Moma’s Chicken Soup – A Parable About Modern America

Credit to Rush Limbaugh who gave me the inspiration to write this. This was inspired by his invaluable writings in his Rush Revere series of children’s books . Please enjoy.

A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy.
-Wikipedia

This is the story about Moma and her amazing soup.

You see, while everyone else was making chicken soup the “old fashioned way”, Moma did things differently. About two hundred years ago, a woman named Moma, came up with a new and radically different way to make soup.

She called her soup “Chicken Soup”.

It was a simple name for a simple soup. While other cooks, chefs and cooking experts were calling their soups by regal names, Moma wanted a simple name for the soup.

As well as a simple name for her.

When a reporter asked her what to call her, an expert? A
culinarian? A commis chef, or a chef de cuisine? She just replied, “Just call me a Cook”.

As far as the soup went, it was just as simple. She kept it clean and uncomplicated. However, the ingredients had to be well cleaned, they needed to be carefully cut, and the proportions of the ingredients needed to be consistent. There were three major ingredients and they all had to be in perfect balance. Otherwise the soup would fail.

Other people laughed.

They said her “great experiment with chicken soup” would never make it. Even one of her biggest supporters, her brother, said “Heh. Chicken soup… if you can keep it.”

The Secret

You see, while everyone else was making chicken soup the “old fashioned way”, you know throwing everything into the pot all at once and letting it blend together. Moma did things differently. She only used a limited number of ingredients. Of those ingredients, she would only add celery, carrots, cut up chicken breast and bullion.

That was it.

Nothing else, and no complex preparations or arrangements of food were required.

You see, Moma believed in balance. The celery balanced the carrots. The carrots balanced the chicken, and the chicken balanced the celery. As long as the roles of each item were clear, the soup became balanced and quite tasty.

Everyone else, however, believed that all soups should be representative of all the vegetables available. They threw in potatoes, squash, rutabagas and just about every other vegetable into their soup. These “soup purists” claimed that by doing so they made the soup more delicious. They claimed that the diversity of elements made it better, more improved and healthier.

They even wrote a poem about it.

“Give me your discarded vegetables, your unneeded leaves, Your huddled unusables yearning to be cooked freely, The wretched refuse of your teeming garden. Send these, the tasteless, the foul, the ugly, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden broth.” 
― Do-well Good-biddy-body

But Moma would have none of that.

She believed that the best things in life came to those that worked hard and deserved a place at her table. To them, she would give them the best that she could make. She used only the best ingredients, perfectly selected, and cut and simmered under her watchful eye.

“Let others eat their soup”, she would proclaim. “If we do everything like everyone else, we will be just like them.”

And so it was.

Time passed

Time passed on and Moma died.

There was nothing sinister or scandalous about her death. It was natural. She lived a long and just life, and when the angel of death came for her, she welcomed it with open arms.

Knowing full well that her death was fast approaching, she explicitly warned about the dangers of changing her soup.

She warned about what could possibly happen and go wrong. She discussed her reasoning as to why the ingredients were as she specified. She explicitly delineated how it should be cooked and how it should be served.

She did so in a special document called the “Fed-Well Papers“. Here she explained everything so that people can well understand why things were made the way there were.

Her family, in her memory (as well as in her will) decided to maintain the family tradition. They would keep everything the same. Especially the name of the soup “Moma’s Chicken Soup”.

The first change

That was all well and good. It’s just that they only needed to make just a few little changes to it. You know, Itsy-bitsy changes. To make it better, don’t ya know.

Little ones. Not big ones.

You see, what happened was a fresh-faced family member, straight out of school with a freshly minted MBA decided to change the ingredients. He knew that he could do so. As he was taught so many new and progressive ideas at the university that he attended.

So, what he did was take people who liked other soups and arranged blind-test studies with them. Blindfolded, they would taste different soups and they would rate the taste.

Since they all came from backgrounds that did not like chicken soup to begin with, he knew that whatever they would select would tell him how best to change his soup to appeal to these outliers.

The results when tabulated provided all the ammunition he needed to convince the rest of the family that Moma’s chicken soup needed to change. It needed to change, he argued, to include more people eating it.

It needed to be more attractive to others, and thus more diverse.

He would pound on the family table and accuse the others of being close-minded, bigoted, and hicks. He called them “deplorable” for clinging to their chicken soup.

They reluctantly agreed, though truth be told, there was money that changed hands, and other methods of persuasion were used to convince the more recalcitrant family members.

The first change was to allow roots, leaves and stems in the soup.

You see, one of the more intellectual family members was taught in school that roots, stems, and leaves contain flavoroids. These chemicals can be used to greatly enhance the taste of the soup. Or at least the theory went.

After all, many other cooks were also doing this in their kitchens. It was only natural for it to be applied to Moma’s Chicken Soup. The other kitchens were progressive. They were “hip” to the “new tastes” that all the youth were professing as extraordinary.

So around twelve years after Moma passed on, they started to add the roots, stems and leaves from the celery, and carrots into the soup.

It was a rousing success!

Everyone was talking about the new “improved” soup. Now better! Now More Nutritious! Now better in every way.

On the television there would be discussion panels of “experts” absolutely raving about how wonderful the “new and improved” chicken soup was. They would hold their spoons up high in the air and talk about about how free and gay they felt. They would praise the soup calling it “LGBT friendly”.

LGBT = Large Garden Bits and Twigs.

A “Living Broth”

People outside the family, and everyone inside the community started to talk about how the soup was a “living broth” and that it was meant to change and evolve with the times.

The idea of a set fixed way of doing things was considered old fashioned, out of touch with reality, and outmoded. Only old grizzly stogies, and women straight out of the “Handy-cooks tale” would eat traditional “old fashioned” and obsolete soup.

The universities and cooking schools gleefully taught this philosophy. In fact, only those cooks that agreed with the idea of a “living broth” could ever be permitted to graduate from college. The others; the traditionalists, were set apart and scorned at the university.

Often at the universities would be set aside “broth free” areas where people could be themselves without the worry of seeing someone eat a traditional soup.

More time passed

Of course, if you make one little change, one little tweak, here and there eventually everything would be at the pinnacle of perfection.

Moves were taken to add more and more different kinds of vegetables into the soup.

The first to be added were tomatoes. As it was thought that nothing looked fresher and “farm fresh” than photos of tomatoes with carrots and celery.

Then came potatoes.

Then apples. After all, tomato is a fruit, so apples are the logical choice for the soup.

Soon, everything was added to the soup pot. This included mushrooms, bean sprouts, cauliflower, sweet peas, sweet potatoes, and beans. In fact, all kinds of beans were accepted into the soup.

It was to make the soup full of protein.

Factions of believers

All these changes necessitated some intervention. As there became different factions of soup lovers. Some thought that the soup should contain more potatoes, while others believed that the soup needed to have bananas and pineapple added to it.

They argued that since pineapple made pizza better that it would do miracles to chicken soup.

There was a faction of “root purists” that believed that the only vegetables that should be used are those that were roots like ginger, potatoes, garlic and onions.

There was a faction that demanded against “dietary appropriation” which consisted of vegetables that were used in other foods. They thought that the best chicken soup was one made out of water with no ingredients at all. These purists believed that “every food had it’s place” in society.

To make sure that the soup would remain pure to all factions, various regulatory agencies were established.

• ATF – All Tasty Flavors
• NSA – No Salt Agency
• IRS – Increased Regulation Society
• DHS – Department of Healthy Soup

Vegetarians get all upset

All of these additions made Moma’s soup a big hit with the vegetarian crowd. they loved the convenience of having all their favorite vegetables all mixed together and easy to eat all at once.

The only problem was the chicken.

Vegetarians did not like to eat meat.

They looked at all the rest of the soups that others were eating. They saw that the vast majority of them did not include chicken. They saw how happy and healthy these people were eating these chickenless soups.

They looked at potato soup, and red bean soup. They looked at split pea soup and cream of turnip soup. They looked at rutabaga and nutmeg soups.

Their argument was rather simple. It went something like this; If all these other soups don’t have chicken, then why does chicken soup contain chicken? It was a question that they asked over and over again. They asked it so many times that people started to automatically ask it themselves.

“Why does any soup need a chicken?” They asked.

So they started a “ban the chicken” campaign. This “chicken ban” effort was very popular in the cities. Where violence against chicken was very common. The idea was that if you ban chicken from the soup, the chickens living in the urban areas would be safer from the urban cooks.

The vegetarians were smart. They knew that they could not ban the chicken outright. So they tired to ban it in all sorts of ways. they came up with ideas from taxing the chicken, to removing certain parts of the chicken and forbidding their use in the soup.

Assault Chicken Ban

Whenever a chicken got into a fight with another chicken, it was recorded on social media and promoted on the internet. The buzz word was “assault chicken“. By constantly harping on this term the vegetarians were able to rouse up twitter mobs to demand that Momas soup ban the chicken.

Of course, a "twitter mob" is an artificial construct. It is just a bunch of fake robots (or 'bots) that are used to give the illusion of popular support. You can buy armies of 'bots to make you look popular. It just costs a few thousands of dollars.

They worked at this and worked on this. They would say such things as “You don’t need an assault chicken to make a good soup.” Or, “why would anyone need to have a chicken in their soup?”

They rallied against certain breeds of chicken. For instance, chickens that were good egg-layers. Calling them “High Capacity Chickens“. They would get on television and say such things as “Why would anyone need to eat more than one egg?“.

In fact, there was one “assault chicken”, a fellow named “A.K.” that was particularly famous. During one newscast he took on forty seven other chickens and bested them all. Thus making the rousing nationwide slogan “Ban the AK-47“.

They rallied against inexpensive chicken breeds as well. The vegetarians were particularly incensed about these breeds. They did not like the fact that people would eat them on Saturday nights at BBQ’s with beer. Calling them “Saturday Night Specials“.

They rallied against new technology as well. As some chickens were spouting plastic ID tags instead of metal ID tags that had been used in the past. These plastic tabs would be applied by a tool that would lock the tag in place. It looked like an ugly pair of pliers, and was called a “G-lock”. Thus the anti-chicken crusade for “Ban the Glock“.

They rallied against stupid chickens. You know the kind, the really stupid ones. The “ding bat” chickens. These were the super stupid chickens. The ones that would bump against the fences inside the chicken stockade. They called these bans “Bump Stock Bans“.

They started to refer to the ways to obtain chickens as “loopholes”. Thus making it sound bad and sinister. For instance, there was the infamous “County Fair Loophole” where people could buy chickens at County Fairs. As well as the popular pastime of sharing chickens between family members. This became known as the “Chicken Transfer Loophole“.

All of this was promoted terribly as if it was something wrong, or evil, and that only a very evil and criminal person would ever handle a chicken let alone eat one in a soup. Because of this people started to get the idea that touching a chicken, or even looking at a chicken was a sinister and vile thing to do.

Every Election cycle

Without fail, every time there was a new major in town, there was a chicken incident” within the first six months of his term of office. He would thus get on the “soapbox” and loudly proclaim that he would need to ban chickens for the public good.

In the first six months of Major Bumba, there was a major chicken incident. Then in the first six months of Major Turnipon, there was another chicken incident. All of which would come with 24-7 non-stop wailing and gnashing of teeth of the “chicken tragedy”.

The news would focus on a crying infant, holding a spoon, and wailing about the horrible, horrible chicken. It would focus on school classrooms that took anti-chicken polls and went door to door convincing people of the dangers of chicken in soup.

One such student, a young Mr. Smog, became the picture boy for the anti-chicken in soup crusade. Now, even though he wasn’t the brightest student in the school, he somehow managed to get accepted at one of the top culinary schools in the country. He and others of his generation, such as Able Oscar-Charlie, were now poised to bring in a new way of cooking chicken soup. They called it “The New Broth Deal”.

Of course, the Major would participate as well. He would make a scene about it with him crying on the television or discussing going “nuclear” against cooks that use chicken in Moma’s soup.

Bumper stickers started to be seen on every other car saying such things as “Ban the chicken“, and “A chicken does not make a good soup”

The Ending of the Story

Once the system was put in place, it was only a matter of time before Moma’s soup banned the chicken. The vegetarian calls for banning the chicken never let up. It was wishful thinking, on the part of traditionalists, that the assault on the chicken would somehow disappear. It never did.

Thus, let it be well understood, the ban did eventually happen.

And all those traditionalists, who said that they would have “to pull their spoon from their dead cold hands” stood by and did nothing. They were just full of hot air and bluster. When push came to shove, they went into their kitchens, slammed the door, and hid in fear.

Huge cauldrons of soup were dumped in the sewers with great fanfare. The CIA (Cook Investigative Agency) police and their armed shock troops patrolled the streets looking for violations of the ban.

Oh, the soup is still made today. Don’t ya know.

And yes, it’s still called “Moma’s Chicken Soup”, but it isn’t the same as what it was when it was first made. Though that no longer matters. No one today remembers what the original chicken soup tasted like.

No one remembers.

It’s not taught in school. The way things are is considered to be normal, and the way that they have always been.

Instead, everyone is still concentrating on improving the chicken-less soup. With the latest additions include such things as pine needles, walnuts, succotash, okra and dirt. The promotions include smiling school children, proudly holding up their bowls of soup to an adoring mainstream media.

And Moma…

Well, there’s been all sorts of earthquakes in the vicinity of her tombstone. It’s like a giant is rolling over and over under the ground.

Conclusion

Yes. America is still called a “Constitutional Republic” when it is actually an oligarchy today. And when the Constitution was first signed, only the male heads of families were able to vote, and their vote only would go to their federal Congressman.

There were not two political parties with the same objectives, and the same funding sources, but different talking points.

Today, you have everyone voting. In fact, the donkey-party wants children and all the non-citizens to vote. As such, it is no longer a benefit to be an American citizen. Any citizen, of any country, in any part of the world can vote.

After all, when 100% of the world can control the actions of 4.34% of the population, you have virtually zero control over your life.

It is a liability.

Americans are taxed to fight (presently) seven wars (and many, many other skirmishes) for rich oligarchs that aren’t even US Citizens. We are taxed and taxed, but don’t get any of the social welfare benefits. They just farm us like animals, and use us like farm animals.

In fact, the USA is so messed up right now that it is IMPOSSIBLE to revert back to the way it was intended to be. There are only two courses of action available. They are [1] continue on the path as is, and permit more laws, more taxes, more regulation, and more corruption to fight more wars, and allow more progressive ideology, or [2] “nuke everything from orbit” and start fresh all over again.

"Nuke It From Orbit" is a popular catchphrase  used in discussion forums to express one's extreme disapproval of a  particular image or link posted by someone else. In other words, when "killing it with fire" isn't nearly effective enough, "nuking it from orbit" is your last resort …because it's the only way to be sure.

"Nuke the entire site from orbit--it's the only way to be sure" is a quote taken from the 1986 sci-fi film Aliens  in which Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) decides that nothing is  worth saving and that the only sure way to destroy all of the aliens is  to nuke their habitat from the orbit. 

-Know your meme

To that I must add… Moo!

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

• You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
• You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
• You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
• You can find out more about the author HERE.
• If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
• If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.