Friday, August 6, 2021

Power to the Plants!


Okay, so hear me out:

A cartoon show for kids about plants as superheroes. It all starts out cute, as you’d expect. Then in the natural progression of the show over seasons they start battling “polluters” and then it becomes “corporate polluters” and then it becomes “extractive corporate polluters” and then “capitalist extractive corporate polluters” and then “capitalist corporations” and then “capitalism” and then “capitalists” and now a whole generation is wearing berets and rejecting the essential tenets of a profit driven society. They stop working in offices. They start farms on rooftops. They ban billionaires. Healthcare is free. They don’t pay rent. The entire current economic paradigm collapses. It turns out people are happier and healthier. The plants did that. It turns out theory really were superheroes.


Remember how Captain Planet taught people my age that protecting the environment was an individual’s responsibility? That’s because it was made by a capitalist corporation.


But who are we kidding? Have you heard that koan about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?


Did you know that in Mexico the firearm maker Colt’s Manufacturing Company sells a handgun engraved with the likeness of Emiliano Zapata, whose name and philosophy of agrarian socialism have been adopted by the Zapatista Army of National Revolution? Capitalism is wild.


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