Dead Babies Can’t Take Care of Themselves
Remember Alice Cooper? He/they was born in 1948 in Detroit to a typical post-war middle class American family as Vincent Damon Furnier. It was once his family moved to Arizona that he decided that rock n’roll was his future. He hit his shock rock stride in the late 60’s and early 70’s when he and his pals realized that there was more to rock n’roll than just music. What was missing was showmanship, which Alice Cooper was more than happy to provide in the best of high school musicals, with macabre face make-up and wagging tongues. And it worked. Being outrageous earned him and his band a following and a growing audience. He got more than enough reinforcement and as Evita used to say, “the money kept rolling in from all directions….” I guess lives of quiet desperation weren’t being fed as they always had through religion or worldly materialism. The crowd needed even more and it was so easy to give them. There is no challenge in finding ways to be outrageous, but once the costumes and the make-up and the pyrotechnics get seen once or twice, something more is needed.
Where outrageous acts and visual effects come and are then gone, a song can last forever, but this was a time when outrageous rock n’rollers knew that for their music to get commercial success, it had to be able to play on the regulated radio and the era of pornography was in full swing, so censors were on the alert for the infamous seven unacceptable words. George Carlin explained that to us and told us we simply couldn’t say “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker”, and “tits”. Of course, he had to say them in order to tell us and that was the beauty of George Carlin. Others found ways to say things euphemistically and we all looked for ways to interpret those words or stories as we puffed the magic dragon, so to speak. Alice Cooper lacked Carlin’s boldness and a folk singer’s penchant for subtlety. That led to his writing of several outrageous songs, whose very titles makes us cringe and create an unforgettable sense of that mixture of pain and pleasure that feels so good while it hurts so bad. The one I can never forget is called Dead Babies and its tag line is “Dead babies, can’t take care of themselves!” It’s so outrageous and actually so incomprehensible that it has maintained its shock value all these fifty years later as Alice Cooper at 74 years of age probably cashes a royalty check on the song every month.
What would make me think of such a song on a sunny day in May? Well, it seems there is a shortage in the U.S. for some unknown set of supply chain reasons, of baby formula to feed infants. This is a market that is beyond a normal food product market, but is rather in the never-never land between food and medicine. In fact, the manufacture of baby formula is so regulated that there are only a handful of companies, many of them pharmaceutical companies that are household names, that make the stuff. During the Trump administration, a tariff was put in place on baby formula such that importation of the specialized stuff was prohibitively expensive and those channels dried up while the pharmas who made it here posting record profits. The theory was that this profitability would incent them to make capital investment to expand their U.S. production. This is the nativist economic playbook in action as it tries to stifle globalization in favor of domestic companies, who we rely on for growth and general population-wide prosperity. But, unfortunately, nothing trickled down as it was supposed to since those companies used the extra cash to buy back their shares to boost shareholder value.
Now some will say that’s OK in a free market system but is infant formula something, much like insulin, that should be subject to the predatory elements of the worst of free market mania that uses government regulation when it helps them and eschews it otherwise as wrongly restrictive? But aren’t those that profit the institutional investors like pension funds that serve the greater good of the general population? I assure you that most pension funds, if they understood the connection between the buy backs and the price gouging on the backs of young families of mixed means, would insist on corporate governance to solve the problem and not ignore it to their own profitability.
But not only have the Republicans caused this problem, they have also seized on it with the help of Fox News to weave in the issue that while the general public faces infant formula shortages, the government has stockpiled formula to use at illegal alien detention centers where children are being housed and in need of formula. The outrage that illegal alien babies should get formula when American babies cannot is blowing the tops of the Fox News anchors’ heads off. But of course, that is a good show for the Fox audience but the numbers and facts don’t really support the outrage. There are hundreds of babies in detention by the border service, but there are millions of babies in the U.S. suffering from the formula shortage. This literal drop in the bucket is not where the problem resides by any means, no matter how many right-wing topics they can tick the box for inclusion.
And then I got thinking about the biggest struggle of the day over abortion rights. The outrage from Fox News and the right over how many protests (peaceful though they may be) that are being had outside the homes of Supreme Court Justices is being hailed as the downfall of the institutions that protect us from anarchy. This pontification, joined in on actively by Justice Clarence Thomas naturally ignores the harm being done to the institution by Justices like Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Coney-Barrett, who effectively lied to Congress and the American people about the sanctity of Roe v. Wade when they went through their Congressional hearings. He also ignores the harm he is specifically doing by not recusing himself for conflict of interest over his wife’s involvement in the January 6th insurrection.
Then it dawned on me, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has made a point of saying that the Wisconsin trigger law is not banning abortion, but is just requiring Wisconsin women to travel south to Illinois to get an abortion if they wish. This is well understood and denounced by pro-choice advocates because it discriminates tremendously against women in the most vulnerable classes of society who can ill afford to take time from work and pay to travel to find proper abortion care and access. So, stop and think for a moment what this means. Republicans want to control women’s reproductive life and their very bodies to force them to have otherwise unwanted babies. Since this will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic segments of women, they argue that to not force them to give birth is denying them the right to populate the world with more of their race or ethnicity. But by the way, let’s not give them any infant formula so that those babies we insisted our pro-life stand demanded, should go without formula now and die.
I now get it. Alice Cooper was onto something. Dead babies can’t take care of themselves. And being outrageous is a great way to increase your audience. Republicans now only need to put on mascara and learn how to stick their tongues out on stage and they will be ready for outrageous prime time.