Under Seed

Usually, Stephen Colbert hits it right on the head. Remember his White House Correspondant's Dinner speech, where he mercilessly goofed on everyone in the Bush administration? ( I wish he'd pushed that "Gannon" button....)

But in this piece mocking a sponsor of the Glenn Beck - Eric Massa interview, he (and his writers) showed off a frightening lack of understanding. Sure, it's sometimes hilarious, the way Fox advertisers (especially Beck's) prey on the fears of their aging audience. And Colbert's fatuous demolishing of the ad's infomercial duplicity is great: unlabeled graphs, outrageous prices, act now or you might be dead!

But there are real questions left unanswered: why would anyone need non-hybrid seeds? What is it about non-hybrid seeds that makes them valuable in a crisis? And why would anyone spend good money on national advertising in the gamble that people will pay outrageous prices for these certain seeds?

The answer is that almost all the seeds we farm with (and eventually eat) in this country are neutered. That's right. If there were a complete societal meltdown, all those acres of corn, wheat, and soybean would simply die off, never to be replaced. What? Not what you learned in school? Can't the farmer just take some of his crop, grab the seeds right off the stalks and re-plant them, generating more and more plants, more and more seeds?

No, they can't.

Why? Because the agribusinesses that have taken over farming in this country have neutered our seed stock. They have done this on purpose, and the reasoning is simple. If you control the seeds, you control the farmers. And you control the food supply (and maybe, if they're lucky someday, the bioenergy supply as well).

Farmers in this country are between a rock and a hard place: the bank owns their land and agribusiness owns their seed. Farmers, who can't afford to go a season without growing, are forced to sign exclusive contracts with seed providers, and the seed they get has been engineered to be good for one season only.

Isn't that a crime against nature? You bet your ass it is. But there's a bitter irony here as well.

Reactionary survivalists don't need to pay hundreds of dollars for non-hybrid seeds. They don't need to mount an expedition to Norway to raid the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. They can just saunter over to the nearest organic farm - you know, the crazy hippies they've been mocking for the last 30 years - and get some organic (non-GMO, non-chemically sprayed, and non-hybrid) seeds, probably really, really cheap.

But that irony isn't the worst part. The worst part is that, given a chance to educate viewers and ream this advertisement even more, Colbert either didn't know, or he took a pass. The latter may be forgivable: he almost never breaks his conservo-facade.

Still, that barbed wire guarding his herb garden was a more apt metaphor than he probably knew.