Zucchini and Elections
Late July and early August is the high season for vegetable socialism and Presidential Conventions. Zucchini have flourished. Even plants that germinate from seeds dropped into sidewalk cracks are producing their share. Relatives or neighbors--some seldom seen or who never wave as they drive by--want to generously distribute their bounty, practice vegetal diplomacy. They share zucchini as tokens of friendship, kinship, or leave them on your porch in the dark.
During a Presidential Election year, conventions are wrapped up in July and August. This election season was high drama that even the most creative screen writer would have had a tough time dreaming up. Tension was high; there were plots and plot twists, trusted allies became sworn enemies, previous antagonists seemed to have always been dear friends. There were betrayals, alliances made and lost, and voters were bamboozled and bombarded with candidate sound-bites calculated to raise support within their camp followers. Would Bernie finally throw his support and delegates behind Clinton? Why did Ms. Clinton come off as untrustworthy? Was the coiffured misogynist, small-handed, racist bully, putting us on? What was Trump's gambit? Where was the profit margin? If he got elected would his Presidential venture be added to his list of failed business ventures and eventual bankruptcies?
The two major party combatants emerged nicked and bruised but holding the nomination for their party. Third party candidates became newsworthy. Fringe party candidates, including some who had purportedly been abducted by deep space creatures, sent letters to Editors. More than a few gave the appearance that they might have stashes of of freeze-dried zucchini buried in the desert or mountains. And some of their supporters--wearing foil hats--gave off the vegetable aroma of the Cucurbitaceae family.
Convention rhetoric deposited tree-ring like concretions in my my brain. Electrons, like annoying gnats, swarmed the airwaves encoded with promises of change, hope, or myopic gloom and doom. Politicians flashed onto the TV screen, teeth polished ultra-white, hair corralled with hairspray, foreheads and cheeks freshly injected with Botox.
This cosmetic remedy, botulinum, in larger quantities, is one of the most potent neurotoxin poisons known to humankind! This bacteria hidden in tomato sauce it will certainly etch deeper lines in your brow as you retch. The convention system in our country is like cans of tomatoes with lids swollen by the bacteria looking for release.
In the early nineties a charismatic fringe leader named Joel, migrated with his family and a friends to Boulder, Utah because Joel had prophesied the end of times. Joel's pioneers totaled 150 heavily armed fanatics. He was--before he received the revelation and abruptly cashed his stock options and resigned--the senior vice-president of an international high-end car company in Annapolis, Maryland. Joel searched until he found an isolated community--Boulder, Utah--with its own hydro-electric plant and three main roads into town that were easily defended. In two weeks he, his clan, and camp followers doubled the population of this isolated town.
I was chair of the Boulder Town Planning Commission when he invaded. I hadn't become chair because I knew city planning but because I volunteered, in an impulsive and un-restrained moment, to be on the Commission. I walked out of the meeting shaking my head because an outsider, me, was appointed as chair. I couldn't help thinking that maybe an outsider would be easier to blame for heavy handed zoning ordinances. Joel and his disciples crowded the meeting room in the old school house/Town Hall for every Town Council and Planning Commission meeting. They yelled and screamed their disapproval of zoning that might infringe on their self-defined Constitutional rights, railed against New World Order, the U.N., oppressive government, and taxes.
After the March Planning meeting, a few months after he transplanted paranoid myopia into town, Joel told me: "You might as well cancel the May meeting because it's been revealed to me, by The Heavenly Father, that the world will end between April 1st and the 15th, this year."
The irony of Armageddon starting on April 1st. wasn't lost on me. What a great April Fools Day joke, especially if a rare, early morning, spring thunderstorm squatted over town and shook buildings like summer thunderstorms often did. The first two weeks came and went. Then it was April 15th, my personal yearly Armageddon. Given options I'd would rather have taken my chances with bubbling tomato sauce or been water boarded than send a yearly check to the IRS. Every year, when I mailed the check, I had the impulse to send the Agency a note about my displeasure with them. Self-restraint, especially when I was younger, was an issue.
After the May Planning meeting, during a moment of poor judgement and self-restraint, I said to Joel: "Joel I'm really pissed at you."
"At the last meeting you said the world was going to end by April 15th, so I didn't pay my taxes and now I'm in deep crap," winking to make sure he knew it was just a joke.
The rest of the Planning Commission laughed at my silliness. Joel and his group glared hard at me. Their auto-machine pistols, hanging from slings over their shoulders, loomed larger. I thought: 'that was a stupid thing to say to a humorless fanatic!' But, I was on a roll, had center stage and, except for Joel and his crew, I had an appreciative audience of locals. I was carried away by an unrestrained tsunami of my own design; it wasn't going to stop until all of the energy had been released.
"And," I added. "My mother's Pentecostal minister said that the entire world would be enveloped by the End of Times. So, are you're suggesting that Boulder, after armageddon, would be orbiting the sun like a giant divot floating in the debris of an exploded Earth."
Joel and his group stomped out. It was dark outside. I looked at the rest of the Planning Commission. The mood changed from light to dark. We had a decision to make; stay in the lit room like a herd of huddled sheep or risk leaving the protection of the building and being gunned down. But Joel and his cohorts had left, spinning gravel.
The next week, at the only cafe in town, Joel cornered me. I panicked until he said: "I hear you know how to harness and drive a team of horses."
"Yes," I said. "But the last time I did that was thirty of more years ago. Why?"
"I bought a team of horses. I read, in some books, about farming with horses in a more sustainable way, and I would appreciate it if you could show me how. I want to use my team of horses to plow five acres and plant zucchini and then freeze-dry it. We'll bury it in plastic septic tanks on BLM land close to where we've buried MRI's and ammo caches."
I've never freeze-dried or dehydrated zucchini. But I asked Joel, the following year, how the experiment worked. "When we reconstituted the zucchini; it turned into mush that looked like algae slime," He said. "I think I'm going to run for County Commissioner."
I ran for the Holladay City Council when the town was incorporated. A previous State Senator and I split forty votes. We were defeated soundly by the third candidate in our District. None of the eligible voters in my family would admit if they voted for me. This year I toyed with the idea of running against the County Council Incumbent from our County District. The Chair of a Township Community Council, two sitting elected officials from the Communities on the east side of the Valley, and a number of citizens were encouraging me to run. Ego fed my dormant lack of self-restraint. In the end I choose not to. We have six grandchildren living in the valley and, as of today, four others out-of-state. I have more pleasant things to do.
The evolution of our country's political system is "freeze-dried" partially because of the two party system. Each election cycle the process is reconstituted into a mush of vitriol, bullying, slander, empty promises, pandering, and distortions. Facts lie dormant waiting to reconstitute. The Presidential nomination process is especially mushy. The Constitution is silent about the number of political parties and ideologies within each. The two-party system has simply evolved into its present messiness. Political inertia is fueled by the powerful stranglehold PAC money has on the two parties. Each major party has internal splinters; sub-groups that have been added to the main party platform. An example is the Tea party absorbed into the GOP.
The two-parties have been drifting further and further apart philosophically like ideological continental drift. I worked in the U.S. Senate in the mid-nineties and witnessed some cross-aisle cooperation but the body was gaining velocity away from consensus and towards dysfunction. Congress was less interested in doing the will of the people and seemed to be focused more on money and outmaneuvering the other side. The House was already entrenched when I worked on the Hill. Assimilating the wild-eyed, froth-lipped Tea Party, in the past decade, widened the rift so that very little has been accomplished in recent years.
My grandfather told me that there is almost always a solution to every problem, you just have to look hard to find it. "And, it may take some time to find the correct solution but keep trying different things," He said. The current widening schism inside the Republican party, caused by Trump, may be the injection of needed entropy into the contaminated legislative business model we have.
Zucchini on the other hand has gained propagative velocity. It's prolific adaptation and success, in almost any environment, seems almost hominid. If humans followed the reproductive model of this vegetable our globe would have twice the number of humans it presently has! The number of pounds that a single plant can produce is amazing. I've used my grandfather's council about problem solving and have been generally successful in finding solutions to issues. The exception is how to limit the staggering number of pounds that one zucchini plant can produce and how to course-correct our political system. I've even thought of doing eradicating night raids on the gardens of neighbors and family who generously "drop by" with gifts of zucchini.
Political leaders shy away from passing an ordinance or law to limit the number of zucchini plants in each neighborhood or family. It may be easier to get political term limits and add viable third parties into the two party system! Maybe a lottery system could be codified that would select the family, on each block, that could plant one zucchini that year. Or, failing at any of these solutions, maybe we can freeze-dry the tons of leftover zucchini and collectively send this gift to Congress.
Post Script: Before I could hit the save and post option someone gave me a zucchini. It stared balefully at me from the counter and I think gained a few ounces in weight. And I read Trump's foreign policy ideas and made four loves of zucchini bread and successfully and surreptitiously hid one in our house sitter's backpack! Three more loves to go! Maybe he could propose to send zucchini seeds or loaves of zucchini bread instead of sending American soldiers to stop ISIS?