The Root of All Evil
Oh dear, cigarettes are bad! Bummer!
Not the most memorable monster-of-the-week, especially for someone who started smoking when he was nine years old. And, at 6’4”, they didn’t exactly stunt my growth either. Fortunately, no one I know has ever had their face eaten away by tobacco beetles!
As is universally acclaimed, the best thing about this episode is the performance of Tobin Bell, an actor I’ve seen in many things but whose name I know only because of this one episode of the X Files. If it was the only thing of note he’d ever done it would be a worthy legacy. How many of us can say that, at least once in our lives, we have risen to the challenge and pulled off such an accomplished piece of work?
As you think of an answer to that question, bear in mind that we are discussing an episode of the X Files in which corporate America is painted as black as a cigarette-smoker’s lungs!
economicsnline.co.uk is frankly open with its definition of globalisation, which it claims “refers to the integration of markets in the global economy, leading to the increased interconnectedness of national economies.” As an afterthought, it is acknowledged that sport and entertainment feature in the globalisation of the late 20th, early-21st centuries. Primarily, though, globalisation is about making money – lots of money.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with some people having more money than others. Even having huge sums of money is not, in itself, a bad thing.
It is not – of course it isn’t – money which is the root of all evil. It is the human ability to obsess about non-human things and to place the value of these merely material objects over and above the lives of other human beings. As 2008 made glaringly obvious, the amassing of obscenely huge amounts of money in a relatively short period of time can only be done at the expense of other people’s lives and livelihoods.
It is, perhaps, understandable how the banks got themselves and the global markets into such a mess. After all, dealing with numbers on a computer screen isn’t like dealing with real life, flesh and blood people. It must be easy to shuffle around commodities without the sense of destroying lives. They must have known the consequences, those who performed these acts of ‘pooling’ and buying of ‘tranches’ (cf. The Economist ‘Crash Course: The Origins of the Financial Crisis’) They just never thought they’d have to face that inevitability.
Unlike the tobacco companies who knew full well that their customers would one day have to face the inevitable consequences of smoking their product. If the banks, and their arrogance, are, at least, understandable, the purveyors of nicotine are nothing but guilty of a crime of holocaust proportions.
I myself could never sue the tobacco industry because I know the risk of smoking and have done so for a very long time. I could not be so hypocritical as to now blame someone else for my own choices. But the fact remains that the tobacco industry did deliberately conceal information that could well have saved countless lives. Shifting millions of cartons of cigarettes is not the same as shifting millions of dollars around on a computer screen.
But then I would see little difference between the tobacco industry and the gun industry. Both are pedlars of death. And for no good reason other than their own personal gain.
There is more than one way to commit a holocaust.
Not the most memorable monster-of-the-week, especially for someone who started smoking when he was nine years old. And, at 6’4”, they didn’t exactly stunt my growth either. Fortunately, no one I know has ever had their face eaten away by tobacco beetles!
As is universally acclaimed, the best thing about this episode is the performance of Tobin Bell, an actor I’ve seen in many things but whose name I know only because of this one episode of the X Files. If it was the only thing of note he’d ever done it would be a worthy legacy. How many of us can say that, at least once in our lives, we have risen to the challenge and pulled off such an accomplished piece of work?
As you think of an answer to that question, bear in mind that we are discussing an episode of the X Files in which corporate America is painted as black as a cigarette-smoker’s lungs!
economicsnline.co.uk is frankly open with its definition of globalisation, which it claims “refers to the integration of markets in the global economy, leading to the increased interconnectedness of national economies.” As an afterthought, it is acknowledged that sport and entertainment feature in the globalisation of the late 20th, early-21st centuries. Primarily, though, globalisation is about making money – lots of money.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with some people having more money than others. Even having huge sums of money is not, in itself, a bad thing.
It is not – of course it isn’t – money which is the root of all evil. It is the human ability to obsess about non-human things and to place the value of these merely material objects over and above the lives of other human beings. As 2008 made glaringly obvious, the amassing of obscenely huge amounts of money in a relatively short period of time can only be done at the expense of other people’s lives and livelihoods.
It is, perhaps, understandable how the banks got themselves and the global markets into such a mess. After all, dealing with numbers on a computer screen isn’t like dealing with real life, flesh and blood people. It must be easy to shuffle around commodities without the sense of destroying lives. They must have known the consequences, those who performed these acts of ‘pooling’ and buying of ‘tranches’ (cf. The Economist ‘Crash Course: The Origins of the Financial Crisis’) They just never thought they’d have to face that inevitability.
Unlike the tobacco companies who knew full well that their customers would one day have to face the inevitable consequences of smoking their product. If the banks, and their arrogance, are, at least, understandable, the purveyors of nicotine are nothing but guilty of a crime of holocaust proportions.
I myself could never sue the tobacco industry because I know the risk of smoking and have done so for a very long time. I could not be so hypocritical as to now blame someone else for my own choices. But the fact remains that the tobacco industry did deliberately conceal information that could well have saved countless lives. Shifting millions of cartons of cigarettes is not the same as shifting millions of dollars around on a computer screen.
But then I would see little difference between the tobacco industry and the gun industry. Both are pedlars of death. And for no good reason other than their own personal gain.
There is more than one way to commit a holocaust.
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