26 December 2003

The irony of 2004 may well be that the imperium will struck down not by WMDs but by Bovines of Mass Destruction or BMDs (if not death by a thousand acronyms).

Of course the drug of choice for the great majority of the American public is beef and it surely was only a matter of time before BMDs finally found their mark, smuggled into every American home in the shape of the innocuous hamburger, in a terrorist campaign that truly dwarfs the efforts of Osama and al-Qu’eda.

As Americans may or may not know, BMD hit the UK some years ago and it took the slaughter of I believe some 14 million bovines to halt its spread but not before 150 or so people had died from eating beef contaminated with the lowly and barely alive, prion.

Today, every bovine in the kingdom is tagged and its movements traced in a programme that no doubt formed the basis for Ober Gruppen Fuhrer Blunkett’s current efforts to tag every homo sapiens movements unless they spread a disease of even greater peril, the disease of disbelief.

I am informed that the current bovine population of America runs into the hundreds of millions and none of them are covered by the Patriot Act. Loose in the land, they threaten to bring the land of the free to its knees, or at least to a prime piece of shin.

Beef generates something in the order of $5-6 billion a year for the dealers, a not inconsiderable sum dwarfed though it is by the income generated from cocaine, but at least until a couple of days ago, beef was legal tenderloin.

The ‘old’ Europeans though, never succumbed to the lure of USBMD, saturated as it is with growth hormones and antibiotics, enough I’m told, to grow tits on a parrot. BMD moreover, was one of the imperium’s major WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destabilisation) for by forcing countries to raise bovines instead of wholesome local produce, not only could the US satisfy the insatiable craving for bovines at a ridiculously low price, it enabled the imperium to takeover foreign economies utilising the tried and tested method of Trojan Bovines.

Now I’ve nothing against the lowly bovine, dumb though it is, and even though beef does nothing for my bowel movement (aside from locking it up completely), I quite like the taste on occasion, but I must say that I have luckily avoided the addiction and can’t quite remember the last time I had a beef patty (guaranteed to be at least 60% actual bovine or something tasting quite similar).

Perhaps BMD will be the event that finally wakes people up to the disease of private profit that motivates the bovine dealer to recycle the poor animal so that it ends up eating its (dead) self in a never-ending cycle of consumption? Perhaps not but at least it may well get people thinking about the fact that the exhaust fumes of the motor vehicle and the farts of billions of cows are among the primary contributors to global warming.

I have on occasion been accused of nostalgia in my yearning for the ‘good old days’ and whilst it’s true that for most people on the planet, there never has been even a single good old day, let alone multiples of the above, it cannot be denied that the scale of destruction that now extends to the furthest reaches of the planetary envelope has reached such proportions, that in the good old days grim though they were, at least one could look forward to a better future.

Perhaps it will require a disaster of truly bovine proportions to wake us from our bovine-induced slumber (BIS) and that the humble bovine may well be both its carrier and its messenger? And whilst there may well be some uncomfortable times during which millions of us will have to endure BWS (Bovine Withdrawal Symptoms), in the end, we can all look forward to an FFF or Fart-Free-Future.