I am facing some jail time for standing up to the evils of Monsanto and other Big Ag usurpers of the Earth. My trial beginstomorrow.
The prosecutor in Iowa appears corrupted by Monsanto and has proposed to a judge that protesters of its toxins be deprived of their constitutional rights at trial. Let’s repeat that. A Des Moines assistant District Attorney has filed a motion that would preclude any “referencing” of the 1st Amendment or free speech protections of the Bill of Rights in my trial. This would retroactively strip a protester, me, of the right to protest simply. Here’s a link to the motion.
Stripping a protester of his or her rights as a citizen in a misdemeanor trial? We cannot find a precedent. There are two of us on trial, me and another person were popped on the charge of trespassing. We face 30 days imprisonment or $500. My lawyer is Wylie Stecklow, a prominent civil rights attorney and supporter of the Church of Stop Shopping. Wylie has been honored with the Key to Harlem, as well as Congressional, State Assembly, City Council and Manhattan Borough Presidents’ citations for outstanding citizenship in relation to his work providing legal services in traditionally underserved communities.
We don’t have videotapes of Monsanto handing brown paper bags of cash to the government lawyers. But that’s where politics comes in. We can’t prove that Monsanto knew that Agent Orange would be causing birth defects fifty years after the Viet Nam War, but they brag on their website about Agent Orange. We can’t prove that Monsanto poisoned the African-American town of Addison, Alabama for years because the statute of limitations has run out on the emails we found between their scheming execs.
Politics is an act of faith. You have enough proof to excite your suspicion that evil is being committed and people need to be protected.
Politics is most powerful when a belief in the good is powered by a belief in the amazing miracle that is life. Frank and I are on the outs with organized religion. But anyone who has sung water songs while facing the gun-men at Standing Rock knows that the disorganized religion of 300 kinds of indigenous peoples singing their clashing harmonies of water prayers by the river while the gun-men watch – that’s a power that no enforcement official, corrupt or not, can stop.
And so I pray for the people of Iowa. In our church we pray to the Earth. I pray to the clean and complex soil of Iowa that my great grandfather William and his wife Lena farmed near Pella, farmed nearly a century ago.
Monsanto’s business model is that the Earth is flawed and we need to make a replacement Earth. Like God the Almighty, the company is devoted to creating life or re-creating it. So Monsanto copyrights life itself. It is laughable to Monsanto that we expect it to be regulated or their products to be tested by researchers who don’t accept their money. Would God submit to the people?
In the service of its God-like presence, Monsanto is devoted to a post-analogue existence. You can’t find it. It is beyond our senses, not unlike its toxins. Our Church of Stop Shopping has tried to find Monsanto. We staged performances at its headquarters in St. Louis; led parades and rallies with our high-stepping gospel; exorcised the demons from their labs in from the farmlands of California to Harvard to the high-rises of Chicago.
We sang our hit single “Monsanto is the Devil” at the EPA hearings on Glyphosates in Washington just last month. Suddenly, after tracking this company for years, I feel this filing that would take away my rights as a citizen – that the mad scientist Monsanto has broken down my front door and aimed a gun at my head.
Consider our crime: we were 250 feet away from the Monsanto “Food Prize” at the Iowa state Capitol, standing on a public sidewalk. In Iowa, the governor is very much like an employee of the company. For the part, Monsanto rented the Iowa State Capitol building and grounds. That’s what I was talking about when the state troopers the had cuffed me.
I can’t remember if I asked them how it feels to be bouncers at a night club called Big Chem, checking peoples’ tickets at the door. I know I asked them about the renting out of their gold-domed Capitol, now symbolically covered with the logo of this celebration of GMO crops. “Doesn’t that look corrupt? Isn’t there some unfortunate symbolism here?” They acted like even to ask the question was a crime.
When someone announces their opposition to Monsanto, to Monsanto these citizens become super-weeds. If we are not the cash crop, we are treasonous, we super-weeds. That’s Monsanto. Scientists who disagree are defamed, even the World Health Organization is called corrupt. What do they do about activists? Use that old tried and true method for social changers that protesteth too much called jail.
As I write this note, it is 3 AMin Brooklyn in a blizzard and I have a bad feeling about his trial. My partner and my six-year-old daughter Lena are asleep. I’m writing to you, oh reader, in hopes for my cause and well-being.
And I pray to the pure earth of my name-sake William and my great grandmother Lena.
Earthalujah!
Reverend Billy Talen
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