IT'S CALLED MAKING DO.

A New York congressman who is in an unexpectedly tight race essentially told voters to deal with the high heating oil prices.

“Yeah, well, I grew up in a family where, you know, if the gas price went up, the food budget went down,” Rep. Maloney said. “So by this time of the week, we’d be eating Chef Boyardee if that budget wasn’t gonna change. So that’s what families have to do. Here’s what we should do,” Maloney said before discussing actions that he says would lower inflation.

It's a pivot back to the creation of a new monopsony power for Medicare, which we have dealt with previously.

What the representative misses is that what "making do" during the American High was is a step backwards sixty years later.  I write as a child of Depression babies for whom Franco-American canned spaghetti and Chef Boy-ar-Dee (which was the label back in the day) ravioli, and occasionally his pizza kit (sauce and cheese, you had to provide everything else, now a $20 offering with pepperoni) were the treats.  Spaghetti sauce was generally home-made, with home-grown tomatoes put up each fall.  Here I thought the Victor E. Garden wasn't political.

There's a Victor E. Garden behind Northampton Grange, and this has been a very good year for habaneros, okra, and tomatoes. But it's a garden, gosh darn it, not a political statement. The zoning code and the subdivision's covenants preclude a chicken coop. I suspect the neighbors wouldn't take too kindly to the cock crowing first thing of a June morning anyway. Although I joke with the neighbors that my electric lawnmowers and rototiller, whose power source is recycled nuclear warheads, are the quintessence of swords into plowshares, they're for quieter tools and for exercise.

For the representative, though, it's probably staying on message.  Years ago, the editors of the Northern Illinois University weekly newsletter liked to throw in stuff to keep the common room comfortable with their prejudices.  During Desert Storm, there was a comment from somebody to the effect of Republicans thinking Americans had a constitutional right to cheap gasoline, in that way placating the environmentalist wackos and the pacifists.  In the sixty years since Franco American spaghetti at lunch, though, factory prepared foods have been improved or upscaled in a variety of ways: you have to look hard to find a TV dinner or a basic pizza among the international cuisine and low-calorie and all the rest) and the representative wants us to turn the clock back at supper.

Perhaps that's the plan.  The way I closed that post about my non-political garden is instructive.  "The real rewards will go to the people who develop backstop technologies, possibly using renewable energy sources, including breeder reactors. Reversion to the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a second-best choice."

It appears, however, that the Jarrett regency would rather have the reversion.  Turf them out.