The Furious Spinner

We went to a party this weekend. I promised myself I would not bring up current events or anything anyone might find annoying or disturbing—I mean, I'm invited to very few parties any more. But someone brought up Bush so I felt as though I'd been given permission to go to town. It was an interesting discussion. Everyone agreed something is rotten in Denmark. When we left, Mario said, "How come we know so much more about current events than so many other people?" Now, you have to know Mario to know that this was not said with any feelings of superiority or judgment about the other people. He really wanted to know because we know that we're not really that informed ourselves. I shrugged. I had no answer. I could guess it was because we get our information from other sources besides the mass media. Except for people in our peace group, other bloggers, and readers of blogs, most of the people I know get their news from the TV—or else they don't get any news at all.

I saw this great program on Link TV about corporate farming called "The Global Banquet, By Invitation Only." This one woman who farms in the United States said some things that crystallized my thinking on the topic of corporations and their harm to this planet. She talked about how harmful monoculture is for plant species, as we all know. But corporate farming is also cultivating (as it were) monoculture in human beings. It's the McDonaldization of the planet.

Corporations go to these poor villages around the world and say, "Stop planting food crops. You need to plant cash crops." So they stop planting crops and start planting cash. This happens again and again. They stop planting food. They spend money on pesticides and fertilizers which poison them and the environment. In the end, they live in worse poverty, only this time they haven't any food because they don't have the land to plant the food any longer. The poverty rate in India has climbed in the last decade in areas where they plant cash crops. Globalization leaves poverty in its tracks all across the planet. As the connection with the environment is broken (and as McDonald's and Targets pop up on every other corner) the rituals, languages, ceremonies, and entire cultures are disappearing. We are all becoming alike. A monoculture of human beings. And these same human beings are slaves to the corporations that are taking away our cultures; they are encouraging us to consume now and ask questions...never. George Orwell was wrong. It isn't governments we need to fear. It is the corporations.

Canada may become the third country in the world to legalize gay marriages. Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin has announced he will go ahead with the legislation "after the Supreme Court of Canada said that parliament had the constitutional right to broaden the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples." You know my views on this. What is all the fuss? If you don't believe in gay marriage, don't marry someone who is gay. If various religious establishments don't want to perform gay marriages, they don't have to. If various religious establishments don't want to perform hetero marriages, they don't have to either. OK? Problem solved.

And what's the fuss about the reporter "planting" the question for Rumsfeld with the soldier. For one thing, Rumsfeld won't answer questions like that from reporters, so they've got to get their questions in somehow. For another thing, I saw most of that event, whatever it was called. Other soldiers asked questions. Rumsfeld was a doddering fool. "Settle down. I'm an old man. It's early in the morning." "I didn't hear the first part of the question." "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and a tank can be blown up." You've heard me rant about this already. But let me just say this: the story is not the reporter getting a soldier to ask his question. The story is that soldiers are not being protected. The story is that soldiers are digging around in refuse piles to find things to put on their trucks as armor. The story is that if we didn't have the army we needed to go to war, we shouldn't have gone to war! 0 comments

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