CelticBear’s Musings

Where do I begin. It’s just more evidence of the disgusting, sickening, control and corruption of public opinion and education by corporate interests.

I’d already been thinking about what kind of culture of sociopathic corporate greed and we’re living in when you have a Bank of America event where a performer perverts a U2 song about love and heartbreak and forgiveness and turns it into a callous and pathetic ode to commodification and corporate desire and greed. (See this blog to see the lyrics side-by-side for a rather disturbing display: One Bank… One Love.)

Then I read Phil Plait’s BadAstronomy blog today and I just feel sick. Chilly Climate pt. 1 and Chilly Climate pt. 2. Please read his blogs themselves, but in short: Part 1 deals with the blind, ideological hatred this administration has exhibited against science and reality. And why should they not, when just about every major member of the administration owns, has owned, is a major stock holder, and/or is on the board of an oil company who has a vested interest in refusing to acknowledge global warming. And when the political party they belong to is in office chiefly because of the work of theocratic religious zealots who detest the concepts of evolution, safe-sex, and stem cells, they need to keep them happy in the bed they share.

But that’s all old hat. Part 2 is even worse for its unexpected horror. Phil describes how the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) — “which represents tens of thousands of science teachers in the US” turned down a donation of thousands of copies of “An Inconvenient Truth” because, in short, it would risk the money they receive from such corporate interests as Shell, Exxon Mobile, and the American Petroleum Institute. Organizations that helps also provide “teaching materials” that intentionally white-wash the role of the role of oil companies in the effects upon the environment.

I’m utterly aghast and horrified. Our childrens’ educations are being sold to the highest bidders. Last July I wrote about the deplorable state of school textbooks and how the information in them are co-opted by corporate and political interests: The Depressing State of Public School Textbooks. My wife and I are overworked members of the labor class, enslaved to earn money for shelter, food, and insurance, and can’t make the sacrifice to home-school our daughter. So we’re forced to have to not only supplement the incomplete education she gets already, as we should do anyway as public school only teaches to the lowest common denominator, but also to try to fight against the corruption of her mind and will to corporate and political interests as well. It may be losing battle, and it makes me both angry and weary thinking about it.