Children of Men

I actually sat still long enough tonight to get through a movie: Children of Men. Gotta say, it wasn’t an easy view. The plot goes a little something like this: It’s 2027 in Britain and women worldwide have been infertile for almost 20 years. Some nebulously unspecified holocaust has racked the rest of the world and the U.K. is the only bastion of ‘civilization’ left. Because of this foreigners and immigrants are declared illegal. With no children society is coming unglued because The End is in sight. Sort of like On the Beach with the end of humanity happening in slow motion.

There’s a bit more to it, but I don’t want to blab too much for those that haven’t seen it. With the concepts the movie is based on it would have been exceeding easy for it to devolve into a world class downer or a “message movie”. While it was a bit depressing it was also pretty compelling. Overly active minds will probably extract cautionary tales from every angle of the film. Case in point; go to YouTube and type Children of Men into the search bar. Look at a few of the comments below each clip. Lazy thinkers love their dystopia wrapped neatly and presented to them whole. The work is science fiction.

The First World has had a fixation with dystopian futures for a few generations now. Thus far nearly all of it hasn’t panned out. People’s Exhibit A: Paul Ehrlich. Another aspect of this first world dystopia fetish; it’s always just around the corner. People’s Exhibit B: Mega Disasters on the History Channel. Not that this particular series is unique. Nearly all the science documentaries produced in this country have some sort of tie in to potential future calamity. The entire genre seems to have enlarged considerably over the past decade or so. You have to be a certain level of rich to allow dystopian fiction into your entertainment repertoire. Maybe this is where our guilt lives when we remove god from the equation. (Those that know me will know that was not an evangelical statement.) Sounds like somebody’s thesis waiting to be written.

From an academic standpoint it’s an excellent movie. It’s so cleanly filmed that at times it felt like a Stanley Kubrick production. The ugliness was beautifully shot, if that makes any sense. The violence is presented to look unchoreographed. Violence that is scripted and presented to look clean ends up making it more palatable, which it shouldn’t be. As I said, it’s a tough film to view but strangely compelling. Probably worth watching, just not before bed.

Ares

The Price of Beer

While Mrs. Ares and I were on our illustrious journey out west we toured a few breweries. It’s just something we do on vacation to pass the time and sample the local brew. (On a side note, by and large they’ve got it going on out west when it comes to beer. In some small towns we visited the locals don’t even buy beer at stores. They take a gallon jug to the brewery every few days and have it filled. Like going to the dairy for your milk. Why can’t we do that here in the south? That’s another day’s post.) One of the breweries we visited was Butte Creek Brewing Company in Chico, California. Something the tour guide said caught my attention. As we were in the grain area of the brewery she said the price of grain was rising sharply, which was going to result in beer becoming more expensive and probably some smaller breweries going under. My amateur observation and this article confirmed her statement.

Why is this happening, you ask? Really it comes down to one word: Ethanol. In our inane attempt to achieve “energy independence” we’ve started converting cropland into fuel. With greater subsidies available, farmers (read: Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) are planting more corn and less of everything else. Those of us who passed high school economics know that when there is less of something the price goes up. Another way this is playing itself out is a rise in soy prices, which is a result of switching cropland to corn. This is going to manifest in a lot of areas because soy is used in so many products. Earlier this year Mexico was rocked by a jump in the price of corn. Reason for the jump: More corn going to Ethanol production.

As for Ethanol itself, I have a few issues. By every account I’ve read there is a net energy loss in production. In other words, it takes more energy to make a gallon of Ethanol than the energy you get from that gallon. While on vacation I read The Worst Hard Time, which is about the Dust Bowl. (Excellent read, by the way.) One of the major contributing factors was that during World War I the government guaranteed a price of $2 a bushel for grain, which was drastically high. This caused a huge increase in breaking new land for grain production, which accelerated topsoil loss. Anybody here think ADM or Cargill is going to be all that concerned about crop rotation and conservation? Finally, there is a basic and fundamental premise to our survival as a species: You don’t mess with the food. This feels like we’ve started down a bad path. Unfortunately there are large amounts of money and emotional political issues tied to this, so it will probably take longer than usual to see it for what it is. On a personal level, they lost me when they started messing with the beer.

Ares