Dear George,
Every once in a while I like to wander down to our local dump, plop myself down, and let my eye play across the mountains of rust and rot that are fitting monuments to the ascent of man.
We are where we are today because we have freed ourselves from the iron collar of the natural cycle and replaced it with the linear movement of the six-lane expressway going nowhere. Man’s journey has been an ascent out of the primordial muck of creation and upward into the sterility of a climate-controlled room where the nonglare of fluorescent lights wash out all shading and shadow.
Nowhere is this progress more evident than in the ascent of agriculture, which has evolved into its highest form, Corporatist agriculture, or CorpAg, as it is known by those in the know. CorpAg has but one goal: to get the nutrients out of the soil and into the sewer.
Traditional agricultural practices were as inefficient as they were primitive. A farmer might leave as much as a third of his land fallow, allowing his animals to occupy this fallow land where they shit all over it and ground their shit into soil with their hooves.
The practice spat in the face of sound accounting principles. First off, land is money. Only a fool would leave a third of it uncultivated. That is like the winner in a poker game leaving a third of his winnings on the table when he leaves. These people were definitely not MBAs. Besides, who in the hell wants to buy food grown in shit? Petroleum based fertilizers are much healthier.
As always, any Corporatist approach contains within it the seeds of a secondary benefit. Petroleum based fertilizers make monoculture possible. No longer is there a need for the crop rotation that restores spent nutrients to the soil. On the contrary, monoculture leaves the soil sterile, thus increasing the need for even more petroleum based fertilizers.
Monoculture reflects the Corporatist principle of fuel uber-consumption. The goal is to burn as much oil as possible, be it flying green beans in from Chile so the American public can enjoy them is midwinter instead of being forced to eat canned beans, or Wal-Mart’s “warehouse on wheels.” This over consumption of oil increases the probability of future resource wars that will make it easier for America to remain on a permanent war footing. The threat of having to buy a more fuel-efficient car will not stir a people to war. However, the prospect of not being able to gorge oneself on junk food will send our fat little bodies scurrying to the nearest rampart.
CorpAg has broken the link between vegetables, animals and humans thus increasing the efficiency of food production. No longer do steers leisurely graze pastoral pastures, taking five years to reach their full growth. Now they are crammed into food lots, and force-fed corn, laced with growth hormones and antibiotics, that is not their natural food. Using this method, they achieve their full growth in one year. Instead of their shit contaminating the soil, it is collected in large lakes that contaminate the ground water, making the purchase of more sophisticated water treatment equipment necessary, which adds to our GDP.
Alienation is the wave of the future as we continue to free ourselves from nature’s chains. In a state of nature, a dog will not shit in its own bed. As a species, we are so far beyond nature that we have no hesitation about shitting all over ours.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
5:32:18 AM 
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