Bush Talks Tough
It’s sometimes said that the Chinese rulers are inscrutable, but as demonstrated in our recent spy plane face-off with China, our own rulers are entirely scrutable.
In the first 24 hours or so of this international confrontation, things got a bit dicey because George W. was having what appeared to be a testosterone rush. Bush’s belligerent message: Give us back our people, now, and don’t even think about going into our top-secret spy plane … or else! Or else what? Well, he didn’t know, so he just had his little bravado fit and let it go at that.
But shortly thereafter, our sitting president was suddenly a model of diplomatic decorum, carefully mincing words, expressing nine kinds of “regret” and acting “presidential.” The news media theorized that senior officials like Secretary of State Colin Powell had intervened to cool his hot rhetoric. But I think someone else intervened: George’s corporate campaign contributors.
You could almost hear Motorola, Boeing, General Motors, Kodak, and others bellowing into his telephone: “Good god almighty, boy, don’t you know how many billions we’ve sunk into building Chinese factories, how much grief we’ve taken for moving thousands of U.S. jobs there, how much profit we make off cheap Chinese labor … don’t you know that we put up millions of dollars to put you in the White House to protect all this? And you’re gonna squirrel our deals just so you can look tough against the Butchers of Beijing?”
As a Chamber of Commerce spokesman put it, “No one wants to see this spill over into other areas of U.S.-China relations, like commerce.” Indeed, Newsweek later reported that Bush’s own Uncle Prescott was in China for a business meeting during the face-off and got snubbed by Chinese officials. You can bet he made a call.
The Market Shouts at Monsanto If consumers are shouting a message, but Monsanto has genetically modified corn stuffed in its ears, do the consumers make a sound?
Monsanto doesn’t want to hear it, but the marketplace is shrieking at it, saying, “We don’t want your genetically altered Frankenfoods with pesticides spliced into grain, fish genes bioengineered into tomatoes, bacteria added to potatoes! Stop trying to foist these manic lab experiments on us without even testing them for their long-term impact on our health and the environment!”
The shouts of “No!” are practically universal: Polls consistently show that a good 80% of Americans don’t want their families used as guinea pigs for Monsanto’s science projects. Europe, Japan, and other major buyers of U.S. grain and other foodstuffs have flat-out banned genetically altered crops from coming into their markets. Such food giants as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Gerber have rejected Monsanto-altered potatoes, corn, and soybeans. Good grief — even cigarette makers are saying no to genetically altered tobacco!
The latest group trying to get through to Monsanto is its direct customers: farmers. The number of plantings of Monsanto’s bioengineered seeds continue to fall, and farmers are joining consumers and environmentalists in about half the states to push legislation that bans, imposes a moratorium on, or requires a label on genetically manipulated crops. “We don’t want to lose the ability to sell our wheat abroad,” explained a North Dakota farmer who strongly supports a two-year moratorium on planting Monsanto’s altered wheat.
America’s farmers are simply listening to their customers, while Monsanto turns a deaf ear to them, preferring to hire PR firms and lobbyists to try forcing the world’s consumers to eat their Frankenfoods.
Mad Cows, Beautiful Lips Time for another peek into the “Lifestyles of the Rich … and Cranky.”
Today’s feature: buying beauty. The rich really are different from you and me: They don’t seem to have wrinkles as they ebb over the 30-year mark. This is because wealthy folks spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on such cosmetic work as surgery, liposuction, laser treatments, spa visits, and … cow stuff.
Yes, cow stuff — or, more precisely, bovine collagen. Collagen is a gelatinous protein contained in the connective tissues of cows, and there are big bucks to be made from injecting this stuff directly into rich lips and faces, smoothing out dreaded eye lines and poofing up lips for that much-desired pouty look. But here comes the cranky part. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reports that there’s some panic among the socialites using the cow collagen because of … mad cow disease.
What if the collagen was from a diseased bovine — can your pouty lips kill you? It’s enough of a concern that some doctors are assuring patients that their collagen comes from a “closed herd” — a sort of elite cow club that doesn’t mix with the cow masses and is protected from all that low-class cow unpleasantness. Dowd reports that one skeptical lady told her doctor that she “wanted to visit the herd.”
Not to worry, though, for alternatives are available. For example, a rooster’s comb contains a hyaluronic acid that can be injected into your face to smooth those wrinkles. If you worry that this could cause you to crow every morning at dawn, you’ll be relieved to know that a bioengineered human collagen derived from the foreskin of an infant boy can also do the job. Dowd tells us that one foreskin is enough, for its collagen can then be replicated endlessly in the lab “and provide lips, etc. for women all over the world, ad infinitum.”
Jim Hightower’s latest book, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates, has just been released in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.
This article appears in April 27 • 2001.