Constable: How dare you apply baling wire to our tax system?
We finally get a Republican and Democrat to agree on something, and I have to complain.
In making a compelling bipartisan argument for reforming Illinois' flawed taxing infrastructure, Cook County commissioners Peter Silvestri, a Republican from Elmwood Park, and Chicago Democrat and former mayoral candidate Jesus G. "Chuy" Garcia criticized the old system as being held together by "the financial equivalent of baling wire and duct tape."
We should be so lucky.
"Maybe we ought to try to get by with some baling wire, patch things up," President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1966 while telling reporters about his plans to keep inflation at bay while stimulating the U.S. economy.
Pliable and versatile, baling wire was as ubiquitous and essential to our suburban ancestors as earbuds are today. Invented in the late 19th century as a way to stop Claude Monet from painting any more haystacks, the baler was a machine that bundled hay into neat rectangles. Wire was wrapped around the bales so they'd keep their shape. By the time of the Great Depression, farmers realized baling wire also could be used to repair most anything.
As a boy growing up on a farm, I held the belief than my dad could fix anything if given a hammer and baling wire. Baling wire kept the muffler on a car, the fender on a bike, the shelf on the shed wall, the gate closed, the wobbly chair legs in place and the light fixture from falling.
"Baling wire is what makes things go," says Steve Berning, a Warrenville farmer who has put up 40,000 bales of hay so far this year. But he admits that the baling wire metaphor gets more use these days than actual baling wire, which uncharacteristically lost its hold on the American market shortly after World War II.
"There were people that did wire when we were kids, but our balers were always twine," remembers Berning, for whom twine is now a memory. "We probably switched to plastic in the mid-'80s or late '80s."
In the next couple of days, Berning plans to finish the harvest of this year's third crop of hay at Galusha Farm with the help of an even newer invention.
"And it's run by an iPad in my tractor," the farmer says of the Bale Band-It, a computerized contraption with a "ton of hydraulics" that scoops up the 50-pound bales tied with plastic and forms them into 21-bale rectangles that weigh more than half a ton and are held together with two steel bands.
Very few farmers still use wire balers, says Ryan Brown, who works for GFC (God, Family, Country) in downstate Pittsfield, which makes the Bale Band-It.
Possibly the only place in suburbia to buy real 14.5-gauge baling wire is Tractor Supply in Carpentersville, where a 6,500-foot spool (a lifetime supply and then some for any homeowners without a wire baler) will set you back $74.99.
The "average city-dweller" knows the baling wire metaphor even if he doesn't know how it originated, says Paul Dugger, executive director of the National Hay Association, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.
"You can fix the world with baling wire, duct tape and maybe a Swiss Army knife."
Once the king of repair staples, baling wire has yielded its crown.
"Duct tape has really taken over for baling wire," Berning says. "With string, rope, bungee cords and duct tape, we can do a lot."
I wish baling wire still sat on suburban garage shelves alongside WD-40 and duct tape. Instead, I'll be grateful that baling wire metaphors have survived longer than the product.
It joins such outdated expressions as "hang up the phone," "roll down the car window," working "freelance," feeling as if you've "been through a wringer," sounding "like a broken record" or even "hitting the hay," "making hay while the sun shines" and enjoying "a roll in the hay."
But politicians need to respect baling wire. Some of the tools that my dad hung by baling wire in our farm's shed haven't budged in a half century.
And speaking of tools that haven't budged in years, Illinois politicians still can admit that they gave us a taxing infrastructure that went haywire.