THE RECORD
December 18, 2002

Fiat Lux

by Ed Deak

This continued demand for more competition reminds me of a long gone cow named Maggie. Her stupid, obstinate "competitiveness" brings back memories of that other famous Maggie of the same era, by the name of Thatcher.

Our Maggie was highly pregnant, ready to drop her calf at any minute on one cold February day, so we put her in the barn, with her own private yard, to make her and the coming calf comfortable. I fed her the best of our hay, then went over to the other corral to feed the rest of the cows.

Seeing the others eat fired Maggie's competitiveness to such fever pitch that instead of eating her private hay she stuck her head over the fence, mooing, bellowing and virtually blowing sparks out of her nostrils, with her tail going like a propeller of a ship.

Finally her greed got the best of her and she took a flying leap over the fence landing in three feet of hard packed snow with her huge belly buried deep, looking like a loot laden Viking ship stuck in an ice field off Greenland.

There was no way to get to her with a tractor, we couldn't possibly dig 50 feet of hard snow away by hand, so there was nothing we could do to help her. By then I was mad enough to leave her stay stuck in there till summer, alive, or as coyote feed.

Maggie was huffing, puffing and bellowing as she was fighting her way out that snow for about three hours. By the time she made it the others ate up all the hay. There was nothing left for her and I sure as hell was in no mood to play Florence Nightingale for her any more. So she starved for the rest of the day and night.

Like all good competitors of history, she ended up in some hamburger joint soon after. If there's any truth in reincarnation, I think she'll come back as the CEO of some multinational, ready to compete globally, or even to teach neoclassical economics at Harvard.
The way I see it, when you have a good thing going, count your blessings and shut up. As the old Hungarian proverb says "He who grabs for too much ends up with little!"

Copyright (c) 2002, West's International