Banana Republics

The Reagan years for me were observed from high school and college. And the lens through which I came to see those years were our Central American policy. My intention is not to go into that topic, but rather to point out that our moral/political world view is very much actualized during the teenage years. For me Vietnam and Watergate merged seamlessly with the geopolitics of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

It still resonates. My high school education (Jesuit Catholic) emphasized ethics, history, and textual analysis. I came to my political conclusions (at that time) via my parents' politics (liberal, and for a time, Reagan Democrat), my own anti-authoritarianism, and the social justice doctrine still emphasized by the Jesuits at that time. Not very sophisticated, I grant you, and very emotional.

I wonder about some of my students. Perhaps one's political bent is largely a combination of these factors: parents, temperament, and the immediate political atmospheres of adolescence...

With this in mind (see the whole post):

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us...