Hunger for Honesty

Yesterday I posted on the subject of whether the sectarian violence in Iraq is a civil war or just an uncivil conflict. Maybe all the fuss about labels is just much ado about nothing. On the other hand, it might be too little ado about something that’s essential to the well being of the country – having a government that is honest and forthright with its citizens.

I give you Exhibit B – the Bush administration has now decided that there is no longer any hunger in America. I mean, this is America; how could there be hungry people in America? That’s just downright un-American. Unacceptable is what that is.

For years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has been issuing an annual report on the status of hunger in America. There will be no more of that nonsense. The USDA has now issued its first report on “very low food security” in America. That’s what hunger is when it grows up and becomes a conservative Reb.

I expect the Bush administration to make the following announcement shortly, right after the president parachutes into a tenement project in Bedford-Stuyvesant: “My fellow Americans, I’m proud as spiked punch to announce, Mission accomplished! We have won the war on hunger! We just need to tidy up a few skirmishes with insurgent food insecurity in the Appalachian province.”

So, what’s the problem with that pesky hunger label? Well, according to the Bush policy makers “hunger” is not “a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured.” This administration wants to use language that it says is more “conceptually and operationally sound” to describe the condition previously known as hunger. After all, one child’s hunger is just another child’s growling tummy.

For some reason, these reason-starved folks have decided that “very low food security” does not suffer from a lack of conceptual or operational soundness, because everyone knows what “very low” and “security” mean. The USDA now defines the people who fall into this group as experiencing "multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake." That means they’re hungry – I swear it does. People who are slightly better-off – i.e., those who aren't always sure where their next meal is coming from – are now labeled as dealing with "low food security."

See how slick that is? Very low food security improves to become low food security, which I’m sure then improves to become food security, until eventually you’ve got all-around security.

The head of the USDA has declared that in order to measure hunger the government would have to ask individual people whether "lack of eating led to [the] more severe conditions" previously known as hunger, as opposed to asking them if they can afford to keep food in the house.

It’s important that all of us are clear about this. It’s not about being hungry anymore; it’s about whether someone in America is too poor to buy enough food. We apparently can handle the idea of having poor people in America because, after all, the Bible says that the poor will always be with us. But, hungry people? That’s another can of corn.

You can’t make this stuff up. Truth is often stranger than fiction. Come to think of it, maybe that’s what keeps our politicians away the truth – it’s too strange for them to handle. Anyway, so much for the notion that it’s only the Dims who work too hard at being politically correct.

The facts are still available from the USDA, even if the names have been changed to protect the guilty. The USDA says that 35 million Americans, 12 percent of us, could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of those Americans reported going hungry at times. (It will take some time for these folks to learn that they’re supposed to report very low food security, rather than reporting hunger.)

But, everyone may not accept these statistics. When Governor W was running for president the first time, he said that the annual USDA report was “fabricated”. It seems this report often indicates Texas is one of the hungriest states in the country. "I'm sure there are some people in my state who are hungry," Bush said. "I don't believe five percent are hungry."

Never wanting to miss a chance to point out a vast left-wing conspiracy, he went on to say that he believed the USDA hunger stats were targeting his presidential candidacy because they were issued in October, just before the election. He chose to ignore the fact that the annual report is usually issued in October. Ah, but not always.

The annual report wasn’t issued this October as usual – perhaps because there was an election on November 7th. You just never know when one of these government reports is going to be delayed. Maybe they decided that issuing a report in October this year wasn’t “conceptually and operationally sound”. Or, maybe it just took them a long time to line out every reference to “hunger” and write “very low food security” in its place. They probably had to sharpen the crayons several times before that job was done.

Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.