The left retreats to "attack the messenger." How does the Electronic Privacy Information Center epic.org know Michael Crichton's on the take from Murdoch, anyway? Do they have Crichton and Murdoch under surveillance?
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
A right-winger attacks global warming
By Wayne Madsen
Sunday, January 2, 2005
Michael Crichton's new novel, "State of Fear," not only unfairly bashes the global environmental movement but represents yet another example of how multinational corporations and their political allies are invading the popular culture to advance fanatic and lunatic right-wing ideas and agendas.
The book demonizes scientists who argue that the world is heading toward cataclysmic weather change unless something is done about the spewing forth of greenhouse gases into Earth's atmosphere.
Crichton develops a story line that has environmentalists and scientists creating weather-making doomsday machines that wreak havoc on the planet.
Killer hurricanes, towering tidal waves and destructive lightning storms are all meant to prove the scientists' point about the deadly effects of global warming. The environmentalists are the villains. The corporate shills who have been paid big bucks to debunk the global warming community are the good guys. According to Crichton, global warming is a myth.
In today's world of increasing corporate control of almost every facet of our public and private lives, Crichton's screed against the environmental movement should come as no great surprise.
After all, the publisher of "State of Fear" is Harper Collins, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the same people who feed Americans and people around the world a daily dosage of right-wing propaganda billed as 24-hour news.
Murdoch can wave his big money around and always expect to find some novelist; screenwriter; movie director; journalist; left, center, or right-wing magazine editor; cartoonist; or research institute fellow to allow himself or herself to become human versions of coin-operated nickelodeons or Laundromats.
Crichton is no different than crossword puzzle editors who are now paid to include as answers to their clues the names of corporations and brand names as a form of subtle advertising -- a new low in the newspaper business.
It is obvious that Murdoch will eventually have his Fox movie arm put Crichton's global eco-terrorism conspiracy tale on the big screen to counteract the climate change warning conveyed by Roland Emmerich's global disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow."
Crichton's book, perhaps not coincidentally, comes at a time the Bush administration is blowing off the Arctic meltdown concerns raised in the Arctic Climate Change Assessment initiated by regional Arctic nations and native tribal peoples.
Murdoch and his corporate cronies may want to think twice before using a science-fiction messenger like Crichton, who has suggested in his previous novel "Jurassic Park" that living dinosaurs can be recreated using 65-million year old DNA extracted from the blood of mosquitoes encased in amber to launch a tirade against actual and reasoned scientists.
Unlike the "silly science" of Crichton, a group of 300 scientists recently concluded that the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known. Disappearing are the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Arctic icepack. Similar melting is occurring in Antarctica with the largest recorded iceberg now causing devastation to indigenous species and science stations.
Crichton's fictional broadside against environmentalists comes at a time when the right-wing and its corporate masters are stooping to all sorts of chicanery to muddy the waters with regard to global warming.
Some ludicrous right-wingers have even suggested that eminent global warming experts like Rajendra K. Pachauri are somehow irresponsibly focusing the world's attention away from the war on Islamic terrorism.
And then comes along Crichton with his novel about global ecoterrorism. It is pathetic that the neoconservatives, mega-media perception managers, and multinational corporations have resorted to such McCarthyite tactics to push their sordid and destructive agendas.
Wayne Madsen is a senior fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (www.epic.org). |
