Friday, July 25 2008
Vive la Revolucion?
Now I will punish you with the silent treatment! Once I get out of this damn box . . .
It's a funny old world we live in these days. Compared to the days of sweet naivete in my youth, the nightly news often drives me to that second glass of wine. But when I see headlines like Militants Bomb Co-Ops In South of France or Injured by Home-made Bomb, I expect to read about angry, marginalized folks with deep convictions about ancestral wrongs or funny ideas about ethnicity or religion. I don't expect to hear that it's a bunch of angry French winemakers blowing stuff up.
'French terrorist' reminds me either of a grouchy mime or Michel Rolland's version of better living through chemistry, but apparently the erstwhile sans-culottes are dead serious.
It's nice to know political cartoons never change, despite the centuries
It's difficult to sort out their issues: their press office is short on releases and they're not getting a lot of sympathetic coverage in the news. However, reading between the lines they seem to be reacting to prevailing market conditions for wine in France, which is sitting on a staggering surplus of wine (something like a half a billion bottles) and is at astounding overcapacity. Add to this that French wine is generally under-competing on the world stage, and the feeble response of the government to their concerns and radicals will start taking matters into their own black hands.
They've bombed government offices in the Languedoc to protest EU dictates to rip out vines and just recently a winemaker in Limoux blowed hisself up with a homemade bomb. His story that he was using the bomb to clear poplar trees was met with skepticism and offers of the loan of a crosscut saw.
What's the deal? It depends on where you fall on the political/economic scale of things: libertarians say that agricultural subsidies are to blame for distorting market conditions (eventually they all get frothy and curse FDR and the New Deal) while less coo-coo-for-cocoa-puffs analysts say it's a lot more complicated than just subsidies. Between the falling US dollar and aggressive competition, the swaddling cocoon of subsidies and regulations aren't serving the French well in modern markets, but the reality of competition can't be avoided.
What's the answer? Well, violence pretty much solves everything, but often with terrible side-effects. Beyond that, blowing stuff up won't help change the way of the world, and trying to regulate a national agricultural product in a free-market world can only make short-term changes. I hope nobody else gets hurt in the name of wine.
| Posted by Tim AT 5:47PM | 0 Comments |  |
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