“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.” — from a 1969 tobacco industry internal memo sent by an executive at Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation.
death cult 2. A religious group that requires demonstrations of faith involving the risk of death.
— a definition from Wiktionary.
What the Wiktionary definition of “death cult” overlooks is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a religious group. It can be a political – or more broadly cultural – group, though it will still share many of the same characteristics of a religious group, such as unquestioning devotion to, and faith in, a leader either living or dead, and often scorn for those outside the group, sect, or tribe. The Republican Party has become such a death cult, and particularly that greater part of it which remains devoted to their Orange Leader, their president in exile.
Danse Macabre, a late fifteenth-century painting by Bernt Notke (1440-1509).
The denial of science by the Republican Party during the current coronavirus pandemic has been breathtaking, but it is nothing new; it has been building up for about 50 years, with large corporations such as Big Tobacco leading the way in the denial of science in order to protect their interests. For 50 years now, Americans have learned at the knee of their corporate masters to doubt the science concerning the harmful effects on their health of tobacco use, the deleterious effects on their air caused by centuries of burning fossil fuels, and the poisoning of their environment by man-made chemicals such as plastics, pesticides, and herbicides.
For some large corporations, it might be that death is their product, and the politicians and media organizations in their pocket are the salespeople. Gullible people without critical thinking skills are their customers. Viewing the customers that —way strips them of their agency, however, and portrays them as passive receptacles for mind poisons, when in reality they are active participants in their deception because it reinforces what they want to believe. They want to stand science on its head and believe the vaccines for COVID-19 are the real poison in our midst, not the virus.
It’s not all that great a leap from believing there’s no harm for others in second-hand smoke as a tobacco user indulges their selfish pleasure to feeling that wearing a mask to protect others from inhaling a coronavirus carrier’s potentially deadly virus particles is an unnecessary imposition on the carrier, and not a viable public health measure. Smoke, after all, is a visible manifestation of poison, and a virus is not visible to the naked eye.
“I see them! Over there against the stormy sky. They are all there. The smith and Lisa, the knight, Raval, Jans, and Skat. And the strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks from the salt of their bitter tears.”
— the acrobat, Jof, describing one of his visions to his wife, Mia, at the end of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film,The Seventh Seal.
Modern day death cultists are right there with people of ages past, who doubted the existence of anything they couldn’t see themselves unless they could endow it with some religious significance. Republican death cultists go one step further in proudly boasting of their ignorance as a demonstration of faith in their Orange Leader, without a care about where that might lead for themselves and for society at large, as long as they can selfishly satisfy themselves with the notion that their obstructive behavior is a repudiation to those who won’t let them smoke in bars, or keep digging and burning coal, or pour Roundup on everyone’s food, or go grocery shopping for fifteen minutes without wearing a mask.
— Vita
This summer, archaeologists from The Public Archaeology Facility of Binghamton University in New York State are digging up the site of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair near Bethel, New York. They hope to uncover an accurate and comprehensive scheme of the place as it was originally laid out for that enormous event nearly 50 years ago, and then turn over their findings to the museum on the site in time for the 50th anniversary in August 2019. Besides broken glass and other relics from the event, the archaeologists dug up numerous pop tops from aluminum beverage cans.
Unlike the stay-tab which replaced it in the late 1970s, the pop top tabs from the late 1960s and early 1970s were meant to be pulled entirely off the top of the can by the consumer. The consumer then had a piece of waste in addition to the waste the can itself would become after emptying, and many consumers simply dropped the pop tops on the ground, where they not only littered the environment but on account of their sharp edges became a safety hazard for anyone in bare or lightly shod feet, as Jimmy Buffett noted in his song “Margaritaville”. Some people dropped the pop tops into the can either while they were drinking from it or afterward, and then some of those people were unfortunate enough to swallow the pop top or otherwise injure themselves when it resurfaced during their drinking.
A litter trap on the Yarra River in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Biatch3.
When a Reynolds Metals engineer named Daniel F. Cudzik invented the stay-on-tab, or Sta-Tab, in 1975, he solved the littering and safety problems of pop tops. Some inconsiderate people still tossed the cans wherever they liked when they were done with them, and unfortunately it appears a certain percentage of people like that will always be among us, but the problems originating from improperly disposed cans have lessened since the 1960s with the adoption of better designs and recycling programs. Since then, and particularly after bottled water took off in popularity in the 1990s, plastic beverage containers have taken over from aluminum cans as a major littering and safety problem.
Engineers and designers have created biodegradable water bottles in the past several years, but so far the bottled water industry has not embraced their inventions, and may never do so without consumers pushing themselves and the industry in that direction. Part of the reason for delay is the relatively abstract nature of the problem for many consumers. Yes, empty plastic water bottles may litter roadsides, where they are unsightly, but they don’t really pose a physical danger to people, unlike aluminum pop tops and cans with their sometimes sharp edges. The physical danger from plastics all seems to happen to animals, many of them far away and out of sight, such as the ones who live in the oceans, where all that plastic garbage ends up and lingers for decades. It was only recently that scientists discovered we, like our animal cousins, are also ingesting plastics, though in our cases we are more dainty in our discernment in that we choose only to take in micro-plastics, meaning those we cannot see. What goes around, comes around, and there’s no escaping it.
In Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate, Mr. McGuire, played by Walter Brooke, has some advice for Ben Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman. In a later scene, Hoffman’s character floats on a raft in the pool at his house and sips a beverage from a can which has two v shaped openings in its top, the marks of having been opened with a can opener, or church key, the most common way to open such a can before pop tops became widely available on beverage cans in the mid 1960s.
Most people can be coached to some degree to change their behavior, and once they are understand viscerally that a problem exists because of their past behavior, many of them can become open to change. They have to feel the problem personally, though, because an abstraction doesn’t always get through to them. A minority of others are hardheads, and little can be done to persuade them to change their ways beyond legal sanctions and public shaming. The mounting problem of plastic litter shares this model of personal and public behavior with the looming dangers of a warming climate. For too many people the problems remain abstractions because the effects can be distant, indirect, or slow moving. The rest of us can’t wait for those people to come around, because they may only do so when they are up to their necks in seawater while standing in their front yards, fighting off all the plastic junk bobbing in the water, and obstinately refusing to reconcile their beliefs with what they see and feel around them.
— Techly
The first frost of fall was late this year across much of the U.S., in some places by one to three weeks, depending on the source of average frost date information. People who spend a lot of time outdoors tend to notice this, and also that a trend has developed of fall frosts arriving later and the last frost of spring coming earlier. Even people who pay attention to climate only sporadically may have noted the muted fall colors of the trees this year in parts of the eastern U.S., a result of extended warm weather and drought.
Fall Colors, Interstate State Park, Wisconsin and Minnesota; photo by Tony Webster
Cumberland Power Plant smokestacks, Cumberland, Tennessee; photo by Steven Greenwood
The growing season has increased over the last forty years or so, but that is not necessarily a good thing considering that short-lived creatures, such as insects, adapt more readily to swift changes than longer-lived plants and vertebrate creatures. Forty years is swift in the long view of climate. The short view is called weather, or weather events. Adding up weather events over forty years plots a trend in the climate. Unfortunately for the sake of rational discussion, too many people fail to make the distinction between weather and climate.
Not everyone agrees that the climate is getting warmer, or that if it is then humans are the cause of it. Some of those climate change deniers are motivated by their religious beliefs, others by a suspicion of government regulators, and still others are unmoved by the weight of scientific evidence, citing doubt about the conclusions. Who has sown that doubt? As always, we are well advised to follow the money. It comes as no surprise then that Big Oil, following the example set by Big Tobacco with regard to the link between burning their products and cancer, has worked to sow doubt about how the burning of fossil fuels contributes greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and causes a warming climate. Where there is doubt, they know, effective action against them can be hamstrung, and profits will continue to roll in until we all burn up from second hand smoke on a global scale.
Cigarette smoke; photo by Flickr user Challiyan
Again following the money,the insurance industry is coming around to the reality of global warming and the increase in expensive weather events it is causing. The insurance industry, conservative gamblers that they are, are most interested in the economic facts they can pin down so as to minimize risk and maximize profit. They are not swayed by emotional appeals to religious or political views, but only by appeals to their bottom line. Another group whose costs are affected by the results of global warming are states and municipalities. As seas rise and severe weather events increase, causing unprecedented flooding, these entities have to pay for infrastructure improvements and higher insurance premiums.
States’ attorneys general are beginning to go after the fossil fuel industry to recoup costs, much as they did to the tobacco industry in the 1990s. It will be an even more protracted fight in this case because of the gargantuan amounts of money the fossil fuel giants can bring to bear; not everyone smoked in years past, after all, but today practically everyone uses gas, electricity, natural gas, plastics, and the list of products goes on. Some of these products can be replaced by use of renewable resources like wind and solar, but ultimately, like the reduction in use of tobacco products due to increasing social opprobrium, the steps for overcoming reliance on fossil fuel products and thereby breaking the economic stranglehold of Big Oil need to be taken by consumers, and that will require some wholesale changes in lifestyle, especially in the industrialized nations.
– Izzy
