honeymonster | Scary.

This here is the book I've been reading since yesterday afternoon. I'm not done yet, but tomorrow is my last Rona-free day for I don't know how long, so I thought I'd share it tonight..

Excerpts:

On the surface it seemed like an ordinary publicity stunt for "female emancipation," the pre-depression equivalent of women's liberation. A contingent of New York debutantes marched down Fifth Avenue in the 1929 Easter Parade, each openly lighting and smoking cigarettes. It was the first time in the memory of most Americans that any woman who wasn't a prostitute had been seen smoking in public.

It was dubbed the "torches of liberty contingent" by Edward Bernays, its brilliant behind-the-scenes organizer. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, later admitted that he had been paid a tidy sum to orchestrate the march by George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company.

-- from the introduction by Mark Dowie

from a section dealing with efforts to push recombinant bovine growth hormone, which is supposed to make cows produce more milk:

Monsanto's own rests showed increased levels of mastitis, a painful udder infection, in cows injected with rBGH. Acorrding to food safety experts, increased mastitis would force farmers to use more antibiotics, which would then be more likely to contaminate the cows' milk. Milk from treated cows would also spoil faster because it contains more bacteria and has a higher "somatic cell count." (Translated from scientific jargon into layman's language, this means that rBGH-induced milk contains "more pus.")

In 1980, a drunk driver killed the 13-year-old daughter of Candy L. Lightner. Devastated and angry, Lightner created an organization called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), to publicize the suffering caused by drug and alcohol abuse. Hollywood publicist Michael Levine described Lightner as a natural practitioner of what he calls "guerrilla PR." In his book by that title , Levine praised "this dynamic woman" who "used the sheer strength of her character to forge a movement." After Lightner and her surviving daughter held a press conference to describe the consequences of drunk driving, Levine said, "a photo of the tearful mother and daughter flashed around the world and suddenly the agony of death from driving under the influence had a face and a name: Candy Lightner."

"We hadn't planned on scenes of crying," Lightner said. "But instinctively we knew the media needed something dramatic." After seeing the reaction to the photo, she learned to use visuals in dramatizing her cause. In a campaign to pass a California bill requiring a five-cent tax on alcohol, she sent her daughter to buy a six-pack with a fake ID. She then held a press conference--with her daughter sitting behind a small mountain of beer cans she'd just bought, illustrating how enormous the problem actually was.

MADD quickly grew to three million members in the U.S. alone, but Lightner's talents have been diverted to other purposes. In 1985 she left the organization over disagreements that included her desire to have MADD receive financial contributions from the liquor industry. She moved to Washington, DC, where she was hired by the American Beverage Institute, a liquor industry trade group, to help defeat MADD-supported laws that would toughen blood-alcohol tests.