Taking The Heat

Last evening The Rachel Maddow Show had an absolutely brilliant piece detailing the extents to which two of the biggest death merchants in the history of this country will go to avoid answering for their actions.

For decades the tobacco industry produced a product specifically designed to create an addiction in their users for that product.  Nicotine levels were purposefully manipulated to guarantee that the vast majority of their users would be unable to stop.  The industry was less than subtle when it came to advertising their product to children, knowing full well that the younger you can get a smoker hooked, the more likely you will have a customer for life, even a life that will be significantly shortened by use of the product.

With the full cooperation of the popular media, especially Hollywood, the tobacco industry made sure their product was portrayed as an essential part of American life, a birth right to which everyone was entitled.  It was turned into a symbol of class, glamour and sophistication.

But when medical and scientific evidence began to mount concerning the link between smoking and many of the most severe health issues affecting the population, Big Tobacco began to get nervous.  Through the courageous actions of pioneers like former Surgeon General C. Everett Coop (recently deceased), the harsh spotlight of public attention was being shone on the cigarette makers, and not in a flattering way.

It was starting to get hot, so the tobacco industry decided they needed a "heat shield" to protect themselves from this increasingly aggressive scrutiny, so they created and funded a bogus organization which they called the National Smokers' Alliance.

Ostensibly cast as a spontaneous, "grass roots" organization of fine, upstanding Americans who were seeking nothing more than the freedom to exercise their god-given right to get cancer, the NSA received millions of tobacco dollars to act as national apologists for the tobacco industry.  They came up with completely preposterous pronouncements such as "Accommodation and common courtesy would solve this problem," meaning that the answer to all the health concerns is for everyone to mind their own business and pretend nothing bad is happening.

But it was hard to ignore the huge costs of tobacco addiction, and a number of high-profile, big-dollar lawsuits against the tobacco makers were beginning to get a lot of attention.  And some of that attention came from a Senate investigating committee, which at one famous session summoned a number of top tobacco executives to answer for many years of lying to the American public.  The gig was up for the phony National Smokers' Alliance, and it quickly disappeared from the national scene.

This was an example of a "heat shield" that did not work.  Now, an example of a heat shield that DOES work:

The corporations that make and sell guns found themselves in a similar situation to the tobacco industry.  Their product is produced solely for the purpose of murdering people.  Guns can't be used for anything else than that.  Knives kill people too, but knives have other legitimate uses.  You can kill someone with a baseball bat, but bats can be used for their intended purpose, in a baseball game.  Guns have one and only one use.

The gun industry did not want to have to deal with the messy business of gun violence and the carnage it wreaks on American society.  The daily slaughter of innocent people of all ages was something they did not want to rationalize.  They needed something to take the heat for them and deflect the public anger away from them, to provide cover for the continued sale of their product and rake in many millions of dollars of profit.  Enter the National Rifle Association.

The NRA would like you to believe they are comprised of four million stalwart American citizens who seek nothing but the ability to defend their family and property from vast legions of vicious, bloodthirsty criminals, undocumented immigrants and an increasingly Fascist government that wants to invalidate the Constitution.  The NRA just wants to make sure the Second Amendment stays firmly in place and every obese, ignorant hillbilly who wants to have a half-dozen automatic rifles in their filthy double-wide should be afforded that opportunity.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution contains exactly 27 words and was written at a time when the newborn country was just getting on its feet.  Those 27 words have been mangled and stretched beyond recognition, and I am certain the Founding Fathers could not dream that it would someday cover mass-produced, insanely powerful weapons like the AR-15 or the AK-47.

The truth is, the NRA receives an enormous amount of funding from their "corporate partners," a veritable who's-who of gun manufacturers.  Their decrepit zombie of a CEO, Wayne LaPierre - purposefully as repellent and obnoxious as humanly possible - acts as a very effective lightning rod for the all the criticism coming at the gun makers.  The NRA has one of the most powerful lobbying machines in Washington to make sure that cowardly members of Congress remain firmly in their back pocket and resist any sort of gun control legislation.

The NRA also relies on the ignorance of their own members, who have been duped into thinking that the NRA is really interested in defending their Second Amendment rights from all the socialist Muslims who want to do heinous, vile and un-American things like ban high-capacity magazine clips or close ridiculous loopholes in gun sales.  In reality, the NRA could not care less about gun rights, beyond the extent that gun rights can be used to maintain and increase their sales margins, and it exists only to make sure there will be an insatiable market for more and more guns in this country.

But, NRA members seem to be perfectly happy and content with being stooges, dupes and idiots, blatantly manipulated by gun industry proxies and being played like cheap violins.  No doubt they are laughing insanely in the NRA board room at how easy it is to make really stupid people do exactly what you want them to.

No doubt the National Rifle Association has learned well from the example of the National Smokers' Alliance on how to be an effective heat shield.  Whether or not it is going to save them from the same fate as the Smokers' Alliance remains to be seen.  We are starting to see little cracks in the NRA heat shield today.  We can only hope that these cracks will grow and eventually, the NRA will be seen as the cruel, cynical scam that it has always been.

I Am OZ, the Great and Powerful

There are some movies which are called "classic" and really deserve that title; one of them is the 1939 film, "The Wizard of Oz."  Starring Judy Garland in her timeless role as Dorothy Gale, the flick is an absolute feast for the eyes and the imagination of people of every age.

There is amazing stuff from start to finish.  Initially the film is in black and white, and it shows the quintessentially American life of Dorothy and her Auntie Em and a couple of hangers-on living on an idyllic farm in Kansas.  Then wealthy, elitist Bitch-From-Hell Ann Romney, I mean Elvira Gulch, shows up with an order from the sheriff to confiscate vicious hell-hound Toto.  Dorothy finds herself having the Worst Day Ever, and just when she thinks things can't get any worse, a tornado blows in and really screws everything up.  This is the part that used to completely terrify me as a child; I remember being unable to breathe, paralyzed in fear, watching the thrashing, writhing tornado funnel bearing down on the Kansas farm like some huge dinosaur marching across the flat Kansas plains under a black sky.

Dorothy is not amused when she finds herself locked out of the storm cellar and runs inside the house for shelter.  She gets knocked on her butt by a flying window frame and hallucinates this extremely intricate dream about the whole farmhouse getting sucked up into the tornado vortex and transported to a place called Oz.  Still in black-and-white, there is a neat cinematic trick after she crash-lands La Maison Gale on top of an innocent pedestrian who turns out to the Wicked Witch of the East: when Dorothy opens the door onto Oz the screen explodes into mind-blowing Technicolor, an effect which is considerably muted when you only have a black-and-white television.

After being flash-mobbed by weirdly-dressed midgets called the Munchkins and getting her marching orders - not to mention a fabulous pair of red-sequined Espadrilles - from Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy starts out for the fabled Emerald City to find the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who reportedly has an awesome GPS system and can get her back to her bland, boring, black-and-white life as a hopeless farm slave in Kansas.  She picks up some friends along the way, all with their own issues, including another wicked witch with anger-management problems and a whole squadron of flying monkeys.  If you think pigeons are messy, you should try to clean up after a bunch of airborne chimpanzees.

Eventually they do find themselves in the stunning art-deco audience hall of the Wizard of Oz, who proceeds to scare the bejeezus out of them with a lot of hollering and bellowing, and special-effects like blasts of flame and clouds of acrid smoke.  Dorothy and her crew completely buy into the all-powerful-wizard scam, but not Toto, who pulls a back curtain open to show a dumpy old man working all the bells and whistles that make the Wizard so gawd-awful scary and Wizard-y.  It turns out the Wizard relies a lot on reputation and overblown bluster and is not nearly as powerful as he would like you to believe.

What's the point of all this, you probably asked yourself three paragraphs ago?  Anyone who reads Careless Whispers knows that "making a valid point" in any blog post is entirely optional and when it does happen, should be considered unexpected good fortune, like finding a $20 bill on the street.  But oddly enough this post does have a point, which is we are seeing a variation of this Wizard story playing out in the raging gun control debate following the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

Playing the role of Dorothy we have the American public, thoroughly traumatized by gun violence, and seeking a way back to a world where 20 grade-school kids are not mowed down by a psycho with an assault weapon.  Obama is the Good Witch of the North, pointing the way to a sensible, middle-road solution like banning those weapons and high-capacity ammo clips.  Congress is there too, playing the role of the Munchkins, a role they play so very well - a bunch of annoying, helium-voiced douchebags that you just want to slap the crap out of.

The choice role of Wizard is played by the National Rifle Association, which for many years has relied on its reputation as the most powerful lobbying machine ever, and who uses gross intimidation, threats and blatant coercion to maintain its iron-clad stranglehold on members of Congress.  The NRA would have us believe they are all-powerful and anyone who dares to speak up to them and challenge their authority will surely get slapped down and ground into dust like some disgusting bothersome insect.  You mess with the Great and Powerful at your own risk, and punishment will be sure and swift: you will find yourself thrown out of office faster than you can say, "There's no place like home."

All the cross-dressing midgets in Congress tremble and cower in fear of the Wizard/NRA and consider it a privilege to grovel in the Wizard's presence and do whatever they're told.  But the Wizard just might have finally met his match in the shock, anger and disgust that have swept the nation as it awakens to the horrific, awful things that gun violence causes in the life of this country.  People are beginning to feel that this problem is getting progressively worse, and that the answer is not what the Wizard wants - which is more guns everywhere in the United States, especially in the schools themselves.  The answer, which will by no means eliminate all gun violence, seems to be to take these automated weapons of mass killing and huge ammo clips and make them much more difficult to fall into the hands of the mentally deranged, while leaving responsible gun owners access to the firearms which make sense for level-headed people to own.

Bottom line is, what we have been doing up to this point when it comes to guns in this, the most heavily-armed nation in the world, is not working.  The answer, in spite of the horrendous screaming and yelling of the Wizard, is not more guns for everyone.  The public seems to be figuring out that the Wizard is all bluster and bombast, and there has never been a better opportunity to pull the curtain away from the Wizard, and see that his power is just an overblown illusion.