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Mother Jones
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“How progressive of him.”
That was one of the first sentences that Bill Compton (played by Stephen Moyer), a nearly two-century-old vampire, ever uttered to his one true love Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) in the HBO series True Blood. The two were briefly discussing her friend, Sam Merlotte (Sam Trammell), and his support for the Vampire Rights Amendment (VRA), which would endow vampires with the same Constitutional rights identical as other Americans:
This was the first conversation, political or otherwise, that Sookie and Bill ever had. This exchange is from the pilot episode, which aired in late 2008, and it was an early hint that the True Blood crew would regularly inject political notes into their blood-and-sex vamp saga, to the point that each season can arguably be read as its own political allegory. With the seventh and final season premiering on Sunday, here’s a look back at some of the show’s political greatest hits:
1. The whole thing is really about gay rights and civil rights:
In the True Blood universe, vampires are—along with being sexy and dangerous—an oppressed minority. The struggle of mainstream, generally peaceful vampires to gain acceptance in American society is routinely paralleled with the fight for gay rights and marriage equality. Here’s a shot from the opening credit sequence that shows a “God Hates Fangs” sign—drop the “N” and it’s an obvious reference to the Westboro Baptist Church‘s infamous placards:
Screenshot: HBO
In 2010, GLAAD declared True Blood the most gay-friendly series on TV: “Thanks to its large cast (and often sexually ambiguous vampires), HBO’s True Blood is the most inclusive program currently on television, featuring six regular and recurring LGBT characters,” according to organization’s 2010-2011 “Where We Are on TV” report.
2. Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann inspired the fifth season:
Season five features an insurgent group of fundamentalist vampires called the Sanguinistas, who are itching to instigate a civil war within the global bloodsucker community. According to True Blood creator Alan Ball, this violent, theocratic vampire movement was inspired by none other than failed 2012 Republican presidential candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.
Here’s Ball, talking to TheWrap about how he mapped out the season, and how the two politicians inspired his vision of vampire terrorism:
For me the jumping off point was watching the Republican primaries, watching Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and asking what would it be like to have a theocracy in America—which is way more terrifying than any fictional monster could ever be…What’s terrifying is how many people agree with Santorum.
“A lot of right-wingers would like to see a theocracy in America,” Ball said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
3. “The Obamas” are an anti-vamp death squad:
The fifth season also introduced the Obamas, a gun-fetishizing, anti-supernatural band of thugs. As they roam around killing vampires and other supernatural beings, they hide their faces behind Barack Obama masks:
Screenshot: HBO
4. The final season appears to reference the devastation of Hurricane Katrina:
The new season finds Sookie’s hometown of Bon Temps, Louisiana, at the center of a new war between humans and a band of infected, extra-ravenous vampires. Some the town’s residents take matters into their own hands, raiding the local police department’s cache of firearms. “We’re here for our guns that are a part of our Second Amendment right not to be fucked over by our government!” one of the spooked citizens says.
An investigation brings the Bon Temps cops to another community that has been slaughtered by the same group of roving vampires. They find this in the decimated town:
Screenshot: HBO
The federal government did not act to save these people, and failed to answer Bon Temps’ cries for help. This should remind you of something else that happened to Louisiana some years ago.
5. There’s a politically powerful church that drives the anti-vamp-rights agenda:
The Fellowship of the Sun is based outside of Dallas and aims to wage a holy war against all vampires. The church also cuts TV ads to counter pro-VRA forces in Congress. “Children see this lifestyle, and maybe they want to imitate it,” says a woman in the following political ad:
6. The Louisiana governor is pretty much a vampire-hating Hitler:
In the sixth season, Gov. Truman Burrell (Arliss Howard) oversees a major crackdown on the state’s vampire population. His policies—death camps, terrible medical experiments on vampires—take a cue from the Nazis. For the record, BuzzFeed’s Louis Peitzman raised a fair point about this last year: “Here’s the real problem with True Blood‘s civil rights allegory: In this case, the so-called bigots are right. Their discrimination of vampires is reasonable, because all of their fears about vampires are true.”
Anyway, here’s a clip of one of Burrell’s speeches, in which he announces the closure of vampire-owned businesses and encourages Louisianans to buy guns and ammo:
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Mother Jones
Vodafone is one of the largest telecom companies in the world, with a strong presence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Here’s what they told us today:
Vodafone said that it had received thousands of requests from 29 countries in the 12 months through March 31. But the report also said that governments in certain countries had direct access to its networks without having to use legal warrants.
In a “small number” of countries, Vodafone said in the report, the company “will not receive any form of demand for communications data access as the relevant agencies and authorities already have permanent access to customer communications via their own direct link.”
Vodafone wouldn’t say which countries have this kind of unrestricted access, but the Guardian takes a guess here.
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Mother Jones
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Jaeah Lee
We hear a lot about the perils of consuming food from China—and very little about the food we send to China. Yet we export five times more chow to China than we import from it (see chart above).
No doubt, China has undergone a full-on food-production miracle over the past generation, but there’s zero chance that its farms will emerge as a global exporting powerhouse, as its vaunted electronics factories have done. As this 2013 UN report notes, China’s total farm output has tripled since 1978. But it has to feed nearly a fifth of the globe’s people on just 8 percent of its arable land. Meanwhile, nearly 20 percent of China’s farmland has been polluted by runoff from industrial waste and/or excessive agrichemicals, its government recently acknowledged. On top of that, the country’s water resources are extremely limited.
Nevertheless, China is a major supplier of some high-profile items in our grocery stores and restaurants. Which ones?
Alex Park
Overall, though, China is a relatively minor source of food for the US—we import much more from both Mexico and Canada. The much bigger story is rocketing exports. China overtook Mexico as the country that sucks in the most US food in 2012. We export more than $25 billion worth of food per to China, as the chart at the top shows—an amount nearly equal to total food expenditures in the state of Ohio.
Jaeah Lee, Julia Lurie, Katie Rose Quandt
The main driver: China’s rapid switch to a US-style meat-rich diet. China taps US farms to feed its fast-growing meat habit in two ways. First, it directly imports it. Pork exports to China have surged over over the past decade. China is also a large importer of beef on the global market (mainly from Australia), but it has banned US product since 2003, over a mad-cow disease scare. With its beef demand soaring, though, it recently signaled it might lift the beef as early as July. As for chicken, China imports a huge amount from the US; and it has also invited US agribusiness giants Tyson and Cargill to plunk down chicken farms on domestic soil. These factory-scale facilities need a steady supply of feed to keep humming—and that’s where we get to the second way China looks to the US for its meat supply: by importing lots and lots of livestock feed, namely, corn, soybeans, and alfalfa (fed as hay to cows). Chinese consumers are also demonstrating a surging appetite for another protein-rich US product: nuts, almost all of which are grown in California. And, perhaps to help wash down all of that meat, there’s a growing thirst another California-centric luxury product, wine.
Jaeah Lee and Alex Park
These final charts, drawn from recent USDA projections, suggest that China’s love affair with meat will continue. Meanwhile, its appetite for nuts shows no sign of abating. For the US, these trends no doubt mean a windfall for the agribusiness companies that dominate meat, grain, and nut production. They also mean yet more pressure on our two most important food-growing regions: California’s Central Valley and the Midwest’s corn belt. As I’ve pointed out before, the Central Valley, source not only of nuts but also of alfalfa, is already rapidly drawing down fossil water resources to irrigate its drought-parched farms; and the corn belt is quietly undergoing a potentially devastating loss of topsoil, under the strain of maximum production and chaotic weather.
Jaeah Lee
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6 Charts That Show How We Became China’s Grocery Store and Wine Cellar
