Representative Madeleine Dean (D, PA-4): “We cannot build bananas in America.”
Sometimes it’s painfully necessary to state the obvious.
Friday, June 6, 2025
Bananas
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Part-beagle”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
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Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
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comments: 4
Not to put too fine a point on it, but bananas are grown in American Samoa, Guam, Hawai'i, Florida, and the US Virgin Islands.
Sigh — that’s what I get for assuming she was correct. (I’m now assuming that you’re correct.) But we can’t produce bananas in the States to satisfy consumer demand, can we?
I understand the representative's point. She was obviously referring to the contiguous United States (not counting Florida). It reminds me of the time I was on a plane and the flight attendant was hawking the airline credit card by noting that if I signed up for one I would receive enough points for a free trip from "the United States to Hawaii". I believe that would earn a "sheesh" from you.
While I doubt that the US can produce enough tariff-free bananas to satisfy demand, I find it amazing that you can buy a banana at a filling station in the middle of Alaska. I'm going to write a book about that some day.
I would give that a “sheesh.”
In Madeleine Dean’s defense, it’s also possible to point out that Howard Lutnick was harping on the idea of manufacturing, building it here. You can’t “build” enough bananas in the States to satisfy demand: in 2023, approximately 10.24 billion pounds in 2023 (!). I think it's like saying that we can’t build iPhones here: it’s not practical in terms of volume and cost.
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