The road to Rolla: Day 2
What makes being out on the road again such fun (for me, at least) is that you always learn something new. This morning, I spent a couple of hours at an ethanol manufacturing plant, so now I know how husks of corn can end up as fuel in the tank of my car. (Don't ask me to explain in too much detail, but I do know that enzymes play an important role in the process.)
I also learned that while the starch in the corn is turned into fuel, the rest of the stuff makes high quality animal feed that is shipped off around the world. So don't tell the ethanol guys that they're responsible for high food prices ... they just don't accept it.
And voters in this part of rural north-eastern Missouri, on the western bank of the Mississippi, north of St Louis, who I had imagined would be staunchly Republican, in fact are overwhelmingly "Dixie Democrat", in other words, much closer to the conservative Democrats of the deep South than to their more liberal fellow-Democrats of Chicago or New York. (So neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton would have been their first choice as Presidential candidate.)
Tonight, I'm in St Louis, home of Budweiser beer, often spoken of as a symbol of America right up there with the Stars and Stripes. But now a Belgian company is bidding to buy it, and many local Bud-lovers are up in arms. Mind you, when I sampled some views in a downtown bar earlier this evening, the drinkers seemed more concerned about the state of the economy than who owns the brewery.
I've just been watching Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican convention: they loved her and her folksy, gutsy style. And by the way, so far on my travels, I haven't met a single Missouri Republican who wasn't impressed by her.
Tomorrow, weather permitting (they say we're due to be hit by what's left of Hurricane Gustav), we head for Rolla, to get ready for Friday's programme.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~33~RS~)
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You have been traveling through a vast ocean of corn. You can travel for hours and all you will see in any direction is corn. Beyond that ocean of corn is an ocean of wheat. There are other oceans of soy beans and rice. These oceans not only give Americans the cheapest most reliable source of food in the world, they feed hundreds of mililons of people around the world who would otherwise starve to death. Some of it is sold at world market prices, some is sold at reduced prices and some is given away depending on need and the ability of people to pay. Know that if there is a carbon credit cap and trade system instituted in America, the farmers who produce these oceans will find it far easier to sell those credits to power companies and take desk jobs in the cities than to continue working their farms. It takes a lot of energy to plant, grow, harvest, process, and ship all that food. When the price of energy goes up, so does the cost of food. We feel it here in America but people around the world will feel it worse. One thing that won't change for those who live in the desert where oil is drilled, you can't eat oil. Nobody talks about the fact that one likely consequence of energy reductions may be starvation of many millions of people who never heard of Missouri or Kansas, or Nebraska, or Oklahoma. What will the environmentalists say then?
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Robin I am very curious to find out what you mean or think you discovered in Missouri by your observation that Missourians in the N Eastern part of the State are not so much staunch Republicans as Dixie Democrats. As you may know since the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war caused a great rift in the Democratic party between the Dixiecrats and the rest of the party, I was under the assumption that Dixiecrats were transformed en masse into Nixon's Southern Strategy Republicans over the years. This was especially the case after the popular Ronald Reagan presidency. I was in college in Indiana in those years and I recalled the tumult that was created at the chaotic 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The Mississippi delegation which was almost all Dixiecrats was ousted in a credentials fight by a mixed race delegation and this was one sign of the profound future rift to come in the party. In other words I believed that from that time on the Dixiecrats had defected to the Republicans and no longer existed. I'd appreciate it if you would explain to me what how you can differentiate between staunch Republicans and Dixie Democrats especially if the latter has been subsumed into the former? Historically, as you know, Missouri was a great battleground between the pro-slavery South and the anti-slavery North in the pre-civil war period. The famous Missouri Compromise was reached by Congress in those years though it proved to be only a temporary palliative. The famous Dred Scott case over whether the Union was to be half-slave and half-free was decided in favor of the pro-slavery South in one of its most dreadful (no pun intended) decisions. So Missouri is a very complex and pivotal State of the pre-civil war era and perhaps even today given its penchant for foretelling the outcome of presidential elections.
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