Eccentric Flower:199901/low truths from hightower

seventeen january

low truths from hightower

I spent the morning reading back entries of If You See Her, Say Hello and laughing my head off.

That was the high point of my day.

Got bad news from Gypsy in email, didn't want to leave the house to get food, didn't want to eat anything in the house, didn't want to cook again (although I had the rest of the curried rice last night, and now consider it an Unqualified Success), didn't want to go back and tear out the last four paragraphs of the A.D. material I wrote last night even though I know it's wonky and I have to start that section over ... oh, and I told myself I was going to write this postcard about four times, and didn't.

And, while I was waiting for my desktop to be repaired and rebuilt after a series of icky crashes, I read some more of this Jim Hightower book and that just about scared me right out of my pinafore.

It's called There's Nothing In the Middle of the Road Except Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos, and despite the Lewis Grizzard title, this is actually a savvy, funny book of "political subversion" - as he puts it.

And no, I'm not going to link to Amazon. Go to an actual bookstore and buy it. Quick, before they all disappear. But not Barnes and Noble. They're just as bad. And Borders isn't much better.

That's the way this book has me thinking. If you hated corporations before, you'll really hate them after you read this.

OK, I'm making the book sound so scary you'll never read it, and that'd be a pity. It's fun and it's funny and it does deliver the good news on occasion. Hightower is a folksy Texan; he talks good. He held a number of elected offices in Texas, was mighty popular with the voters, and during his time in office he had a fair degree of success at throwing da bums out. Unfortunately, there was only one of him, and a lot of bums. He now has an unabashedly populist radio talk show, where - ironically - he's probably helping more people than he did in office.

Don't let his ten-gallon hat fool you, smug Northerners; Hightower's got a brain, and underneath the wit is a lot of wisdom and, yes, downright subversive theory - pitched so that even Bubba can understand it. Actually, Hightower believes Bubba understood it all along, it's just that no one higher up would believe it.

The main premise in the book is that "left" and "right" political divisions in this country are a bad joke, a red herring. The real division is top-to-bottom. There is nothing less than a full-blown class war going on in this country, a very effective one which is systematically marginalizing most of the citizens. It's being waged by the corporations and the people they make rich. And if you don't believe it, Hightower's got the stats.

Did you know that corporations are willing to pay those CEOs those ridiculous salaries because they just deduct the whole thing, so that the taxpayers eventually end up subsidizing overpaid bosses? Did you know the US government pays the costs of some companies' overseas advertising campaigns?

OK. How about this one? This is the one I was reading tonight. National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Big to-do, right? Gotta fight breast cancer. Get your mammograms, learn self-exams, eat right ....

The number-one environmental factor responsible for increase in breast cancer - a near-direct correlation - is organochlorines. They're used in bleaching paper, in making plastics, a lot of other things. Dioxins - ever heard of those? CFCs? PCBs? They're all organochlorines. They accumulate in your body. They never go away. And certain reproductive failures and cancers - breast and testicular cancer in particular - go up as their levels increase.

No, wait. It gets worse. The sole corporate sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a company that has made this their personal fiefdom and in fact has the power to approve all BCAM printed materials, is ICI. ICI is a British chemical giant. You know what they generate a lot of? Organochlorines.

But wait, you say, I don't remember seeing the ICI logo on any BCAM materials lately. Well, in '93 ICI spun off its pharmaceuticals and agricultural chemicals arm, called Zeneca. Zeneca is the part that sponsors BCAM. Zeneca contains some of the nastier bits of ICI - in 1990, Hightower points out, they were sued for dumping DDT and PCBs into the Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors.

One of Zeneca's more profitable drugs is Nolvadex, which makes them about a half a billion a year. Nolvadex is currently the number-one drug used in breast cancer treatment. It has a lot of nasty side effects, like liver and uterine cancer, but what the hell.

Are you getting the full irony of this yet? Good. I won't draw you a picture then.

Read this book. I don't care if it terrifies you. It's very important.

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