[Written and submitted by George Webber. Note to Guy Fieri: it is a heavier piece, so don't even try to read or comprehend it.]

During a recent shopping excursion to Walmart – and by excursion I mean a series of brilliant tactical manoeuvres to avoid the wall of eight listless Mexicans in the ill-fitting, food stained Hello Kitty t-shirt and worn out slippers meandering slowly abreast and pushing one cart with a case of Tecate – I happened to make a break for safety through their newly re-modelled and irritatingly relocated housewares section where, to my chagrin, I noticed a series of Paula Deen signature products.

I’m not typically enamoured with such pricey novelties and ‘Celebrity Chef’ style gear no matter how smooth and round Giada’s hefty stockpots are, but it is nice to know even the small people with Walmart-centric subsistence level income lifestyles such as myself can enjoy a lesser quality representation of the opulent post-prison Martha Stewart empire by getting doily cutters for $14.88 after price rollbacks. So, despite the fact that Miss Paula was smiling her best chemically enhanced 3D White Strips smile at me from the glossy wrapper of a French Rolling Pin and offering up a friendly ‘Hey Y’all!’, I was perfectly inclined to continue on my way, undeterred, when part of the fine print caught my attention:

‘Manufactured in Thailand.’

And it occurred to me what an absolutely brilliant and cunning plan this was. My admittedly limited exposure to Paula Deen is, of course, entirely self-inflicted. I’ve heard Y’all more times in 9 minutes of Paula’s Home Cooking With Heaping Great Wads of Butter than I ever did in 9 years of The Beverly Hillbillies and the department store Santa guy she’s married to creeps me out more than Ina Garten’s subservient houseboy Jeffrey, so I tend to avoid her at all costs. But I never would have thought that our jovial and portly Miss Paula could be so ruthless.

Granted she could have provided limited manufacturing jobs for a small fraction of the 14 million people in this country desperate for work, but clearly Paula’s vision is far more global in its scope and much more devious in its design. The fact is, anyone can make a stick. Stick-making technology has existed for some 22 million years, in all likelihood starting with the Proconsulids during the Miocene, and remained a robust and flourishing technology down through the period of Homo Erectus and into the era of Archaic Homo Sapiens. Even as recently as twenty-thousand years ago, regardless of their ability to more efficiently bang stuff with a rock, the various anatomical moderns toughing it out in the cold caves of France still found the basic stick a practical and effective tool (as evidenced in the artwork of Lascaux, for example).

So it stands to reason that the small band of resident Parisii Celtic tribes huddled along the Seine would one day further hone the essential stick into a world-renown and classic tool for rolling and shaping fluffy bits of sugary dough and eventually open a series of nice pâtisseries when they weren’t busily hacking away at the invading Roman army.

But Paula Deen’s cunning plan obviously isn’t just about creating a properly tapered 18-inch stick.

This sarcous Savannahan… Savannite… Sav – Georgian understands that Thailand is a rapidly-emerging, newly industrialised country with approximately two-thirds of its more than $600 billion GDP coming from exports and the remainder from tourism, prostitution, and the sex trade. They also make some cars. But mostly the rest is sex. This makes the country not only a major contender in the global marketplace but one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia. For the exports, not the sex. But Paula is also very clearly aware that the same total factor productivity to investment capital weakness that touched off the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s is still an exploitable reality.

With very nearly half of Thailand engaged in agriculture, Paula realises that through a simple matter of subterfuge, she can convince them to satiate the American need for a good stick at a bargain price and thereby incrementally lay waste to the lush forests of the Chao Phraya river valley one native Gaharu tree at a time. Through the cumulative effect of this methodical deforestation, the available biomass which typically supplies, cleanses, and rejuvenates the earth through nutritional cycling processes of decomposition and decay will slowly be depleted and eventually rob the topsoil of valuable nutrients. And without the trees to shield the earth from excess heat, absorb vital water stores and to act as carbon sinks, the already oppressive tropical heat will go unchecked and soon the once arable and abundant lands will be completely desiccated. Erosion will then expose the anaerobic and nutritionally poor substrate and the country will rapidly become a heat island no longer able to support rice production – its primary export.

With millions of farmers out of work and the barren, uncultivable landmass unable to sustain essential crops, enormous pressure will come to bear on the financial sector and escalate an already unsustainable increase in domestic spending. As the baht is strained, encouraging even more need for exports and pushing the fragile economy further into a dangerous imbalance, nervous foreign investors will pull their support, interest rates will skyrocket and Thailand will collapse. As an anchor economy in the region, when Thailand goes, so too will much of Southeast Asia.

Obviously Paula is counting on the fact that the largely Buddhist population will not likely fight back – because these aren’t the Shaolin Mahayana Buddhists who would drop you like a pair of moistened panties at a Phuket brothel if they were given the chance – and she feels confident that she can crush them like a tiny bug beneath the heels of her Gabriella Rocha’s and laugh and eat butter the entire time.

It truly is a brilliant strategy. I still won’t buy the stick, of course, but the plan itself is really very cunning indeed.

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