The Chris Moeller Archives

Bullies on the farm

Monsanto is a food company so unpopular with consumers that they have spent millions of dollars fighting to defeat laws that require labels on their product packaging. They are also an omnipotent player in American agriculture today, boasting a profit of almost $3 billion in 2012, and they have sued or settled out of court with hundreds of independent farmers, charging them with copyright infringement when the wind blows their contaminated seed into the farmers' neighboring fields. This is not your grandfathers' farming industry anymore.

---

Quote of the day: Noam Chomsky, "[The U.S. still names] military helicopter gunships after victims of genocide. Nobody bats an eyelash about that: Blackhawk. Apache. And Comanche. If the Luftwaffe named its helicopters Jew and Gypsy, I suppose people would notice."

---

I have not seen the film "Zero Dark Thirty." Don’t plan to. It’s being marketed as a “journalistic” film by its director, Kathryn Bigelow, with the hope of adding cache as a courageous telling of actual events. I wouldn’t care if Bigelow made a fiction or non-fiction film on this topic. She could make a openly-deceitful historic film like “Django Unchained,” or a deceitfully-deceitful historic film like “Lincoln.” But I do care that Bigelow feels the need to lie about the national security vetting she says she didn't receive to tell “the true story of the killing of Osama bin Laden.”

She contends that she didn’t receive CIA approval for the project, but all evidence indicates that she did. She received unprecedented access. It was even well-publicized that she did-- at least it was prior to the moment her studio began setting the course for the marketing of the film. (That's also why the release of the Obama-glorifying film was delayed until after the election.) Therefore, the film is not courageous, it is not autonomous. It is not the story behind the “official” story, but instead, the “official” story exactly. You can't boast about the access you received, and then deny what you gave up for it in return. I don't know if the film, at the end of the day, endorses torture techniques or not, but I know that the U.S. government endorses torture, and I know that they conducted quality assurance on this film.

All films you see that borrow U.S. military hardware for filming (i.e. weapons or other machines, which are, incidentally, public property) have received similar vetting. This is one of the dirtiest secrets of Hollywood, and the fact that it’s such a well-kept secret, makes it all the more treacherous. "Zero Dark Thirty" is government propaganda of the highest order; in that respect, “Triumph of the Will” for the modern fascist, and this brief blurb of mine, just coined between the two previous commas, if appearing on a promotional poster for the film, wouldn’t win the movie many Oscars, even if the swell of patriotism has Americans racing to the theater.

---

When will these fallen athletes get it? The wags are lying when they say that a public admission and apology will only open up the arms for forgiveness. There can be no final walk of shame on PED use because the story can never be allowed to die. After the public contrition takes place, the news angle becomes, “It’s too late.. It’s not enough.. Now s/he needs to make amends.” It’s not enough for Lance Armstrong to say he has a “flawed character,” which incidentally is a more honest confession of his central make-up than most Americans will ever allow for themselves.

Just once, I’d like to hear one of these guys make this speech to the world instead: “I took the shit. I’m not sorry. You guys don't know dick about what it takes to compete at the highest level of sports in this modern medicinal world. The drug your kid can use by prescription to try to grow taller in middle school, I can't use by prescription to battle back from surgery. The 'War on Doping' is a foul scam-- on par with the 'War on Drugs.' Just about every Tom, Dick, and Nancy in the cul-de-sac is on some sort of performance enhancement drug. The top 12 drug manufacturers in the country combined to make almost half a billion dollars in revenue last year, and that’s just the stuff that's legal. Can our Justice Department please concern itself instead with real criminals like corporate banking slot jockeys, wage thieves, and executive branch war criminals?”

---

With each passing year, I grow more enamored with the historical figure John Brown. By far, he's my favorite religious fundamentalist militant. The fiery soldier of abolition had the correct convictions, and certainly the courage of them. He forced the holy terror into the hearts of the terrorists. As Henry David Thoreau said, in his work "A Plea for Captain John Brown": "He could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers did not exist." With Brown, there was to be no more tolerance for the compromise shit that still plagues Washington today-- on even the clearest issues of Earthly morality (such as torture, for example). I hope that when the next Civil War breaks out, there is a John Brown again to light the way for the North.

I'm currently reading Tony Horwitz's ("Confederates in the Attic") 2011 book concerning Brown and his raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia in 1859 entitled "Midnight Rising," and it can be wholeheartedly recommended. How long and powerful is Brown’s cultural legacy? Horwitz's book is 290 pages long, and Brown is bludgeoned and captured on page 180.

posted by CM @ 12:45 PM