IN MY DOTAGE, I find myself constantly (if merely mildly) consternated by the goings-on of my fellow humans. When confronted by their (possibly insecticide-inspired) shenanigans and the fact that so many appear permanently stuck in auto-destruct mode, to soothe my troubled mind I often reach for the 1979 movie Life Of Brian. If I don’t have time for a full viewing, I skip to the final scene.
It is calling this scene in Life Of Brian to mind that allows me to find something positive in an editorial like “Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains” by Nicholas Kristof for The New York Times. In it, Mr Kristoff takes the present administration to task for embracing and encouraging the use of a rather horrifying chemical, chlorpyrifos.
“The pesticide, which belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, is now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked to lung cancer and Parkinson’s disease in adults.” 2
All Nazi concentration camp staffs were originally part of the Allgemeine-SS under the office of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate (Inspektion der Konzentrationslager or IKL).
This is an insanity that willfully embraces approving the use of a chemical which extensive research has shown can harm the developing brains of fetuses and children who eat food from plants treated with the compound. 1
But Mr Kristoff notes that Dow’s spokesperson Rachelle Schikorra claims, “Dow stands by the safety of chlorpyrifos.”
After reading Mr Kristof’s piece, I immediately saw the bright side: Ms Schikorra joins such luminaries as Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman, Kellyanne Conway, and the hostesses on Fox News as examples of female “accomplishment” in today’s political and corporate world that allows us men to ably and manfully negate any argument that any feminist can ever make concerning how fundamentally bad/greedy/evil men are and how much better things would be under a matriarchy!
For this we should be thankful.
Finally—and, unfortunately, without a trace of irony—Mr Kristof notes, “Dow had donated $1 million for President Trump’s inauguration.” 4
Rachel Schikorra, Head-Media Relations & Financial Communications at Dow Chemical Company. “While acts of evil can mushroom into monumental tragedies, the individual human perpetrators of those acts are often marked not with the grandiosity of the demonic but with absolute mundanity.” 3
Spoiler Alert!
If you haven’t seen Life Of Brian, please not watch this video—get ahold of the movie and watch it all the way through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoaktW-Lu38
If you have seen Life Of Brian, go ahead and watch this video—it should prove more than nostalgic …
FEATURED IMAGE: An airplane dusts a field of soybeans with any one of thousands of possible chemicals allowed on foods that reach our tables in America.
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FOOTNOTES:
1 See “A controversial insecticide and its effect on brain development: Research and resources.”
2 See “Dow Chemical is pushing Trump administration to ignore studies of toxic pesticide.”
4 See “Trump 2017 Inauguration Donors.”