The Conspiracy Against Catfish

As anyone who regularly reads this space knows, not much gets by the trained eye of this writer. I have pieced together what I believe to be a new threat on our nation by foreign interest, probably the Taliban. Like most good investigative reporters I did not come to this conclusion from one source and one source only. The first hint was not even recognized by this trained eye the first time I heard about the occurrence that now fits so well into the conspiracy. A few weeks ago on a normal late winter, early spring Saturday night a truck crashed into the kitchen area of Libby's Restaurant out on Highway 67 in Priceville. Until today that crash just seemed like a simple misfortune that caused my friend Libby to lose several weeks of business and 40 or 50 of my friends to lose a breakfast and early morning coffee shop. Libby's is an institution in this area, but having a truck run through the kitchen on Saturday night was just something that might happen in Priceville, and did not raise too many red flags.

Toward the end of last week another seemingly innocent clue was embedded deep in the Decatur Daily and probably did not draw much attention from untrained readers. The article to most readers would seem harmless and would be considered by most to be filler since there is usually not much to report around here. To a trained eye like your writer's it was much more. The article reported catfish farmers in Mississippi and Alabama were being recruited to transform their catfish farms from raising catfish to growing algae. Algae, the same slimy green gook that hangs to a fishing line and clogs boat motors. Now the article reported how some company from up North was going to use this slime to make a new bio-fuel to use in our cars and trucks. Now anybody with half a brain should see that this was a scheme, either the Yankees were trying to destroy our economy (i.e. reconstruction) or there was some greater plan in play that reeked of Bin Laden or his group. Convince us to wipe out a prime food source and substitute thousands of acres of slime; this thinking could only come from our most deadly enemies.

The last piece of the puzzle came this morning while getting a haircut from my faithful and smart barber Vic. Now Vic and I don't see eye to eye on many things political, but I do put a great deal of stock in his ability to size up a problem. Vic was on a rage about the Omnibus Spending Bill passed last night by the Congress. Now since I am a Democrat and Vic is just to the right of John Birch we don't agree on many thing but when he mentioned the Spending Bill contained some provision to protect us from the genocide of catfish the lights went off in my head. These dogs are beginning the implementation of their plan to destroy the catfish industry in this county. The government knows about it and is trying to fund some agency to stop them but has not told us about what is going on.

I figure there are sleeper cells all across the South putting their plans into motion. These people have been living among us for years, just waiting for this day. Quietly they are renting mini-vans to violently crash into catfish joints across Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas. With any planning at all they know if they strike at the heart of the industry in these states the other states will quickly capitulate. Tennessee, Florida and the Carolina's have absorbed too many Yankees over the years and are not as dependent on catfish to supplement bar-b-q joints income and would not be so vulnerable to the loss of revenue generated by catfish. Yankees have never been able to overcome the thought of catfish swimming around the sewer lines that feed into their water supplies. They have never minded drinking the water these sewers feed into but heaven forbid eating the fish. As a result they have never really developed the taste for the whiskered fish we southerners have.

Taking away our catfish here in the south would be like cutting Samson's hair. As a people our culture thrives when we consistently fill every catfish joint within 20 miles of our homes on Friday and Saturday nights just to eat catfish fillets or whole fish, coleslaw and a slab of onion. Thousands would be forced out of work in the joints and at the French fry and tartar sauce factories that have sprung up all across our land. Ice tea consumption would be cut and the manufacturers of the little pink and blue and yellow sweeteners would have no choice but to lay off thousands of workers.

These people know what they are doing. You read it here first-----'it's the little things that will get us".