"God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs... a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees... a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, a land whose stones are iron and out of whose hills you can dig copper... Take heed lest you forget... the great and terrible wilderness" (Deuteronomy 8 7-9).
Fighting for its survival against its enemies within and without, the republic now saw a massive popular demonstration against the scarcity of bread, hijacked by the radical sans-culottes.
Those were the days for taxes, and for war's infernal din; For scarcity of bread, that fine old dowagers might win; For shutting men of letters up, through iron bars to grin, Because they didn't think the Prince was altogether thin, In the fine old English Tory times; Soon may they come again!
The march began among women in the marketplaces of Paris who, on the morning of 5 October 1789, were near rioting over the high price and scarcity of bread.
Three days later, a Parisian crowd, led mostly by women fishmongers, marched to Versailles in response to the scarcity of bread.
It involved scarcity-era bread lines, suppressed Jewishness, the inevitable indignities that arise from multiple families sharing tiny apartments, and a two-year stint in the Soviet army, in which Smirnoff got out of artillery training by volunteering to paint portraits of Lenin and Stalin.
Poverty, rising food prices, scarcity of subsidized bread, unemployment, the poor quality of health services and education, and charges of nepotism and rampant corruption were among the many grievances in a country in which inflation reached 25.6% (food price inflation 35%) in August, unmitigated by a 30% increase in the salaries of public workers and 7% GDP growth.
Oldham was frequently disturbed by bread and labour riots, facilitated by periods of scarcity and the disturbance of employment following the introduction of cotton-spinning machinery.
Bread boredom aside, the sandwich's other downfall was a scarcity of vegetables.
In that regard, Maduro's real enemy is not imaginary fascists but the bread-and-butter economic problems of soaring inflation and spreading scarcity.
