino Foods plans to make big profit. You think they’re in the cheese business, but no, they’re in the cash flow business.

Other than the pitiful, shameful giveaway of the water rights, the effect on the Greeley economy will be minuscule. The company is interested not at all in its impact on the Greeley economy, plus or minus.

We had hoped the company would let the smokestack stand for sentimental reasons. They’ll say the structure was unstable – but then it stood for a hundred years, didn’t it?

Does anybody miss Great Western? Not really. The company virtually enslaved the sugar beet growers who supplied them, treating honest farmers like chattels.

This is the way it has always been done. And it’s the way it’s still being done even though the beets grown in this area are shipped elsewhere to be made into sugar.

Is Swift and Company Greeley-friendly? Not particularly. Was the meat packing factory more benevolent when it was called Monfort? Well, yes. We have schools and hospital facilities we call “Monfort,” so some considerable benefit did come back to the people.

Company officials in those early packing plant days were more accessible to the public somehow, than the heartless and faceless officers of Swift and Leprino.

There is one definite benefit — the cheese factory will produce an unpleasant odor.

The stench will give the Greeley Tribune an additional odor to write about. For that matter, is the Greeley Tribune your friend?

Not really. That’s why they keep writing, year after year, story after story, about how it stinks here.

Reporter Mike Peters is the main perpetrator of this. Peters, a fossilized and bitter relic from a bygone era in journalism, actually sets the editorial tone of the Tribune. (The editor and publisher go to lunch together. That’s about the extent of their contribution.)

Peters just loves to write about the odor – a subject I myself got tired of 20 years ago. Now he’ll all have even more stink about which he can whine.

How does all this relate to the horrid election?

Your basic Democrat is in it for the salary. No other explanation seems plausible. The Dems vaguely espouse socialized democracy, but it’s really all about the paycheck while they’re in office and the retirement benefits when they leave.

The Dems know down deep that socialism doesn’t work. Proof of this – read the several scholarly dissertations on it – is that socialist-tainted lending policies established by the corrupt Mr. Clinton and the naïve Mr. Carter are at the base of the current banking debacle.

The Democrats just can’t grasp the idea that when there’s more outgo than income, bankruptcy eventually happens, regardless of the size of the mortgage bundle.

It’s true. Look it up. Try the Wall Street Journal, for one.

The Socialist-Democrats reasoned, “Poor people need mortgages too.” The same Democrats are nowhere to be found when those poor people can’t repay those loans. So people blame the Republicans – even in the face of President Bush’s early alarm at the faulty lending policy.

We elected a new president because he has black skin and a distinctly non-Christian viewpoint. People thought it would be cool, it would be cute. It is racism to vote for a guy because he is black just like it is racism to not vote for a guy because he is black.

We certainly didn’t elect him because of his stand on issues. Like any good Democrat these days, the man is adept at avoiding perceived commitment. “I’m not going to tell you how I stand on any issue until after I am elected,” he was saying. Remember the glib Saturday Night Live line, “I’ll tell you later.” It isn’t later, yet.

I was hoping for better. I was hoping that if we elected a black president in my lifetime it would be because he was a good and qualified man. Ideally, we would vote for a man and his qualifications, setting aside his racial heritage rather than making it his raison d’être.

The whole thing – the election and the demolition – saddens me. Change for the sake of change is expensive. We will pay the price. Thump.

Word of the week:

Ask and you shall receive. In Letter #72, we were baffled about the definition of a word I picked for Word of the Week. We asked for help, and we got it, in spades.

Correspondent John Sellers wrote:
“The word katzenjammer is German, meaning ‘discordant sound’ and is also sometimes used to indicate a general state of depression or bewilderment. It's sometimes used in reference to a hangover. The literal translation is ‘cat's wail.’"

Correspondent Dan Stoffler wrote:
“Ahhhhh, da Katzenjammer . . . yahh, zer gut! It is German meaning ‘discordant sound.’ A literal translation is ‘cat's wail.’"

Caterwauling, a similar word in English, is a shrill howling sound like that of a cat at rutting time; screech; wail; scream.

Thanks Dan and John for coming to our rescue.

This week’s word: Vessel. Whew. This is quite a word. The Latin is vascellum the diminutive of vas, a vessel.

The primary meaning is a vase, bowl, pitcher or kettle. But Biblically, it can be a person thought of as being the receiver or repository of a spirit, as in “a vessel of wrath.” Oohh heavy.

It can also mean: a ship or a boat; an airship; a tube or a duct, as in a blood vessel. It also plays a big role in medical language: vasectomy is an example. We used to joke, “A vasectomy made a vas deferens in my love life.”

Am I a vessel of hope and happiness today? I wish I was.

-0-

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