All Hail King Pfizer!

Regular viewers of this blog (I’m sure there’s millions of you out there, but you’re all too shy to put up any comments ha, ha) will notice that I haven’t put up any posts in the last ten days or so. I tried to put up a piece explaining to Kevin Myers why we didn’t have the same fascistic attitude to single mothers that they do in Britain and the US, but the computer wouldn’t accept it for some reason, presumably because there’such a surfeit of Myers-baiting material on the web already that one more article would have caused a global internet crash that would have resulted in porn addicts causing riots on the streets and a global outbreak of depression from people not being able to buy generic paxil and generally the sort of thing that was predicted for the start of the millennium.

Alas, I realise that none of this was going to happen. I came across a blog-focussed search engine and typed in the names of some of my postings and got nothing. Nada, zilch. I found this terribly depressing, almost as depressing as Million Dollar Baby winning best picture Oscar, though I realise that there are around 8 million blogs out there; the same article pointed out that while some famous blogs might make money, for most of us it’ll never be more than a hobby.

Still, I’m going to soldier on, writing is, like, y’know, my metier, my dharma, man, it’s what I was put on this Earth to do.

So anyway, there I was last Sunday sitting down to watch the Simpsons on Sky like I do every other Sunday.

Those of you who watch the show with anything like the religious fervour that I do will know that it regularly satirises the sort of corporate cuddliness that has infected modern society like a really bad tumour, embodied best by Lynsney Nagel, who, for example, converted the first church of Springfield into a public-private partnership when Bart’s hamster flew a rocket into it (it makes sense when you watch it). Another time Lisa convinced Mr. Burns to open a recycling plant but it turned out he was using it to make slurry from fish he caught in with recycled six-pack holders.

There’s a not-very-subtle message here that no matter how many times corporations tell you that there’re really nice and looking out for the everyone’s best interests, there’re still basically evil. But they know that if they keep saying the same things over and over again, people will eventually believe them. It worked for Hitler, it works for George W Bush and it works for the corporations.

Or at least so they must imagine as one of them broadcast an ad just before the Simpsons on Sunday.

The wisdom of such an act is debateable to say the least. A book I got my sister for Christmas (She likes the Simpsons too) spent a lot of time asking whether the show was genuinely subversive or if it was what it’s author describes as a mere court jester in the world of corporate America. The fact that Rupert Murdoch once appeared on the show describing himself as a billionaire tyrant leads me towards the latter supposition, but there’s a more hopeful part of me that hopes that the generation brought up watching the show will have a healthy scepticism towards corporate advertising.

Like that ad for Pfizer which they showed just before last Sunday’s show. Apparently Pfizers scientists spend all there time thinking up cures for cancer and heart disease. So I guess they must have just have come up with that Viagra thing by mistake, then, as it only increases blood pressure and adds to the problems of anyone who has cardiolgical problems to begin with.

Then they tell us that the best way to maintain good health is not to take their pills but to get lots of fresh air and exercise. Gee, isn’t it great that all those smart men in white coats are working here in Ireland, as we could never have figured this out for ourselves.

The irony wont be lost on anyone who grew up in the lower Cork harbour area any time in the last quarter of a century. When I was a child growing up in Crosshaven, the smell was often so bad that we had to lock all the doors and windows of our houses. I’d often get indescribably bad migraines at the same time.

The air quality has improved somewhat in the last few years and big pharma companies like Pfizer credit incineration for this. But incineration is also a dangerous technology that affects human health in other ways, by converting chemicals into toxic compounds known as dioxins. Pfizer are among the companies sponsoring a much bigger toxic waste incinerator as well as a municipal waste incinerator that will burn toxic waste from all over Ireland with possible disastrous implications for the health of people in the area.

They’re doing this because they care not about the health of people in the areas where they build their factories but for the health of the bank accounts of their shareholders, as they are legally obliged to do. This is why they spend so much time and energy researching mythical diseases like female impotence rather than curing diseases like malaria, which mainly affects people in poorer countries.

I’m hoping that most of the people watching that particular show will remember the one a few weeks before where Homer was forced to smuggle drugs from Canada because the big pharmaceutical companies artificially keep the price high and prevent anyone from producing generics, even in third world countries where they obviously can’t afford the real thing.

It’s true that firms like Pfizer have contributed to the economic development of Ireland in a major way – the active ingredient for Viagra, made in Ringaskiddy, is worth 14 times it’s weight in gold – yet the biggest beneficiaries of this wealth have been property developers while all the poor old people of the Cork harbour area get is a big factory where they burn toxic waste.

So maybe we should all write to Pfizer and ask them to incinerate the master tapes for this mendacious ad.

But do it outside your own headquarters, if you don't mind