A Modest Proposal

This morning I got up insanely early, pulled on my boots and went turkey hunting at one of my usual public quail hunting spots, a place that during quail season was absolutely covered up with turkeys, but no quail.


Today, however, I neither saw nor heard a single tom, but I was kicking up pairs of quail seemingly every few yards. So it goes. It was nice to see quail doing well, even in our continued drought, so I didn’t mind getting skunked on the turkeys. After last quail season I was beginning to think that perhaps the bobwhite quail was a mythical creature that inhabited the realm of cryptozoology.

All in all it was a singularly pleasant morning – until I made it back to the parking area. I had gotten there and walked in well before dawn, so I hadn’t noticed the bullet-riddled sign and wads of toilet paper strewn everywhere.

And as I stood there trying to comprehend the mind-boggling idiocy of such an act, it occurred to me that perhaps science – in its never-ending quest for new sources of energy - has for all these years somehow managed to overlook the single most powerful, limitless and ever-renewing force known to Man – stupidity.

Think about it: Fossil fuels still reign, but are on the downslope of Hubberts Peak. Forget nuclear fission and all its attendant issues of safety and radioactive waste, while cold nuclear fusion still occupies the realm of science fiction. Solar and wind have major scale issues, destroy upland bird habitat and are completely dependent on the vagaries of weather and climate. And biofuels? Maybe if we all want to live in a global cornfield.

But stupidity? Well, that shit’s everywhere, all around us, occurring naturally and in such profusion that I sometimes wonder if we’re not all drowning in a sea of the stuff. So when life hands you stupid, why not - to paraphrase the old cliché – make stupidaide, or stupanol, or stuplear power (we can work on the name later…).

Seriously, if there were some way to harness the kind of potent, high-grade stupidity it takes to completely trash the parking area of a public hunting area and then convert that stupidity into an energy source for spinning power plant turbines, we’d be set for life…

And if any physicists out there want to take a crack at it, I know where you can start mining your raw material…