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Living In The World
Oct. 15th, 2007 01:08 pmAfter watching the newly released documentary King Corn yesterday, and taking a little time to process it further, I find myself a little struck today by the idea that we are, today, right at this very moment, living in the world that is the creation of men who are now in their 80s and 90s. This is one of the main messages of the film; that the Secretary of Agriculture in the 1970s decided that farmers needed to be paid to overproduce instead of being paid to underproduce. This 96 year old man's decision directly resulted in the creation of the processed food industry we have today, and made corn syrup into a viable economic alternative as a sweetener... really what happened was, people said "Shit we have all this corn, what do we do with it?" and food scientists invented the vastly industrial chemical process of creating corn syrup.
It also strikes me that quite a few of the documentaries I have seen over the last few years have had a tendency to climax with a confrontation with a very old white man. I'm thinking Fog of War and Bowling For Columbine mainly, and those both deal with just the military industrial complex. But then I think of Vietnam and the Iraq invasion, and both of those were directed by Rumsfeld. And now there's this Earl Butz guy who made the agriculture decision, and he thinks we're living in a paradise of plenty (never mind that it's completely unsustainable - can you imagine the millions that would starve if anything broke the industrialized chain from inedible corn to store-bought packaged goods?). While we may have "cheap food" now, and that gives us more disposable income, the money not being spent on food is now going to be spent on health care for things like diabetes drugs and weight loss surgeries.
These men from the post-WWII era really never thought about the long term consequences of their actions. They had the great gall and ego to believe they could completely control the world and industrialize it into submission; and their legacy is obesity, globalization, overconsumption, pollution, global warming, and endless war. An insane world where it is "cheaper" to fly raw materials and goods thousands of miles criss-cross the planet instead of producing and manufacturing locally, and the wealthiest country in the world grows a trillion acres of inedible corn and feeds half of it to livestock until they get sick and die, and then eats that unhealthy livestock and ingests the rest of the corn as soda and french fries. The environmental impact of this is VAST, the amount of fossil fuels necessary to farm this corn and process it is ridiculous. Never mind the tens of thousands of people who die for Iraqi oil. Never mind the people who are drowning in tsunamis all over the world. It's a complete and utter horror.
We need to sweep out these Cold Warriors. This world is still very much under the thumbs of very old white men, and we may not be truly free of them for at least another 20 years; but we have to start building our world now. They were our age when they put the wheels in motion; now it is our turn, and we may end up having to roll back a few of their changes, but we need to do it before something truly cataclysmic happens. I don't want to think about having to live through a global famine or radical global climate change; I want to keep those things from happening in the first place.
It also strikes me that quite a few of the documentaries I have seen over the last few years have had a tendency to climax with a confrontation with a very old white man. I'm thinking Fog of War and Bowling For Columbine mainly, and those both deal with just the military industrial complex. But then I think of Vietnam and the Iraq invasion, and both of those were directed by Rumsfeld. And now there's this Earl Butz guy who made the agriculture decision, and he thinks we're living in a paradise of plenty (never mind that it's completely unsustainable - can you imagine the millions that would starve if anything broke the industrialized chain from inedible corn to store-bought packaged goods?). While we may have "cheap food" now, and that gives us more disposable income, the money not being spent on food is now going to be spent on health care for things like diabetes drugs and weight loss surgeries.
These men from the post-WWII era really never thought about the long term consequences of their actions. They had the great gall and ego to believe they could completely control the world and industrialize it into submission; and their legacy is obesity, globalization, overconsumption, pollution, global warming, and endless war. An insane world where it is "cheaper" to fly raw materials and goods thousands of miles criss-cross the planet instead of producing and manufacturing locally, and the wealthiest country in the world grows a trillion acres of inedible corn and feeds half of it to livestock until they get sick and die, and then eats that unhealthy livestock and ingests the rest of the corn as soda and french fries. The environmental impact of this is VAST, the amount of fossil fuels necessary to farm this corn and process it is ridiculous. Never mind the tens of thousands of people who die for Iraqi oil. Never mind the people who are drowning in tsunamis all over the world. It's a complete and utter horror.
We need to sweep out these Cold Warriors. This world is still very much under the thumbs of very old white men, and we may not be truly free of them for at least another 20 years; but we have to start building our world now. They were our age when they put the wheels in motion; now it is our turn, and we may end up having to roll back a few of their changes, but we need to do it before something truly cataclysmic happens. I don't want to think about having to live through a global famine or radical global climate change; I want to keep those things from happening in the first place.