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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Corn Zombies
An excerpt from one of my trademark, early morning NewAthens rants.
Wednesday, 2009-07-29 | New Athens, Social Studies, Zona Roja
| Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is 'finding his place in it' while really it is finding his place in him. |
| CS Lewis (as the venerable "Screwtape") |
The following is an excerpt from one of my famous, first-thing-in-the-morning diatribes. The topic was healthcare reform (which is the big topic right now) and the question was how to get the most "bang for your buck" when spending money on the health and well-being of the American people at large.
My solution, unsurprisingly, involves a fierce brow-beating:
The punishment wouldn't have to be of the very physical, very low on Maslow's Hierarchy, "bad boy/bad girl", pants-down-spanking variety: if you just channelled some money towards making it shameful (really and truly shameful) to become a bloat-bellied, slack-jawed corn-zombie, that money would go a long way towards fixing the problem.I remain, of course, open to other solutions and different takes on the problem.
e.g. you send a team of public-healthers and do-gooder advertising types (think "TRUTH" campaigners) into poor rural and urban communities. The team in Indiana notices that the red-faced corn-zombies wake up, spray their bulging-stomach-sacs with hot water for 45 minutes, stare into the television and plan the day's purchases according to the plan laid out for them by Kraft and Nabisco with the help of Viacom, eat some HFCS-flavored extruded corn breakfast solution in cold cholesterol, drive their SUV's to the Piggly Wiggly where they are encouraged by bright, colorful signage to purchase mass-produced, confined-feed-lot, corn-fed meat solution and consume that with a side of emulsified, high-heat extrusion potato-style corn snack solution while watching Viacom's mass-produced, multi-media entertainment product and sipping on cool cans of GMO cereal beer-product (e.g. Budweiser).
Meanwhile, the team in the city notices and documents how the rope-muscled, sunken-faced malnourishment victims emerge wide-eyed and generally feral from their trash-strewn hovels, looking oddly fresh and clean in embroidered, designer jeans and a new, blazing white t-shirt from the 10-pack of disposable white t-shirts (the old one have been thrown out with last nights corn-sweetened synth-liquor bottles) recently purchased from a folding table in the parking lot of the nearby retail clothing solution station for something like $2.99, and slowly slink towards the nearest stripmall where they queue up (voluntarily?) to view teasers for forthcoming mega-corp entertainment product and snack on low-cost, high-calorie extruded corn snack solution until the sun sinks low in the sky and it's time to shamble back to the corner store for more extruded corn snack and more HFCS-infused fermented corn liquor product.
If you want this behavior to change--i.e. if you want to put a dent in the obesity statistics--you don't start taxing and fining. What you do is use the results of your observations to justify throwing some money and talent at making people feel ashamed for carrying on in these sorts of ways.
You put up big, government-funded advertisements in the FYE and the Best Buy about how little Madison Avenue thinks of its target demo. You put up big, government-mandated warnings on the overhead menu at the McDonald's about how a.) this shit can barely be called food on account of its mostly-inedible ingredients and near-zero nutritional value and b.) consuming it, since you can't actually digest it, is basically you putting a few pennies in the pockets of a wealthy white man in Oak Brook, IL.
Over at the Piggly Wiggly, you put up big, colorful fact sheets about how "vegetarian-fed" chickens and cows, in addition to living and sleeping in piles of their own dejecta and the offal of their fellows, consume the majority of the nation's antibiotics because their diet of corn-and-offal-mulch renders these mutilated, unwitting cannibals a.) highly susceptible to disease and b.) utterly unresilient in the face of other forms of contagion.
Meanwhile, you force Viacom to run its government-mandated PSA programming during prime time (i.e. not at 4AM on Sunday) and give away valuable advertising space to non-Madison Avenue, peacenik advertisers whose annoying, taunting advertisements confront viewers with the facts behind the entertainment industry (e.g. how a recording contract works, how mass-media distribution works, what a focus group is and does, etc).
And you basically brow-beat people into considering that which is truly vicious as a vice. Because as it stands, vices aren't. Which is to say that the servility, docility and obesity of the American corn-zombie are all symptoms of the same affliction and the demographers and racial profilers pushing mass-produced X-need solution and getting fat off of tiny profit margins and baldly monopolistic government-sanctioned and government-protected national distribution networks are the real enemies.
Because, in the end, sin taxes, fines and fees don't do anything but make the fat cats fatter and the fat slobs iller.
