Coal Blooded Killers
Mountaintop Removal Mining is known to be environmentally hazardous and leave the land with all the beauty of a dried up turd. Today on Democracy Now! an environmentalist had an interesting way of describing the process:
For instance, she missed a chance to compare the bulldozers the coal industry uses to the ones Israel uses to bowl over Palestinian shacks. Hello! That would have been a big winner with DN listeners. I'm sure it occurred to Amy Goodman as well, but she didn't want to say it and betray her objectivity on that issue.
In fact, the whole process of Mountaintop Removal Mining is eerily similar to how Galactus, The Ravager of Worlds, devours a planet. As a comic fan I'm upset that no one uses that.
Next time I'm describing someone I don't like, I'm going to connect them to McVeigh. "Yeah, Ryan. You know him? He drives a pickup truck just like Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Same make and model. Dude's an asshole."
Well, basically, the coal industry comes in and cuts all the trees off the top of the mountain, and most of the time they don’t even use the trees. Then they set—they take bulldozers and scrape the wonderful topsoil from the top of the mountain, and then they drill holes and use ammonium nitrate, which Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing, and they load those charges, and then they set a blast off. And it shakes the whole valley.It's little comments like that that brighten up the dull newscasts of Democracy Now! I like how the activist semi-subtly connects cigar chomping Big Coal capitalists to right-wing christian terrorists via a chemical compound. Now that I'm looking over that statement with this idea in mind, all I'm seeing are missed opportunities.
For instance, she missed a chance to compare the bulldozers the coal industry uses to the ones Israel uses to bowl over Palestinian shacks. Hello! That would have been a big winner with DN listeners. I'm sure it occurred to Amy Goodman as well, but she didn't want to say it and betray her objectivity on that issue.
In fact, the whole process of Mountaintop Removal Mining is eerily similar to how Galactus, The Ravager of Worlds, devours a planet. As a comic fan I'm upset that no one uses that.
Next time I'm describing someone I don't like, I'm going to connect them to McVeigh. "Yeah, Ryan. You know him? He drives a pickup truck just like Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City Bombing. Same make and model. Dude's an asshole."
posted by Matt Bors at
8:25 PM
1 Comments:
Bors, I'm glad you're willing to take the extra step and criticism independent media when they need to be. I'm all for activism and liberalism as the next, and am against mountain top strip mining, but you can't get dragged into the yellow journalism that the big players so often use.
On a side note, I've done two videos on mountain top removal. One was on the TVA Coal Protest and a second one was on the Sequatchie Valley Institute. (shameless self-promotion)
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