Cornholed

So we've finally found a use for all those acres of flyover country that don't have coal, gas, shale oil, or timber to strip out. Forget plastics, my boy, and forget the Internet: the magic word today is CORN.

GM has been telling us in splashy ads that we should "live green, go yellow" (a slogan that could have been coined by a filthy-minded third-grader), and Sunday's New York Times begins to fill in the real meaning of both colors.

The green, it turns out, is mainly the color of money, as there is nothing remotely fuel-efficient about burning huge quantities of natural gas to manufacture ethanol. Nothing fuel-efficient, either, about the vast quantities of petroleum-based fertilizer required to grow corn, a plant that sucks up nitrogen at prodigious rates, or about the vast quantities of diesel fuel required to transport the enthanol once it's been made.

So the green part is a bit of a fraud. The yellow likewise stands for a money color -- gold -- which Cargill's boss tells the Times is what the ethanol madness comes down to: an unconstrained rush for gold on the featureless prairies of the Farm Belt.

The Times, being the Times, walks gingerly around the huge questions this enterprise raises, noting only, for example, that some demur from the view that enthanol deserves to be called a green solution. Noting likewise that diverting millions of bushels of corn away from food production could have a malign impact on domestic food prices and that corn fever could result in planting on lands that really should not be used to support such a nutrient-demanding crop. The Times report does not bother to consider the worldwide impact on food supply and price in a post-NAFTA/WTO era in which other countries have been rendered U.S.-corn-dependent by force of law.

As with all things corn-related, what is going to happen is that the biggest pigs will get in, get fat, and get out, leaving behind a stinking wreckage for the rest of us to clean up. One of the very biggest corporate hogs -- the nefarious ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) -- is already in prime position to reap billions from ethanol craze. By pushing corn syrup as an additive in just about every food we consume, ADM has singlehandedly created an epidemic of Type II diabetes and morbid obesity in this country. Now they invite Americans to plop their corn-syrup-fattened asses into gashog cars and fill them up with ethanol while congratulating themselves for saving the planet at 10 MPG.

What of the lowly farmers who actually put the seeds into the ground, watch the weather, and hope for the best? Again, the big winners will be the huge agribusiness operators who enjoy close ties to entities like ADM and to the politicians who voted to subsidize ethanol production. The actual lowly farmers who go into corn imagining that they can participate in the boom will end up just like the small fry who were the last to bust up the primordial prairie sod of Oklahoma just before the price of wheat collapsed in the late 1920s and the wind started to blow away the soil itself. Eventually there was a song written about them; its title: "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You."