Q: If Farmer Bob has two sons, and both sons really want to keep the family business going, what is the outlook for Farmer Bob's dairy farm? A: Zilch.

This looks a bit like Bob's dairy farm, but it's actually in Connecticut.

For a few days this week I escaped upstate, to the western Catskills of New York, where the friend of mine who moved up there a few years ago has a neighbor we'll call Farmer Bob, on account of that's his name. Bob, that is.

Bob is what you'd call a "character." Everyone in the area knows and respects him. He speaks at a level of profanity that makes the denizens of The Sopranos sound like pious Lutherans. And so when he looks, for example, at the tractor that a city-bred neighbor has inadvertently driven into a ditch (Bob being on the spot because at pretty much any time of day he's there in about half a second when he hears that someone needs some kind of help), while berating City-Bred Guy in his most colorful vernacular for bleeping nitwittitude he is lifting the front of the tractor and hauling it up and out of the ditch.

Bob is a dairy farmer, as many people in the region used to be. And he takes his dairy farming very seriously. He is fanatical about the care of his cows and the quality of his milk. (He has all the modern processing equipment you have to have in order to be able to sell milk legally.)

Early in their acquaintance Bob began giving my friend raw milk--for cheese-making--on a regular enough basis that my friend went on eBay and bought himself a milk jug. When he presented it proudly for his next batch of milk, Bob took one look at it and said (cleaned-up version), "I'm not putting my milk in that." My friend, who happens to be something of a cleanliness freak himself, spent a couple of days scraping and polishing the jug till it shone. When it was re-presented for Bob's consideration, it won a grudging grunt of approval.

(Bob has a brother who lives on the other side of my friend. His name is Hank. He's also a farmer.)

As suggested above, there's way less dairy farming going on now in this region, which is severely depressed economically, than there used to be. It's not surprising when you hear the pathetic pittance Bob and the other farmers are paid for their milk, a price that hasn't been increased in living memory. Of course all of Bob's costs have skyrocketed. The money Bob is paid roughly covers the cost of feed for the animals.

(Part of the problem the dairy farmers face is the availability of cheaper milk from Canada. Hmm, do you suppose the weakening of the U.S. dollar relative to the Canadian dollar may in some fashion assist the NYS dairy farmers? Nah, there's bound to be some other way to screw them.)

Now, Bob has two sons--both of whom have similar tractor-lifting capabilities. And both, curiously, are really interested in keeping the farm going, contrary to what we hear so often around the country, where farms are being sold because the children don't want to live the lives their parents did. Bob's boys do, but their father has made it clear that it's not going to happen. He says he'll sell the place before he allows it.

It is, he tells them, "no life." It's a back-breaking full-time job, 365 days a year, because the cows don't take vacations or know from days off, and the reward is . . . well, in economic terms, there is no reward.

One of the national lies we tell ourselves about ourselves is that people like Farmer Bob are the backbone of America. This is sort of like the lie that Rush-hornswoggled "patriots" spew about "supporting our troops," when in reality what they do is cheer on woefully ill-equipped troops sent off to be butchered and maimed for no earthly benefit, and then turn their back on those troops when they come back, in whatever condition they come back in.

You can't blame it all on George W. Bush. He didn't make this a country of bullshit. He just took every imaginable advantage of it, built his sorry life on it. His presidency is the crowning symbol of the transformation of America into the Land of Bullshit.
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