Damn the French.

I was going to start out with stronger language but I kind of like the French and really didn’t want to do more than damn them as an opening. That may change as I get into this a bit deeper.

It’s all over. Finished. Done. The whole thing, the micro-farm marketing plan for megabuck egg markups I so carefully detailed last week, is in the can. I weep.

As you no-doubt recall, the plan centered on Americans’ love for all things not-American. You may take Toyota, Foster’s beer, and the South American drug cartels as a few examples. It doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s not from around here then it’s probably better. Since it worked for steel, beer, and cocaine, we thought foreign eggs would have been a no-brainer. We figured that we could shake down some serious coin by selling the eggs we got from our originally-French chickens, the Salmon Faverolles.

But they didn’t hatch.

How, you might ask as I did, is that possible? Given that these chick producing factories spit out chickens faster than Bayer makes aspirin, we thought that they should have this down to a science. But no. How wrong we were. They may be able to crank the wheels of chick production at an alarming rate but in this case they weren’t dealing with chickens, they were dealing with French chickens. No matter that they haven’t really been French for hundreds of years; once French, always French. The attitude lingers; it matters not that they actually came from New Mexico.

I offer Quebec as proof.

But they didn’t hatch and no explanation was given. It may have been that the parent chickens were sitting around a rive gauche café wearing black berets and chain-smoking Gauloises. It may have been that the putative mama et papa were enjoying a three-hour lunch over a bottle of white wine to get them ready for a four-hour dinner and a bottle of red. It may have been any number of archetypically-French things that they were doing. But they were supposed to be doing the horizontal je ne sais quoi. And they weren’t. There were apparently eggs, but they weren’t fertilized. And they didn’t hatch.

But trusty Bay Hay and Feed came through with other, less Gallic, fowl. From Iowa. No, really, from Iowa; not like the “French” Salmon Faverolles, but honest-to-god from Iowa. They are called Iowa (go figure) Blues. They’re really more blackish-gray but I guess they’ll sparkle blue from iridescence when they get fully fledged out. Bay Hay told us they’d have the French birds in in a month but that would have been too late to easily integrate the chicks into the grown-up flock; and, as we’ve seen, there’s no guarantee with the French. I mean, really, I don’t want to spend all my time fussing over something I might have to throw on the grill one day.

But Iowa doesn’t have the same cachet as France. I don’t think we could get the same marketing mileage by putting “Eggs”, or whatever they call them in Iowa, on the label as we could from “les Oeufs”. There’s just not the same level of romance.

So we got the cute little black-and-white chickens anyway and introduced them to their new – and now much larger – companions just to see how they got along. There was some frightened cheeping at first, a tentative step toward the larger flock-mates, a hesitant advance until they were looking each other in the eye, and then, a peck on the face that I could hear.

Oh! The poor little baby chicks! I can hear you say.

Poor little baby chicks, my ass. It was the two-day old fluff balls that had the one-week old and twice-as-big Ameracaunas running for cover. Inside of five seconds these Cornhusker-hooligans were chickens number one, two, and three in a flock of six. Five seconds.

After a day though, everybody had come to terms with their places in the pecking order and the flock was getting along great. It was such fun to watch them huddle together sleeping or try, one by one, to burrow under the other five only to be popped off the top of the pile in short order. When it was just three it was just okay, but now they’re really a flock and really fun to watch.

The marketing plan is dead but we’ll just enjoy the Iowan’s brown eggs, or whatever they call them in Iowa, and sell the green eggs as planned. The Salmon Faverolles, and les oeufs, will just have to wait until next year, when the flock expands.

Damn the French.

And their intractable debt.

How’s that for the old bait and switch?

Yes, things in Europe are tanking faster than I originally thought because nobody worried about the French. Somehow, in between late breakfasts, long lunches, and endless nights of dancing and absinthe, they have totally managed to screw the poodle, as it were. Sure, there was finger pointing at the rioting-in-the-street Greeks. There was a subtext of “Gee, these Spanish don’t look too happy.” There were confident declarations about too-big-to-save Italy. Nobody really looked at Portugal because that’s the same thing as Spain, right? And nobody, nobody at all, bothered to look at Ireland because, well, just because. Throughout all this handwringing and whining nobody even mentioned the French. Nobody bothered to let the rest of us know how “deep in debt”, as phrased by NPR, France really was.

I can see why that information was considered a cat better kept in the bag. France was one of the two guarantors of the bailout loans to the other failing European economies. If word got out that France’s economic clout was less than ideal, things might start unraveling.

But as predicted here, Europe has now set itself on a course of chaos that will end in tears. This past week’s elections in Greece and France not only have shown the people to be completely against the austerity measures implemented in the hope that the Euro can be salvaged; a hope that history will show to be even more unfounded than it appears right now, but also that those same people don’t give a flying-rat’s patootie about what will happen anytime further down the road than a week from next Tuesday.

Europe is, basically, screwed.

Greece was the keystone of the Save Europe campaign. The logic was that if Greece’s economy could be salvaged, then maybe things would ease up for the economies-in-free-fall of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. Following the elections there are now exactly two chances that the European Union will survive: slim and none.

Greece is to Europe as France is to the rest of the world. In a word, flighty and unpredictable. Okay, two. In France when things don’t go well, everybody goes out on strike. They shut the whole place down. It’s all very French and all very civilized but that’s how they do it. Eventually one side – usually the government because France is what is known as Socialist even under the Conservative Sarkozy – caves in and everything goes back to normal; in a couple of hours. The efficiency of recovery develops from the experience of repetition. I’ve been lucky enough to have visited France, or one of its Overseas Departments, on four occasions. During three of those visits there was a general strike in progress.

If it’s going to be a long strike, as when I was on Martinique and Guadeloupe a few years back, the way things develop is as follows: 1) The whole place shuts down, everything is closed for weeks, hardship ensues; 2) The strikers run out of wine, cheese, and baguettes; 3) The strike is called off allowing the ships filled with brie, croissants, and burgundy to be offloaded and; 4) The shelves now restocked, the strike is resumed. This cycle repeats until the government accedes to the strikers’ demands.

What Greece did in their general election is to put in a parliament composed of communists, socialists, conservatives, and Nazis, of all things, to make damn well sure that when they end up striking (yes, the Greeks do it too), there won’t even be a government to cave in to their demands. Greece has, in one week, tried and failed, twice, to install a new coalition government. Were I a fan of sports metaphors there are one or two that come to mind.

All those billions of Euros, sacrificed by investors in the hope of saving the E.U., have been essentially flushed down the drain and out into the warm Adriatic.

The people of France, being the relatively sensible, i.e. as compared to the Greeks, electorate that they are; merely threw Sarkozy out on his ass and elected the anti-austerity socialist, Francois Hollande, who is on record against the fiscal conservatism of his predecessor but also on the hook wanting to invalidate the austerity agreements already in place. (As of this edit he has vowed to increase the tax rate to seventy-five percent on “the rich”.)

That, plus he also hates Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkle.

Perfect.

The next few months will be interesting to watch, to say the least. Europe can look forward to stagnation, a failing Euro, and a continent in which everything is authorized, paid for, legislated, and controlled by the only remaining solvent country in Europe:

Germany.

And that, my friends, is irony so thick you could cut it with a knife.