Dr. Helen Caldicott Ignored by the Press Once Again
This Woman Gets Naked in Public to Save Us
HOW A FRAUDULENT MEDIA, FOR AN ASLEEP-AT-THE-SWITCH PUBLIC, FOLLOWS THE SCRIPT AND DOESN’T PAY ATTENTION
Helen Caldicott is an extremely attractive woman, a driven genius of Seventy Winters whose voice and humor are as piercing and haunting as her logic. She shares a Nobel Prize for her role in creating Physicians for Social Responsibility, and has garnered praise and awards otherwise essentially innumerable, in addition to writing copious popularly accessible and scientifically sound investigations of the Nuclear Terror Complex that our government has been carrying out in our name for just over six decades. She blossoms in the beautious bounty of the crossroads of the Smokies and the Blue Ridge, in the French Broad wonder of Western North Carolina.
In a world where even a ghost of journalistic integrity existed, of course, not to mention any appreciation for the marvelous aesthetics of the situation, her doings, her comings and goings and shouted imprecations to “PAY ATTENTION” would be front page, blaring-headlines copy. Alas, ours in not such a world, and she speaks half a dozen times in beautiful arts and culture spots like Asheville, North Carolina without generating a whisper of attention from established media outlets. I would raise HEAVEN AND HELL in order to find some “LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS” here!!
Dr. C. was last around Asheville for a conference in Autumn, 2002, “Radiation and Health in the Nuclear Heartland,” that joined culture and activism and science together in deconstructing the criminal plans of U.S. industry and government to create an infrastructure of Mass Destruction in Dixie. A bevy of brilliant men and women stood with her in making this presentation---Dr. Steve Wing, Mary Olsen, Ralph Hutchison, among many others. Their collective work represents the bulwark of rationality that has prevented a Chernobyl or two or three from erupting on this side of the planet. Each one of these dedicated truthsayers has risked a job or a career or a livelihood or a life, or some combination, sometimes again and again, in order to confront the wealthiest and most powerful institutions and families on our fair earth.
Deep, then, in the throes of a Bush-ascendancy that seemed unshakeable, a few months before the invasion of Iraq that could yet end up being the end of us all, she asked---she shouted to a receptive audience of several hundred---”What is HAPPENING in your country?!!! Don’t you see?! Don’t you realize what is being done in your name?!”
Despite returning to the Southern Appalachians yesterday with further dire warnings, of unfolding disaster that daily verges on ritualized slaughter and annihilation of everything human, she is less shrill in her tone. She sees hope, in the current political and social conversation, for something resembling a balancing of the self-immolating greed of the Bush administration. She regales her listeners still with metaphors of “missile-envy” by men who no longer know how to use their penises; she speaks sardonically of how “Robust” bunker busters alleviate the “penetration anxiety” of men like ‘Dick’ Cheney. She unabashedly calls for a more compassionate, a more feminine, political and social orientation.
And she has, as usual, volumes of data gleaned from government documents, official reports, and watchdogs with her same mission---to end the menace of nucleacidal Armageddon before they make their own, likely natural, exits. She points to the coming plans to take nuclear technology into space. This involves providing propulsive power, with fission technology that is less and less palatable on earth, and that is grotesque multiples more expensive to the coffers our taxes feed, all the while generating greater profits for the already plutocratically powerful and wealthy. Such craft would rain a steady mist of trans-uranic nastiness on us, in the fullness of time.
Along with these atomic rocket engines, various weapons platforms are also on DOD’s and NASA’s drawing boards, or at more advanced stages of planning and prototype. We face a near future, in the event, of mega-redundant suicide not only under the seas and ready to circle the globe via air or missile launch, but also silently waiting beyond the atmosphere to drop undetectable and unstoppable vaporization, in the course of an hour or two, on unsuspecting millions or billions of the putzes who paid for it all in the first place. What a set-up!! But for my kiddos, I might chortle as it served up a farce that would put even Strangelove to shame.
The more horrifying scenario, perhaps, is the infrastructure of death that DOD and DOE(few folks realize that the Department of Energy’s core mission is building H-bombs)plan soon to foist on the witless South. Oak Ridge, the Savannah River Site, and a ring of H-bomb able bases along the Atlantic and Gulf Coast, complement the conveniently placed nuclear power plants that never were economically viable but represent various components for the pending arsenal of death, from the massive Plutonium to the diminutive Deuterium and Tritium atoms, elements that each reactor produces daily which would otherwise never exist anywhere in our corner of the cosmos.
The future, ASAP from the perspective of the prime contractors who own the Republican Party, and a large part of the Democratic as well, will soon see new investments of tens of billions of dollars per year, producing a hundred permanent cancer laden employment opportunities in exchange for each billion dollars of ultimate-homicide. Is this a bargain, or what?
As Dr. Caldicott has often made clear, the legacy of nuclear poison may already doom us, and the odds must worsen as we blithely allow manslaughtering thugs to act, in secrecy and with apparent impunity, against every interest we have in life on earth. The use of depleted uranium in ordinance---such as artillery shells and heavy calibre bullets---is a horrifying example of this, that has already paid a visit home from the current round of brutality in Iraq, has caused tens of thousands of cancers on the ground there, and may have a hand in the now nearly forgotten---but for the tens of thousands or more who suffer the effects---Gulf War Syndrome of Bush I.
The come-down-to-cases stories of all these situations---the lies, the hidden costs and outright theft, the slow sinking scythe of cancer, the sudden rapacity of heart attack, the cover-ups and general Keystone Kops attitudes of the authorities---will emerge in these pages, bit by bit, from all over the South. Entire communities recognize their own destruction, but people find few alternatives other than the begrudging return to work, with the hope of something better for the children coming up.
The political economy of this Nucleacidal Armageddon Paradigm is especially damning, and Dr. Helen points much of the story out when she speaks. The last two administrations---eight years of Clinton and the four of the moron-from-Midlands---have demonstrated the predominance of the Nuclear Terrorists who are the gatekeepers of America’s throne rooms now. The history of the development of the atomic death complex will show up here for readers eventually as well, some of which tales have seldom if ever been available for public consumption, rednecks bellying up to the big trough and showing an ability to get the job done.
The equities of the nuclear industry are beyond belief. Fewer than one inhabitant of earth out of every million have ownership benefits in these industries, other than a few shares in virtual portfolios. Another coterie of some tens of thousands of technicians would have no other place to turn for employment, at least no home that would let them apply their obscure and amazing talents to the same degree. The members of this unbelievably tiny subset of humanity are arguably net winners from the prominence of the nuclear condition. Obviously, if the logical conclusion of the industry transpires, they will go up in smoke like the rest of us. But who knows when or if such events will come to pass?
The rest of humanity face the same prospect of annihilation, of course, as well as experiencing greater and greater deficits in their lives, the closer their actual connection with the business. Those at the furthest remove pay more for things, witness a cretinzation and nazification of politics, and live in fear. Those downstream or downwind, a few hundred miles distant from any facility, ponder the implications of increased cancers, see first hand the poisoned land and water, and live in greater fear. Those who are local, or actually work in the plants or mines or other death-traps that have such lovely exteriors, they know the origins of, but risk their homes and lives and jobs if they say anything about, the plethora of disease that accompanies the business. They daily dance with death and laugh at fear, even as they blanch at the merest brush of the reaper’s touch. As a Carolina peace activist put it last August, “We have a lot more to fear from the terrorism of the Department of Energy than we ever did from Saddam Hussein.”
The Dogwoods have begun to come out all up and down the slopes of the lower ridges of the Appalachians. Soon, the Mountain Laurels will join in with their own riot of reproduction at higher elevations. The rivers burst the banks and waterfalls thunder the dance of Spring. How is it that we have lost contact with these rhythms of fecundity and rejuvenation? How have we, instead, given in to murder merchants and opportunistic greed-heads who believe they can win a nuclear chess match and still find a pleasant mansion somewhere to hole up in?
I certainly don’t have easy answers to these questions. I see Helen Caldicott continue to do her job, and as best I can I continue to scribble away in an intelligible way about all of it. What about everyone else? What should folks do? Reading Dr. C’s book is a good idea of course. “The New Nuclear Danger” names names and connects dots for folks. Dr. Caldicott also appeared in a film, “If You Love This Planet,” that won an Academy Award in 1983 but which the Justice Department presently requires viewers to obtain a permit in order to see. Any step of self education has to be a good idea.
But common sense and true heart count for as much as knowledge. Juries don’t have to study ballistics to understand who shot whom, nor do they need to comprehend DNA biology in order to see that someone whose blood was on the weapon likely had something to do with its use. We need to take back our country. The more we know the better, but we’ve been right about the facts and the policies for decades, and our knowledge hasn’t trumped the political strategy of the hypocrites and the thugs.
How do we take back our country? Perhaps the process needs to begin with this simple acknowledgement, that it’s our country and we mean to have it back. The airwaves, the highways, the schools, the sayso on spending the taxes, and even the mines and factories and stores if the people who own them courtesy of our sweat won’t manage them worth a damn. We can even have fun in the process.
A decade or so ago, Helen Caldicott, ever a sensuous and beautiful flower of womanhood, was struggling to bring any sort of attention from the muzzled media to a Capitol Hill farce in favor of the trust-fund crooks who control nuclear and military policy. At best, the prospects seemed daunting. At one strategy session, a rather peculiar tactic came to the plotters, who decided that they might gather more press NAKEDLY physical than they’d been able to obtain with mental magic.
Thus thirteen activists streaked the halls of Congress and went to prison in the nude, in order to give the cousins of humanity yet another chance to save themselves. I don’t know about my readers, but right about now, a million person naked love in and peace rally sounds like a pretty interesting party. Anything beats more whining and hoping for the Demopublican Plutocratic Ascendancy to deign to serve the citizenry.
Once again, my friends, THAT’S MY STORY AND I’M STICKING TO IT!!