Lake Cow Bacon

Lyrics

[Intro]
(bayou at dusk, frogs, a paddle in still water)
Nineteen ten. The United States Congress. The American Hippo Bill.

[Verse 1]
There is a meat shortage. There is also a problem in Louisiana:
the water hyacinth, imported for a flower show, has eaten the bayous,
choked the waterways, killed the fish, and nothing will stop it.
So Congressman Robert Broussard proposes, in the House, in earnest,
that the nation import hippopotamuses from Africa,
release them into the bayous to eat the hyacinth, and then eat them.

[Chorus]
LAKE COW BACON! That was the marketing! That was the actual phrase!
Solve two problems with one enormous animal!
The New York Times was for it. The Washington Post was for it.
Former President Roosevelt was for it. It missed by ONE VOTE.
Lake cow bacon. It nearly happened. It nearly happened here.
America came within a single vote of a hippo industry.

[Verse 2]
And the two men pushing it were the strangest pair in Washington —
Frederick Burnham, an American scout, and Fritz Duquesne, a Boer spy,
who had each been sent, at different times, to assassinate the other,
and who became friends, and who together lobbied Congress
for the hippopotamus, which is a sentence I have checked four times
and which remains, on every check, entirely true.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the hyacinth is still there. It is still choking the bayous.
And the meat shortage was solved by industrial cattle instead,
with all the water and the grain and the consequences of that,
and there is a serious argument, made by serious people,
that the hippo was the better idea, and we simply flinched.
One vote. One vote, and the South would smell of something else.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the frogs again)
Lake cow bacon.
Say it out loud. It was nearly a product.