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Davidson Loehr
April 1, 2001
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PUPPET SHOW
Written by Davidson Loehr and the No Strings Attached Puppet Players
This Performance : Ryan Hill, Julie Irwin, David Smith, and Eric Kay
Parrot, two raccoons and Mother Parrot.
Parrot and raccoons appear, raccoons on one side, parrot on the other.
Parrot
Hey, see my new hat?
Beavis Raccoon
Hey, where’d you get that hat, bird?
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah. That’s a cool hat. How’d a goofy-looking bird get such a cool hat, huh?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh, heh, how’d that happen?
Parrot
Well, I got it volunteering for “Wings on Housing”, that’s how.
Butthead Raccoon
Uh….don’t you mean “Paws on Housing”?
Parrot
No, Wings on Housing. That’s where we rebuild the nests for birds in the forest who need help.
Butthead Raccoon
(To Beavis Raccoon)
Hey, I like, want that hat!
Beavis Raccoon
Hey, yeah, I want it too, heh heh.
Parrot
Well you can get one if you volunteer, too. The next one is on April 28th and 29th.
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, right. Well, how about we just take it!
Beavis Raccoon
Take it! Yeh, that’s good, let’s just take it! Heh heh.
(The raccoons go over and take the parrot’s hat.)
Parrot
Say, what are you doing? You took my hat!
Butthead Raccoon
Took your hat?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, took your hat?
Butthead Raccoon
Why are you saying we took your hat?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, why?
Parrot
YOU TOOK MY HAT! YOU TOOK IT RIGHT OFF MY HEAD, AND NOW YOU HAVE IT ON YOUR HEAD! THAT’S WHY!! YOU CAN’T DO THAT!!
Beavis Raccoon
Heh, can’t do it?
Butthead Raccoon
Can’t do it? You mean you haven’t heard about the law?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, I’ll bet the dumb bird has never heard the law!
Parrot
Law? What law? You stole my hat!
Butthead Raccoon
The law – well, it’s the law that says raccoons have the right to take the hats off of parrots, that’s what!
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh, heh, because we’re bigger-
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, and there are two of us.
Beavis Raccoon
It’s the law, heh heh.
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law, you dumb parrot.
Parrot
I don’t believe you! What a dumb law!
Parrot Exits Below
Beavis Raccoon
Well, um, it’s the law.
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, bird, it’s the law.
Beavis Raccoon
Um- like, where’d the bird go?
Parrot enters with a scarf on.
Parrot
All right, keep my hat you dumb raccoons!
Beavis Raccoon
Hey, cool scarf!
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, cool scarf, bird!
(The raccoons mutter between themselves, agree, laugh, then one goes over and takes the scarf away from the parrot.)
Parrot
Now stop that! You stole my hat! You can’t steal my scarf too!
Beavis Raccoon
Boy, you really don’t know the law!
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, what a dumb bird.
Parrot
Now what law is this?
Butthead Raccoon
Um- it’s like, the law that says- .uh-
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, the law, the law that says that-
Butthead Raccoon
Heh- It says that once we have your hat, we can have your scarf too!
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, because like the hat and scarf like go together, and if we have one then we need the other.
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh. Dumb bird.
Parrot
(Pulls out a candy bar or some sweet treat.)
Oh, I’m so unhappy, this just isn’t fair!
Beavis Raccoon
Hey, hey, uh, what’s that?
Parrot
When I feel sad, I have a candy bar. It makes me feel better.
The raccoons mutter quickly to each other, then one takes the candy bar.
Parrot
Hey!
Butthead Raccoon
Sorry, bird, but it’s the law.
Parrot
What law? You’re making these laws up!
Butthead Raccoon
Well bird, that’s the law.
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, it’s the law.
Parrot
What law?
Butthead Raccoon
Well, um- the law that says when we have more stuff than you do-
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, like hats, scarves, things like that-
Butthead Raccoon
That we can take anything else we want from you too!
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, like you know if you don’t have any stuff, then you don’t have any rights to have other stuff!
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah right, we have your stuff, so we get the rest of your stuff.
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, yeah, it’s like in the bible, or something-
Parrot
The Bible?
Butthead Raccoon
Yeah, it’s like religious and everything. It says “To them who have, even more shall be given”
Beavis Racoon
“and to them that don’t have, even what they have will be taken away.”
Butthead Raccoon
So like it’s the law, and it’s religious.
(The raccoons start laughing, mocking the parrot, making fun, waving the hat, scarf, candy bar, etc.)
(Mother Parrot enters and quickly takes the hat, scarf and candy bar away from the raccoons.)
Butthead Raccoon
Hey, like, what are you doing?
Mother Parrot
April Fool! April Fool! (Laughs.)
Beavis Raccoon
April Fool? What’s April Fool?
Mother Parrot
It’s April Fool’s Day! You didn’t really think I’d like you steal everything from the parrot, did you?
(Gives everything back to the parrot.)
After all, that wouldn’t be fair. And the real rules are fair, not set up so you can just steal from each other!
Beavis Raccoon
Aw man “that”
Butthead Raccoon
Aww, come on, you’re spoiling our game.
Parrot
It was just awful! I thought they were going to take everything I had! I was so scared!
Mother Parrot
No, nobody can do that. Only on April Fools’ Day would they think they could do that! Here, have another candy bar, it’ll make you feel better
(Gives another candy bar to the parrot).
Parrot
Oh, thank you,
(Parrot exits)
(Raccoons look at each other.)
Butthead Raccoon
Candy bar? You have more candy bars?
Mother Parrot
Oh yes, I have lots of candy bars.
Butthead Raccoon
So, like, can we have some more?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, heh heh, like you know we would like a whole bunch of candy!
Mother Parrot
(Laughs and laughs and laughs)
No!
Butthead Raccoon
No? This is like another April Fool thing, isn’t it?
Beavis Raccoon
Yeah, we really get a bunch of candy bars, don’t we?
Mother Parrot
(Laughing)
Nope. April Fools is all over now. Say goodbye!
Raccoons mutter grip and yell as they all disappear.
(Somebody holds up a “THE END” sign)
CENTERING:
From Healing and the Mind by Bill Moyers:
A Story by Rachel Naomi Remen
I bought a little, falling-down cabin on the top of a mountain. It was so bad that when a friend came to see it, he said, ‘Oh, Rachel, you bought this?’ But with two carpenters, an electrician, and a plumber, in three years we have remodeled the whole thing. We started by just throwing things away–bathtubs, light fixtures, windows. I kept hearing my father’s voice saying, ‘That’s a perfectly good light fixture, why are you throwing it away?’ We kept throwing away more and more things, and with everything we threw away, the building became more whole. It had more integrity. Finally, we had thrown away everything that didn’t belong. You know, we may think we need to be more in order to be whole. But in some ways, we need to be less. We need to let go, to throw away everything that isn’t us in order to be more whole.
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you–all the expectations, all of the beliefs–and becoming who you are. Not a better you, but a more real you.
SERMON: “It Ain’t Necessarily So”
(It ain’t necessarily so, it ain’t necessarily so; the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so, etc.)
April Fools’ Day demands some foolishness and some seriousness, and I think they should be mixed in unpredictable ways.
As a student of religion, I agree with almost every word in that Gershwin song from 1935. But the orthodoxy I want to challenge today isn’t from the Bible.
Most of the time, people expect their religions to keep them content and happy rather than awake and concerned. Nobody comes to church hoping they will feel worse for the trip. But like the little poem on the cover of your order of service by Danish poet Piet Hein, I want to mix fun and earnestness today. (“The Eternal Twins”: “Taking fun as simply fun/ and earnestness in earnest; shows how thoroughly thou/ none of the two discernest.”)
I want to think about one of the oldest pronouncements of religion, which is that the love of money is the root of all evil. I think that’s far too simple: evil has a whole lot of roots, though the love of money is certainly one of them. This isn’t saying that money is bad, or that it isn’t good to have it. It just says that it’s seductive, that we’re easily seduced, and that if we make the mistake of falling in love with money rather than people, the effect on us and on our world may be deadly.
Take the trillion-dollar drug business. Whether you are in favor of legalizing all drugs or not, it is clear that the business wouldn’t be so big if it weren’t so profitable.
Or take pornography, which is now a $10 billion-a-year business in this country. It’s routinely attacked by conservatives as though it were a liberal demon. But when there’s that much money to be made, you should expect big businesses to be getting in on it, and they are. The New York Times recently revealed that General Motors now makes $200 million a year from pay-per-view sex films aired through its DirectTV subsidiary. That’s more money than Hustler magazine’s Larry Flynt makes on graphic sex movies. (Hightower Lowdown, 2-2-2001)
Another big profitable company, AT&T, outsells Playboy in the sex business, offering a hardcore sex channel called Hot Network that reaches 16 million homes on cable TV, plus selling pay-per-view sex in a million hotel rooms. “Revenue-wise,” says an official with AT&T’s cable channel, “it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.”
That’s an astonishing statement: “Revenue-wise, it’s one of our biggest moneymakers.” And the unspoken ending to the sentence is “Therefore, it’s a defensible activity for a reputable business.”
Please understand that I’m not bashing the rich. I don’t think poor people are any more or less moral than rich people. Given the same temptations the majority of us would act the same.
But if the love of money really is one of the roots of evil, then nobody who falls in love with it is likely to be immune.
Those stories of General Motors and AT&T embracing pornography as good business raises the question of just how far we will go. How many people are we willing to sacrifice, given the temptation of enough power, profit and privilege? It’s a sobering question. And it is a huge area. Originally, I had intended just to talk about economics, in a kind of sequel to the sermon I gave here last fall on “The Dark God of Capitalism.”
But I got sidetracked by Bill Moyers’ two-hour PBS television program this past Monday (March 26, 2001). It was called “Trade Secrets,” and was about the rules that have governed some significant areas of the chemical industries for a long time. I want to use some of that material to sketch a broad picture. Then I’ll go into much more detail on just one story that he didn’t mention, one tragic story that has been unfolding for decades, and which has probably touched almost everyone in this room. And then, as in any good sermon, I’ll relate everything back to this morning’s puppet show.
The documentation for Moyers’ program was several million pages of private letters and inter-company memos obtained from the major chemical manufacturing corporations. Some documents go back over forty years. While there is room for differences of opinion on some parts, other parts seem unambiguous.
I hope many of you saw the program. While I took a lot of notes, it was much too detailed to repeat here, and would take too long. It was a story, documented by the actual confidential memos of some giant chemical corporations like B.F. Goodrich, Dow Chemical, Union Carbide and Esso, of the wholesale betrayal of both employees and citizens. It showed that the companies have known, as far back as the 1950s, that some of their most profitable chemicals were toxic, caused cancer, dissolved bones, sterilized and killed people. They acknowledged this in private letters to each other, as they also insisted that they must all agree to keep this secret from their employees, the government and the general public. 1
One of the chemicals was vinyl chloride, the key ingredient in PVCs, which you may remember from the news stories about them not too many years ago. B.F. Goodrich knew as far back as 1959 that they were toxic and posed serious health risks to their employees, which they did. In 1966, they wrote to Monsanto, Union Carbide and others that exposure to vinyl chlorides could cause bones to dissolve. Their advisors suggested reducing it to less than 50 parts per million – though concentrations in their factories were five to ten times that high. But they never published the warnings, and continued to tell their own employees that vinyl chloride was harmless.
In 1973 Union Carbide acknowledged in private memos to the others that the companies’ secret actions in these areas could be seen as criminal conspiracy. Nevertheless, they continued to cover up and lie to employees about the deadly concentrations of vinyl chlorides in which their employees were working.
Another infamous chemical was benzene. As early as 1958, it was identified as toxic by Esso and other companies. It was linked to leukemia, and they wrote that it was so toxic that only a level of zero was safe. Also in 1958, Dow Chemical knew that Benzene’s active ingredient could cause sterility in men, and concealed this from their workers, who experienced exceptionally high rates of sterility – and which the company insisted were not work-related.
As the threat of government regulation gained force in the 1970s, the chemical companies wrote more secret memos to each other trying to find or invent a way to get more money, so they could have more political influence – or, to put it less romantically, so they could buy more politicians. Finally, before the 1980 election PACs were created as a way of pooling money to buy greater access and influence in politics. They have been spectacularly successful. In his first month in office, Ronald Reagan delayed all EPA regulations of the chemical industry until the EPA could prove their claims conclusively. The rest, you could say, is history. Many of the toxic chemicals are still unregulated.
As part of the program, Bill Moyers had samples of his own blood taken and tested. The tests showed that he had 84 foreign chemicals in his blood, including more than 15 in the dioxin family, and more than thirty in the vinyl chloride group. It’s a good bet that we do too.
These chemicals have been known to be toxic for decades, during which time the company memos show they have conspired to keep this secret from their own workers and the country as a whole. For the record, these are also the companies who own the patents and are doing the work on genetically engineered foods, introducing mutant genes and invented chemical combinations into us at every meal. These artificial products haven’t been well tested because they can’t be well tested. The slow processes of evolution have not prepared any life form on earth to deal with these new chemical inventions. So there is no way – and probably can be no way — to predict what their medium or long-term effects will be. They are, however, profitable.
What will the costs be? We don’t know. But already, brain cancer in children is up by 26%, and there is over a 60% increase in testicular cancer in young men from the profitable chemicals that are already in us.
At the end of Bill Moyers’ program, an executive representing the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association, while evading almost all questions, kept saying, “We’re a science-based industry.” No, that’s not right. Chemical companies use science as an essential part of their business. But science doesn’t drive the business or tell them to mislead their employees and the general public. They’re a profit-based industry. It’s not clear that they could survive if they weren’t. Their history shows that it is profits, not science, that steer their decisions.
I have a personal story about this difference and the difference it can make. Sixteen years ago, while I was writing my dissertation, I was offered a job as a staff chaplain at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, a huge hospital in downtown Chicago. The hospital had just been restructured to respond to what the insurance industry called DRGs, or Diagnostically-Related Groupings. The length of time the insurance companies would now reimburse the hospital for any patient’s stay was now determined not by the attending physician, but by a chart allocating a certain number of days for almost every imaginable sickness or surgery. Coincidentally, very few patients stayed longer than their insurance would cover. (To add some balance, the DRG system was the idea of Medicaid, an effort to curb excessive spending by hospitals, and patient stays that were longer than proper medical care warranted.)
My boss, who had been the head of the chaplaincy program there for about fifteen years, was struggling to understand what this change meant. The hospital’s board had been changed from doctors to MBAs and accountants, and each time he returned from a board meeting he seemed more confused. “Something fundamental has changed here,” he would say, “and I can’t see what it is.” After two or three months, he did see it, and he taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
Both the quality and the cost of patient care had always been central concerns of the hospital, and the same language was still being used, about quality and cost of care. But formerly, they used to say “We try to make medical care as cheap as possible, considering our primary commitment to the quality of patient care.” Now, while using the same words, the formula had been reversed. Now they were trying to provide the best medical care they could, considering their primary commitment to profitability.
That’s what the chemical companies were saying in the memos exposed in Bill Moyers’ television program. They cared about public safety, and about profits. But they cared more about profits than about public safety, and quietly sanctioned the disease and death of tens or hundreds of thousands of their employees and their fellow citizens over several decades because, revenue-wise, it was a big money-maker.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month
This may be hard to believe. It is certainly disheartening to believe. But to see both the horror and the cynicism that are represented by letting concerns for profits rather than people govern a country, as I think they are in fact governing our country now, I want to tell you in some detail about something that has become an annual national tradition. You’ve all heard of it, it is called Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Last October was the fifteenth, the sixteenth annual BCAM is coming up in six more months.
National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’s core message is the importance of early detection, with a special emphasis on regular mammography exams. It also carries the subtle implication that breast cancer is just something that’s somehow just “out there,” without any specific cause, and that if women get it, it’s partly because they didn’t take adequate care of themselves. How on earth can we go through sixteen years of concern about a killer like breast cancer without ever once raising the question of its possible or likely causes?
Imagine how different this story would sound if we learned, instead, that breast cancer had been linked to some chemicals commonly found in pesticides and other chemicals produced and marketed by a giant international chemical conglomerate by the name of Imperial Chemical Industries. It’s true, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month was invented by AstraZeneka, one of the subsidiary companies in the conglomerate that produced the cancer-causing chemical.
Breast Cancer Awareness Month was not devised as a public service but as the kind of “misdirection” that magicians do to distract you from the real trickery. AstraZeneka has always been the primary sponsor of this program, and has final control over all promotional and informational copy published in connection with Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As a result, no mention has ever been made of some of the known causes of this murderous disease. AstraZeneka is no longer under the giant ICI firm. But it now produces and distributes another controversial chemical called tamofixin, which has been approved to reduce the risk of contracting cancer in women with a high risk of breast cancer. So it still wants to be associated in the public eye with efforts to address breast cancer, though not with discussing the causes of the cancer.
The official story, celebrated every October, is that we are all blessed by better living through chemistry, and the chemical companies are our life-saving friends in a naturally hostile world.
But there is another way of seeing it. That is that the world is not naturally hostile. It was made hostile and deadly by the very chemicals that this and other companies are polluting us with, knowing full well their murderous effects, knowing they also make a good profit. And, as General Motors and AT&T have done with pornography, when these companies come to a fork in the road where profits go one way and concern for people go the other way, they seem to follow the profits, and create a cynical and intentionally misleading Breast Cancer Awareness Month to hide the evidence that all these women are being killed not by nature, but – at least in part — by them.
In this country, about 40,000 women will die of breast cancer this year. The disease has skyrocketed over the past 40 years. In that time, more American women have died of breast cancer than the total of all American soldiers killed in all the wars of the 20th century combined. If there is a more cynical story around, a story continually showing brutally how greed kills when profits are elevated over people, I don’t know what it is.
Now we have a new president in our country, and every member of his cabinet comes with longstanding and powerful ties to the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. I won’t read you the whole list here, though I’ll put it in the version of this sermon that is posted on the church website and printed in hard copies. But twelve of President Bush’s cabinet members came from, have strong ties to, or will return to, virtually every major corporation in the country. And both the President and Vice President come from and represent the oil industry.
Some people who claim to be knowledgeable claim that the corporate control of our national government has never been this complete. I don’t know. But if programs like Bill Moyers’ expose of the chemical industry and the sad, cynical story of the real origin and purpose of Breast Cancer Awareness Month are fair indications of what lies ahead, we may be entering a chapter in this country’s history that we will look back on in shame. Many European countries already see it that way.
The most fundamental power that rulers can have is the power to write the story within which we agree to live. Those who control a society’s story are its invisible puppeteers.
The mother in this morning’s puppet show was an April Fools’ joke. There is no mother to keep the rules fair. There’s just us. I think that enough rules are out of control that we are on the verge of losing our health, our safety, perhaps our country.
I think that at least some of what I’ve said here has been persuasive for some of you. You are the brightest and most creative group of people with whom I’ve ever had the privilege of working. I wonder if there isn’t something that we can do in this area to make a positive difference in the lives of ourselves, our children and the larger community? I can’t organize anything, but if there are those here who feel drawn to these issues and have some organizational skills, I will do what I can to help you. There must be many ways in which we can begin to make a positive difference. I don’t know what they are. But I keep thinking of that puppet show. Those raccoons and the parrot – they were just puppets. We’re not.
—————
Addenda:
Here is a partial list of President Bush’s Cabinet members and their corporate connections, taken from Jim Hightower’s newsletter The Hightower Lowdown. I’m repeating most of this from a column by Molly Ivins where she quoted Hightower:
Elaine Chao – Bank of America, Dole Foods, Northwest Airlines, Columbia/HCA Health Care
Norman Mineta – was a top Washington lobbyist for Lockheed Martin before joining the corporate cabinet as Transportation secretary.
Gale Norton – Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Ford, and Phillips 66, all funders of the Mountain States Legal Foundation from whence she came. She also chaired the Republican Environmental Advocates, funded by American Forest & Paper Association, Amoco, ARCO, the Chemical Manufacturers Association, and Ford.
Paul O’Neill – Alcoa, International Paper Company, Eastman Kodak, and Lucent Technologies.
Anthony Principi – QTC Medical Services, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems, and Federal Network.
Donald Rumsfeld – General Instrument Corporation, G.D. Searle & Co., Asea Brown Bavari, the Tribune Company, Gilead Sciences, Ind., RAND Corporation, Salomon Smith Barney.
Colin Powell – America Online and General Dynamics, plus a very long list of corporations that paid $100,000 per speech.
G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, & Commerce Secretary Donald Evans – all Texas oilmen representing the oil industry.
John Ashcroft – Particularly close to the Schering-Plough pharmaceutical company and was heavily funded by BP Amoco, Exxon, Monsanto, Occidental Petroleum, Union Carbide, and Weyerhauser.
Spencer Abraham – Energy Secretary, sponsored a bill to abolish the Energy Department and led the fight in the Senate to defeat greater fuel efficiency for SUVs, a cause dear to both auto and energy industries.
Ron Paige – Education Secretary, is an enthusiastic corporatizer of the public schools. While he was superintendent in Houston, he privatized food services, payrool, and accounting, signed a contract with Coca-Cola to put Coke bottles in the halls, and with Primedia Corporation to broadcast Channel One in the public schools.
Ann Veneman – Agriculture Secretary, was on the board of Calgene, Inc., which produces genetically altered food, and was connected with an agribusiness front group funded by Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Kraft, and Nestle.
