The First Big Idea 5/7/07

Hey, thanks for droppin' in on Harmless Jones!
This is what I'm talkin' about! BIG IDEAS. You'll find a bit o' news here now and then, but mostly you'll witness some deep thinkin' That's what I do. I'm a one man think tank. There's nothin' I like better than to push everything aside, kick back and have a big think. I'm king of the daydreamers. The lost art. Most of us have forgotten how to daydream and parents don't know how to teach it. If you take TV, the internet and the iPod away from most people they freeze. For a while anyway. I think most, unless they've been damaged by the thinkin' the machines have been doin' for them, will learn how to think again. Unfortunately, schools don't teach people how to think either. There oughta' be a class on thinkin'. Not just reasoning or critical thinkin', but navigatin' the pathways, rainbows and cesspools in our imaginations. But that's not a big idea, it's just an observation. Here's a BIG IDEA. Any BIG IDEA I put forth on this page is free for the taking. This is my gift to the world. If you see a BIG IDEA you like and you want to run with it and make it happen, go for it.
Now here's my first BIG IDEA. America needs a national food. We need a whole bunch of national things. But I think it's a good idea to start with food. Our culture has has gotten so blended and scattered that the only way to define American culture is to say "it's diverse". That's crap! That just means we don't have any focus and we're starting to dissolve into an indefinable moosh. That's not desirable. Once you start swirling all this diversity together all the sharp edges start gettin' rubbed off of it, and it's gettin' hard to see what made stuff seem so diverse in the first place. So I say it's time we started defining ourselves again and the best place to start is with what we put in our bellies. Personally, I think a great candidate for national food is the donut (or doughnut). Listen to my song "Song About a Donut" and I think you'll agree. Baby, this is pure American food. Don't give me any of that crap about the donut evolving from a beignet. We bore a hole in it baby. It's ours! Wassup!! you don't like the donut, how about oatmeal? Let's do Cheezits, or any of a variety of cheese-flavored snack foods. The pop tart might work if it weren't so manufactured. Or maybe that's what makes it American. We build food. We don't grow it anymore. Help me out here. I think this is one for Congress to tackle. They shouldn't be dealing with resolutions to end the Iraq war. They supported the resolutions and actions that took us there. They only move toward a decision when they face overwhelming pressure to do so. They supported the war because the pressure was on them to agree or look spineless and unpatriotic. Now they're all saying it was a mistake because to continue to support it makes them look as stupid and misguided as the President . Yeah, yeah, I know it's such a wonderfully designed system we have. Then why is it so frikkin' reactive. Let's do something proactive and designate a national food. I nominate the donut . That's what I'M talkin' about!