Jimmy Gave it Away

OK childrens, listen up here, we have a science lesson and a history lesson. We'll start with history.

You may think that politics are crazy now, but there is a good reason for it. A long time ago, before any of you were born, before Ronald Reagan, the citizens of the United States elected a peanut farmer for president. I am not making this up. He had buck teeth and an addled brain, but Gerald Ford keep hitting little old ladies with his hook shot on national TV so Jimmy Carter became president. Being from Georgia, he was big on Southern hospitality and he immediately started giving everything away. Most recently you have seen him talking to Khadaffi, Arafat and North Korea's Dear Leader, trying to give away anything he can to make peace, and you might have thought of this quixotic wanderer as a recent phenomenon. The problem is he goes way back and he is in such good health he will probably outlast Bill Clinton, who is not in good health (not you, Clint). Anyways, I digress. We were first introduced to Jimmy Carter's largess with regard to taxpayers and American resources when he made an innocent enough trip (early in his first and only term) down to Latin America, only to return with an announcement that he was giving away the Panama Canal! To a military dictator! Little did we know this was the first in a long string of military dictators that Jimmy would hang out with. At the time we thought it passing odd. The canal was built by Teddy Roosevelt more than a century ago, over a ten-year period and after the French couldn't do it. It was an American legacy and this farmer gave it away for peanuts.

I was recently dispatched to Panama by the U.S. government in my top secret capacity as international lawyer and negotiator to find out all I could about the canal, in preparation for an imminent invasion. I had dinner with a guy who tried without luck to run for president of Panama about 10 years ago, and being a bit bitter and more than a bit drunk, he accidentally disclosed the location of the canal. The next day we hired a "cab" (the CIA has drivers in every Latin American country) and took unmapped back roads up into the mountains. On the way we passed an abandoned air field where Ronald Reagan (it took Jimmy Carter to make Ronald Reagan) sent in the troops to take care of one of those military dictators, who is still in prison in the United States, by the way. I was going to snap a picture, but the driver gave me one of those national intelligence looks and I put my shoe camera back on. All of a sudden we came out of a steep mountain pass, right on the canal. It was so sudden I didn't have time to put on my fake mustache.

So now for the science lesson. (Clint, wake up. Your study the broads program is over now.)

You see, up on top of the narrow neck of land between the Caribbean and the Pacific is a lake. The French thought they had to go around the lake and they tried to blast a canal at sea level through the mountains. The mountains won. (Everybody beats the French, but that is a different post.) About the same time, some U.S. Army engineers were tromping around the jungle looking for military dictators, and perchance came upon this lake. They immediately reported to their officer, whose job it was to think. He thought and thought and then came up with a marvelous scheme:

Build the canal down from the lake instead of up from the ocean! The canal is fresh water, not sea water. As long as it rains in Panama (believe me, it rains every day) there will be water in the lake to send down to the ocean along with the ships. In this first shoe-phone picture you are looking at double locks coming out of the lake. There are two ships coming in. They come so slow you can barely see them move.

You see, the locks are at lake level, so the ships glide right in, very slick, with no idea that they are about to lose altitude. This is an old CIA trick that Jimmy told them about.

These ships are really big. Here they are making their way into the locks. There were a bunch of tourists there, mostly from Communist countries since we in the U.S. aren't supposed to know the canal is there. The announcer was telling everybody how much they got to charge each ship. These boats are the largest kind, and they pay about $340,000 each just to go through the canal. Every monetary amount he reported ended in the phrase "in cash". They don't take no checks from Americans down there.

When the ship gets all the way into the lock they distract the captain (all of these captains are easily distracted) while somebody sneaks in behind and closes the lock in the back. Then they start shouting at the captain to look at who closed the back lock. While he is looking back, they open the front lock and the ship goes shooting out the other end. It's kind of like a ride in a waterpark.

Did I mention these ships are really big? The bigger ones carry about 4000 containers on top. It takes aout 200 containers to fill up a unit train, so one ship is equivalent to 20 trains. The clearance on the side of the locks is about 20 inches. In the second photo you can see some cars running along tracks on the side. They keep the ship in line. They run about 2 ships an hour through the canal, so it makes up a large part of the national budget, which is balanced every year, a trick they didn't learn from the Americans.

So as a summary, a poor seafaring captain comes out the other side of the Bermuda triangle and sees a line of ships. Being a BYU grad, he gets in line. All of a sudden his ship starts moving around and doing funny things, he sees Communist tourists, people are shouting at him and then he is on the other side. Then he looks in his safe and notices some of the cash is missing. Not wanting to go home with missing cash, he keeps sailing around until he runs out of fuel, at which point I negotiate a fuel supply contract for him. So it all works out in the end.

Sincerely,

A lifelong Republican

P.S. Sorry I didn't mention Kate in this entry. I hope it will still post OK.

P.P.S. Childrens, for extra credit you can tell me how the ships, without pumps, got up to the lake in the first place.