The Real GMO Wars

Much has been made—and rightly so—of the constant push to genetically modify this or that. Our food is the most common target: the seeds from which it is born, the offspring from which it is raised. A recent article even touched on the future of beef—edible beef—sans the need for any kind of genealogy, grown instead in a petri dish. Monsanto is famously infamous for genetically modified soybeans and corn, but even this short list of GMOs (from Monsanto and others, and including not only corn and soybeans, but sugar beets and papaya) tells us that such apparently infinitesimal tinkering is (and is becoming) far more common than we think.

Monsanto’s latest brainstorm is still another genetically modified soybean, this one developed (with BASF) in response to “an explosion of crop-choking weeds around the U.S. that have become resistant” to the most recent round of Round-up, Monsanto’s best-selling herbicide. The weeds, it seems are smarter—and faster—than our best scientists.

***

I never much liked Edgar Allan Poe. I find him overly rococo. For sheer horror, built from natural human responses and events, give me Nathaniel Hawthorne any day.

Hawthorne isn’t a name that leaps to mind when thinking of horror, but that deserves to change. Hawthorne regularly dipped his toes into gothic waters, particularly in his short story oeuvre. Tales as popular as “Young Goodman Brown” live side by side with lesser-known (but still wonderful) works such as “Lady Eleanor’s Mantle” (which could give Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” a solid run for its money) and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.”

What strikes me most about Hawthorne—and what made him scarily prescient—is the way he wrote about science and its obsession with changing the natural order of things. Exhibit A is the masterful tale “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” written about 1844. In it, our protagonist, one Giovanni Guasconti, arrives in Padua to study at the University there, and takes up run-down lodgings overlooking a beautiful garden, where he soon spots Beatrice, the daughter of the eponymous scientist—a man who has been (using our modern terms) genetically modifying organisms. Beatrice, born and raised in this environment, has had her own genetics modified. As with many cautionary tales of the times, such a use of science—by man in imitation of God—results in predictable tragedy.

***

We have very little sense of (or choose willfully to ignore) the unintended consequences inherent in our quest for answers, yet science plunges forward anyway, as if anything that comes of it can only be good.  Regardless of how many times we are reminded that such is not true, still we learn little. And we’re playing with nature….

Many of us watch the GMO wars and fear becoming Rappacinni’s daughter, or perhaps worry that our children will, or that their children will. We fear that we, ourselves, will unwittingly become genetically modified organisms, much as Beatrice did. But if you’re afraid of what the science of genetic modification might do to you or your offspring or your offspring’s offspring, then you’re likely wasting your time.

We could all be gone by then.

The real war—and the real fears that go with it—are closer than you think, the harmful impacts potentially much greater and much more immediate.

We humans change relatively slowly, our cumbersome genetic responses dragged down by twenty-five-year generational cycles. We are surrounded by organisms, however, that evolve at rates much, much faster. The plant world, the insect world, and the microbial world—the worlds with which Monsanto and others are at war—are evolving in response to chemical attacks.  We don’t need to worry so much about the chemical effects on us as we do about dying because of the rapid changes on this much smaller scale.

It's not just the florae—the ones schooling the scientists at Monsanto and BASF—that should worry us. They are not nearly as smart as the smaller still insect world. Just last fall it was reported that Monsanto’s carefully constructed anti-rootworm corn was now succumbing to… rootworm. You know how it works by now: the genetically modified corn resists the rootworm and the majority of the insect population—they live only on corn, after all—die off. But the few that remain, the resistant few, breed and survive. Rootworms lay eggs on annual cycles, and so it wasn’t that long before the resistant worms were comfortably feasting again. Likewise, too the Colorado potato beetle, which has developed resistance to more than fifty different compounds.

Smarter still are the microbes—and they’re why we should be frightened. You see, it’s not just about Monsanto and our food. It's about all chemicals designed to make our lives better. The pharmaceutical industry is essentially in the same business as Monsanto, attempting to perfect the use of science in developing protections against harm, and, like Monsanto, the health care industry now suffers the same constraints. So-called superbugs have become stronger in recent years: a 2013 report from the World Economic Forum shows an unprecedented rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or ARBs, with nearly 100,000 deaths reported in the United States alone.

We’re paying attention to the wrong GMOs; the real GMOs are the creatures adapting and surviving, the ones killing us.

***

It’s a war we’re losing, a war we can’t possibly win.  We need to think differently. We need to be at war with the way we respond to what happens around us and to us. If we focus on wars with companies then we’re missing the picture. We must recognize that we live in a time where defeating is more important than coexisting, a dominion philosophy grown from socio-religious roots, a time where short-term profits produce short-term thinking without considering long-term consequences. The war needs to be with our culture, with ourselves, the part that says eat cheap and fast and take a pill for every ache and pain.

If we don’t change—if we don’t recognize that we can’t win a war that aims to dominate nature—then the result could very well be a Hawthornian future, one that makes the ending to “Rappacinni’s Daughter,” even more frightening.  As Hawthorne writes near the close of the story, “And thus the poor victim of man's ingenuity and of thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there….”

Let it not be so.

A Response to All Regarding “A Letter to Liberals”

My last post received more than the usual amount of attention, and that’s putting it mildly. (Website traffic was the second highest it’s ever been, topped only by a post I wrote last year which questioned Oprah Winfrey’s motives in donating to a Stockton, CA candidate.)  Comments, too, have rarely been higher. My site gathered over 150, and the various Facebook trails easily topped another 500 or more.

I tried to keep up with them, really I did. But it was just too much. So instead I offer this post as a response to all who took the time to read and reply.

First, a bit of summary: my previous post was an open letter from a fictional narrator (let’s call him “John”) who has a basic middle-class life with generally conservative, bullet-point political beliefs, none of which are all that strong. He spends most of his time living life rather than breathing politics—as most of us do. He describes himself, first in purely personal terms, and then in terms that are increasingly conservative, and he asks whether the liberals out there hate him. (I also want to add that John’s beliefs are NOT mine; a number of responses asked about that—several even calling me cowardly for “hiding” behind a fiction. My answer is to read more of what’s on my site; my positions are well-known and very public.)

The point of the post was not to discuss John’s political leanings; it’s pretty obvious that most on the left would disagree with much of what he says. The point, rather, was for each of us to ask ourselves whether, as we learn more about someone’s political beliefs, we’re that much more likely to pigeonhole them (or, worse, demonize and dehumanize them), allowing that small part of their lives to color how we react.

And it seems, based on the responses received, that we do.

Using a variety of semantic techniques (in which I’m well-versed) I took the time to manually analyze the 166 responses on my web site in order to categorize what people said.  Here’s the chart:

First thing to note: A sizeable chunk of commenters—about 1 in 5—spent their energy disputing the specific points delineated in the narrator’s world view; many, it seems, thought they were actually talking to me rather than a fictional character.  It was interesting to see where these people got to before they became a little bit heated in their responses. Frankly, it was much as I expected: people were fine with “John” until he hit one of several hot buttons: for some they “were fine with you right up until you said you voted for Bush twice,” or they “just didn’t understand why you think we’re trying to take your guns away.” For others it was religion and still others abortions.  A few people even went point for point.  Most, though, remained largely civil… largely, but not always.

Then there were the 5% of responses that clearly and succinctly confirmed their hatred for the narrator, offering up some choice tidbits in doing so:

“Yeah, you're hated. You're too lazy to think.”

 “Yes, I do. You're scum. It's because of you and millions of dumbasses just like you that the country's as fucked as it is right now. Fuck off and die.”

More interesting to me, though was the “almost hatred,” the collection of people who couldn’t come right out and say it (perhaps because they don’t like to think of themselves as people who would hate), but who have absolutely no problem pitying the narrator, or feeling for sorry for him, or just straight out insulting him… as if that somehow makes it okay. I call these people the “No, buts” (as in, “No, I don’t hate you, but….”), and there were quite a few of them who said things like these:

“I…do not hate you but I don't hold your views. You and your wife sound like sheep led blindly by the [R]epublican party.”

That was one of the nice ones. Try these on instead.

“Of course I don't hate you. But I do think that you're a bit of an idiot who holds opinions he's not willing to think about for more than a minute at a time.”

“To answer your question, "Do I hate you?" the answer is that I disparage and disdain you for your complacency, ignorance, lack of foresight, and lack of empathy. But you are just too insignificant by yourself to be worthy of full-fledged hatred. I reserve that for the scoundrels who have taken you in.”

Oh, but thanks for not "hating…."

A nice chunk of the commenters—about a third—were civil and engaging on the general topic, and chose not to bullet-point their responses. To these people I say “thanks.”

My favorites, though, were the small group of people who really took the time to examine their own responses, who saw the point I was trying to make, and who suppressed their limbic brains long enough to take a look at themselves:

“Manufactured divisiveness is the problem. Oneness is the solution.”

“[The post] was meant to get readers to consider why they think all Republicans fit into that mold. Because they don't. And to get readers to realize that all of us Liberals don't fit into the mold that Republicans try to squeeze us into either. Doesn't anyone take the time to read all the way to the end anymore?”

It seems to me that many do read all the way to the end. But they don’t necessarily wait until the end to make up their minds….

(A side note of thanks to the few who made me laugh, especially the guy who said that he didn’t hate the narrator until he found out that he, the narrator, was a Penguins fan…)

Semi-finally, I want to point out three sites that were referred to along the way; two are direct responses to “John’s” letter, and the third is a wonderful cartoon strip that sums things up quite nicely. From Deborah Winter-Blood comes this one, and from Philip H. comes this one. The third, from the site Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is here. All are very much on point and interesting to read.

And finally finally, let’s all just ask ourselves honestly and truthfully: Where on this chart did we end up? And where do we want to be?

Michael (the real, non-fictional person) Charney

A Letter to Liberals...

Hi.

I wanted to take a few moments to introduce myself.  I live just outside of Pittsburgh, in a single-family home along with my wife and two children, both girls. My daughters’ names are Katie, she’s nine years old, and Chrissy, who’s twelve (though Chrissy, now a tweenager, is starting to prefer Christine, or just Chris, because she says that “Chrissy” makes it sound like she’s still a toddler.)

Our house is simple, a bungalow with three bedrooms and one-and-a-half bathrooms--and a mortgage that can make things a little tight for us now and then. There’s an eat-in kitchen, a nice living room (and, yes, I splurged on a wide screen HDTV that hangs on the wall over the fireplace). Built in the ‘20s, the place needs a bit of work now and then, but nothing I can’t handle, though I imagine in a couple of years I’ll need to spring for a new roof.

Do you hate me? At all?

I work in Human Resources for a company that makes corrugated cardboard boxes. We have about ninety employees and we pay a decent wage and have been able to avoid unionizing. A family-owned company, we’ve managed to instill that family feeling across the board, and our owner, the grandson of the founder, feels that if you just treat people fairly, you don’t need to deal with what he calls “that union stuff.”  I mostly agree with him. I know unions are good for worker safety and things like that, but mostly I think they aren’t needed as much these days, and just kind of get in the way of things.  My wife doesn’t work, but she knows she can if she wants to, especially now that the kids are a little older.

Do you hate me? Even a little bit?

As a family we’re somewhat religious. My wife was raised Presbyterian; I was raised in a Charismatic church, which I left as a teenager (over my parents’ very strong objections). I find the Presbyterian church comfortable, and the four of us go most Sundays. The church tends to the conservative, with conventional sermons on morality and ethics. The sermons aren’t usually about really sensitive issues like, say abortion, but it’s generally accepted that the church is against it, even though, well, like everything, there probably should be some exceptions. And with gay marriage, well, we’re not sure. It somehow feels wrong, but then I’m sure God loves them, too. It’s a good church with a good pastor. We like it.

Do you hate me? Perhaps silently?

We’re a Republican family, and both my wife and I have voted Republican for as long as I can remember (including both times for George W. Bush). Though we both think the Republican Party should do more to reach out to poor people and minorities like it did way back when, we’re also strong believers in people picking themselves up by their own bootstraps and not counting on government to support them all the time. Plus, I do feel the bite of those taxes every other week when I get my paycheck, and it hurts. Taxes should be lower.  I’m also not happy with being forced to buy insurance if I don’t want it or think I need it, and I don’t like the fact that people don’t seem to respect the Constitution much anymore, like how they want to take away guns from honest, law-following people.

I’m also not real sure if I like the idea that people who have come here illegally should get to stay. I know there’s no simple answer, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.

How about now? Am I a Rethuglican to you? Or a Teahadist? Or a Teabagger? Am I someone you feel pity for? Someone you wish didn’t exist?

Actually, I don’t think about politics all that much, and when I think about myself and my wife and my family, it’s not “We’re Republicans,” or “We’re Conservatives.”  Mostly I think about how we’re a family, and about how I want my girls to get good grades so they can get ahead, and how I want them to respect others and God. I think about doing a good job and loving my wife and kids, and I think about my friends and whether Tom and Jack will ever agree on who makes the best barbecued ribs. Oh, and I think about the Steelers and the Penguins, but not so much about the Pirates. I’m a husband and a father and a sports fan and a hard worker and a good friend. And sometimes, when someone wants to talk about politics, or when an election comes around, I’m a Republican.

I’m really not that different from you, am I?

So why do you hate me?

[Note to my readers: the above "biography" is fictional, and is not my personal story. I chose this mode to personalize my point for each of us. To paraphrase Suze Orman: People First, then Politics, then Things....]

Our Funding Fathers

I’ve come to the conclusion that Citizens United is much ado about nothing; the real culprit is Buckley v Valeo.

Buckley v Valeo was a squabble over the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1971, which both limited various kinds of campaign spending and financing, and established the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as the body responsible for oversight. Five years later the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court which ruled, in a per curiam decision (meaning the court’s decision is rendered collectively and anonymously) that certain provisions of FECA71 were unconstitutional. Per Wikipedia, “the limitations on campaign expenditures, on independent expenditures by individuals and groups, and on expenditures by a candidate from personal funds were struck down.”

The decision is famously interpreted to mean that money equals speech.  It remains so to this day (despite Justice Stevens comment in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, where he said that “[m]oney is property, not speech.”)

And from there it’s been all downhill. For a sense of where we’ve come since those Nixonian days, check out this video:

It was Robert C. Byrd, former West Virginia Senator, who said that it “is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.” And it was Phil Gramm, another Senator (this time from Texas), who reminds us—all too sadly—that those looking to serve the public as elected officials should “have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.”

And ready it is. In recent years alone we’ve seen the dramatic and corrupting influx of money in politics from the likes of Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, the Koch Brothers, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Vincent Ryan, not to mention the NEA, Goldman Sachs, the NRA, and the AFL-CIO. It’s gotten so bad that we need scorecards to keep track. And all of these people get to “talk” with their money. The First Amendment (and the SCOTUS responsible for Buckley v Valeo) says so. But those famous names and acronymic organizations obviously have “voices” that are exponentially louder than ours…

But is money really speech? Is that a core First Amendment principle that stands staunchly in the face of all assaults?

Apparently not.

In this compelling Virginia Law Review article, the case is made that “[a]s any first-year law student knows, a helpful way to test the rule a court might offer to govern a case is to see whether one is also comfortable extending that rule to a relevantly similar case.”  So if, they argue, it’s okay to contribute to Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Greens, is it then okay to donate to, say, the American Nazi Party? Or the Communist Party? Or any party that promotes ideals and methods antithetical to the general interests of the society at large?

Well, all of that seems to be okay. But what about donating, for example, to Al-Qaida? “On the one hand,” the article points out, “if a contribution is speech, then it is speech no matter to whom the contribution is made. But on the other hand, this looks a lot like the support of terrorism.”  Well, you might say, that makes sense. It’s obvious. You can’t aid and abet criminal activity. That’s nothing new. It’s a pretty clear line.

But isn’t that what we’re doing when we allow a few individuals to so corrupt our political system with their “speech” that the rest of us can’t ever be heard above the din? What is so different about allowing large donations to be used in support of gaming Wall Street, or promoting foreclosures, or offshoring jobs. What is so different about allowing a flood of money to be used in the effort to poison our aquifers and delay the building of infrastructure and protecting high-powered weaponry (both governmental and civil)? You might argue that one is quite literally blowing things up, while the others do so only metaphorically. Well I beg to differ. One method is just faster.

So why is all of that okay?

Ahh… wait, I forgot.  All of those things aren’t criminal activities, are they? They are insanely legal activities, because what money in politics is really being used for is to make morally criminal activities legal. And so we have Ouroboros eating its own tail: the money and the beast are the same.

We have only the one choice: voices. Real voices, not the printed kind that folds up in your wallet and sports dead presidents. Real voices from real people, gathered together and getting louder and louder until, finally, something is done. We have only the one choice. So spend your time. Spend your energy. Ultimately these are more powerful currencies than what they have to spend, no matter how much it is.

We Have Met the Enemy, and he is….

Over this last week we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly Americans. All have been on bright, unavoidable display. Consider:

A couple of very bad Americans committed a heinous crime. Despite the amateurish execution of a poorly designed plan, they managed to kill several innocent people and injure scores of others. Smoke and flames rose; fragments penetrated skin and bone. Some lost limbs. Others will remain traumatized for a very long time. And an American tradition is now forever scarred.

Immediately, though, many, many good Americans—thousands, it seems, if not more—expressed first their shock and dismay, and then their support, in response to the events in Boston. People are donating to the man whose now-damaged boat served as an unsuccessful hideout; first-responders are rightfully having their moment in the limelight; even New Yorkers put aside their love/hate relationship with Beantown in a touching moment at Yankee stadium—one the most hardcore fans on both sides of that rivalry could never have imagined.

But then the ugly Americans came out, emerging from all the usual places. Journalists on CNN forgot what their job titles mean and spread scurrilous rumors and false information. Elected officials rapidly fashioned brand-new bully pulpits in order to use the tragedy to deliver self-serving, ideological messages. Conspiracy theorists, living as they do in a surreal, Dali-esque world where nothing is ever as it seems, have elevated the hash tag #falseflag back to the top of the Twitter charts, broadcasting their beliefs in a government conspiracy 140 characters at a time.

And underpinning it all: the definition of the word “enemy.”

There is no question that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are our enemies. They fashioned an act of terror, one designed (we're assuming) to deliver an ideological message and an equally ideological response. But so, too, is Timothy McVeigh our enemy, who’s bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City served the same purpose even though the message was different. And so, too, is James Holmes, he of the midnight movie shootings, and Eric Rudoloph, the Olympic Park bomber, and Steven Spader who, along with two accomplices, brutally macheted a family in Mont Vernon, NH for no reason other than to see what it felt like to kill. These are all our enemies, all people who would terrorize us, who have terrorized us. 

Ahh… but times are different now.

Now is a time when some want to reclassify people who believe different things than we do, particularly if those different things have anything at all to do with a religion we don’t much like. Many are now crying out for the surviving Tsarnaev brother—an American citizen—to be classified as an enemy combatant, a status that would essentially suspend all of his civil rights.  Fortunately, the White House declined to do so, recognizing—rightfully, in my opinion, that Tsarnaev is a criminal.  He is no soldier, no state actor.

A criminal.  Criminals in this country get due process. It’s one of things that our country does right, and one of the things we should never let go of. Instead we should wonder at those who would take it away, who would see something they don’t like, and claim that “they” shouldn’t get the same rights the rest of us are entitled to.

Somewhere out there, real terrorists are laughing, noting ironically the speed with which we neuter our own values out of fear. And those who would enable them, those who would claim that one particular type of person with one particular type of beliefs should be singled out for harsher treatment… well, they who would make such claims are the people we should truly fear, truly think of as “enemy.”

Picture Credits:  "Evil Empire" by John Kaminski; Pogo, by Walt Kelly