Striking a blow for Goosey Loosey!

This is truly a good year to be a goose in Chicago. About a month and a half ago, I wrote about an elderly man who was facing a possible prison sentence for accidentally killing a canadian goose. It's been over a month, now, so I suppose that it is time for the animal right's activists to have their dementia validated again, and so it has been. The Chicago City council has passed a law banning the sale of foie gras, fattened goose liver. The rationale is as bizarre as the legislation - the fattening of geese is supposedly "cruel". Guess what "force feeding" consists of? One takes the goose's head, tilts it back, and pours as much grain down the throat of a notoriously gluttonous animal as it will take. Supposedly this is "cruel" because it's bad for the health of the goose. Excuse me? The goose is due to be killed in about a month when force feeding commences. Life expectancy is, by then, a rather moot point. But our crusaders will not be denied in their holy quest to take control of the lives of others. As one of our local chefs told a reporter "Today, Tramonto laughs off the exchange. 'Charlie and I got a chuckle out of it. Hey, both of us made Newsweek.' But he finds nothing funny in the current situation. "Unfortunately, the public is the loser," he says. "If [animal rights groups are] going to dictate what we're going to eat, what's next? That's the problem that I have. I wish I could say that the people have spoken, but I don't really think the people had anything to do with this." The spin one sees from the outside media is what one would expect. Many leftists talking about how wonderful it is that our city council has gone where no obtrusive American legislator has gone before. One gets the usual snide remark from lone individuals on the coasts about ignorant Midwestern hickishness running amok into legislation, as if farmers tended to be in favor of this kind of thing. But let me give you the little detail the newspapers won't pick up on, because pointing out this kind of thing is politically incorrect, and because knowing this would involve knowing the community one was reporting on, instead of just pulling the story off the wire, e-mailing a few people, and tossing in a few editorial glosses. Chicago, like Louisiana, is home to a large ethnic French population. Chicago, unlike Lousiana, has a lengthy history of treating its French-Americans like dirt, to be trampled underfoot and defecated on, when nobody is looking. The largest contingent in that community is the Alsatian one. Guess which is one of the delicacies most closely associated with Alsace, very much a part of that province's traditions, traditions that our not very good friends from the North Shore have been trying to high pressure some of us into giving up for generations? Foie gras, a key ingedient used (usually sparingly) in a number of Alsatian dishes served on very special occasions. It's as if Boston passed a law against the sale of cardone, and then tried to pretend that this was not aimed at the large Southern Italian community in the North End. It is nativism masquerading as humanitarianism, and the second most amazing thing about the whole situation is that this is being marketed as "progressive" legislation. The most remarkable thing is that many people will probably accept that, considering the flimsiness of the pretext under which the traditions of others are being sabotaged. Ignorantly simpleminded? Hardly, "Sneaky" is more like it. Openly passing a law banning the consumption of Alsatian food, at the very least, would raise a few eyebrows. Trying to accomplish the exact same thing indirectly, in bits and pieces, won't raise as many, and that's the idea. The real kicker is what Joseph Moore, the author of this legislation, has the actual nerve to put near the top of his ward's homepage: "Celebrating Diversity in the 49th Ward" I guess diversity doesn't include you or your traditions if you happen to be French, in Mr.Moore's vision of Chicago. But then, for those of Southern European descent, that's how things usually work around here. By the way, according to this page on the official Democratic party homepage, "Joe Moore, Alderman from the 49th Ward in Chicago, is chairman of the National Democratic Municipal Officials Conference and serves on the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee." You remember the Democrats, right? Our courageous fighters for tolerance and individual liberty? Still want to know why I vote Republican? If so, stick around. The goose stepping tendencies of the Chicago Democratic party are an inexhaustable subject, one that does not fit in with the public image that party likes to cultivate, and you'll be hearing more about them here. A lot more, and it gets a lot worse.