"Without the ability to grow your own food next year, your family may be in danger," says the commercial for Survival Seed Vault, a regularly featured ad currently starring on conservative talk radio. The picture on the company web site features an elderly woman pushing an empty shopping cart down a deserted grocery aisle along with the question: "What will your family eat when the grocery shelves are empty?"
Gosh. Like we don't have enough to worry about. Anyone who read the Sunday Times magazine a few weeks ago about anxiety is wondering if they or their children have a thick cortex. Most of us worry about our dwindling savings accounts, aging parents and declining memories. Close to 10% of Americans are without a job.
But growing our own food? Next year? Please.
Heirloom Organics, the company pushing the Survival Seed Vault is either really, really paranoid or just capitalizing on the fear-mongering movement made popular these days by right-wing hawks. Politicians and pundits alike rattle the sabers and spin stories in to a tornado of uncertainty and angst to exert power and create zombie-like followers.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney was, and perhaps still is, the Master of Fear. Liz Cheney, his 44 year-old daughter, is the Heir Apparent.
A former State Department official, lawyer, and mother of five children, Liz is one rising star in the Republican Party. She is Sarah Palin with credentials and GOP family pedigree. Like her father, Cheney espouses foreign policy that is short on diplomacy and long on scare tactics. When it comes to national security she is an aggressive interventionalist, not afraid to call out President Obama as a sissy, and was quoted saying he is "an American president who seems to be afraid to defend America."
Barack Obama? Afraid? It sounds scary, and Americans afraid play right in to the hands of the Neocons and Cheney, who likes to invoke the notion of our fragile "security" under the Obama administration when she makes the rounds and gives her stump speech. Like her father, she is a know-it-all. She alone knew, for instance, that "W" stood for women in the 2004 election. She knows better than George Mitchell what peace in the Middle East requires, and she certainly knows better than the 5 elected members of the Norwegian Parliament who awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1895 when Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel died, his will divided his estate and left "one part to the person who shall have done the most or best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for holding and promotion of peace congresses."
An interesting legacy for the guy who invented dynamite.
The legacy of the Dick Cheney is also interesting. From the loins of the guy who sent us to war in Iraq based on make-believe WMD's, we have General Liz marching towards the 2012 election armed with rhetoric, chutzpah, and a soon-to-be aired web site KeepAmericaSafe.com.
Don't worry America, Liz has got your back.
3 comments:
Yikes, I was blissfully ignorant in terms of LC. So, if I get this straight, the recipe for the survival garden is a few sprinkles of paranoia on top of a generous base layer of fear & when you see sprouts, protect them with your guns...?? :-) My theory is that the fear strategy works because the US is just too big for one government. Somehow mass hysteria seems to take hold faster than in other equally developed educated countries but I could be wrong! xo Holly
Hey counselor, what's with the bodyguard?
Is "interventionalist" a word?
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