Sean Hoare

KAREN SILKWOOD

Karen Silkwood was a woman who worked at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. As a member of the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union’s bargaining committee, she was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. Apparently there were innumerable violations at the plant, most notably those of exposing workers to contamination. As a consequence, Silkwood testified before the Atomic Energy Commission. Later that year, she was found to have plutonium contamination 400 times the legal limit. Following decontamination she was deemed to have similar levels of poisoning the next day, despite having been assigned only paperwork at the plant. On a third day her levels of radiation were even higher, to the point she expelled contaminated air from her lungs as she breathed. A decontamination team was sent to her home, which was determined to be heavily exposed to radiation.

Silkwood by then had assembled a wealth of paperwork on the conditions at Kerr-McGee, including her own plutonium poisoning, which was found to have originated from a section of the plant she had not been able to access for at least four months. A meeting was set with a reporter from The New York Times and a national official from her union. Yet that night, as she drove en route from a local union meeting, she had a fatal car accident. Naturally, sleeping pills were found on the scene and the police deemed the cause due to a weary driver. Certainly no official report has ever been altered and no surreptitious injection ever made to a person’s body.

Authorities discounted skid marks on the road, damage on the rear of Silkwood’s auto, and microscopic paint chips belonging to another vehicle. All the documentation she was carrying concerning Kerr-McGee’s supposedly dangerous and criminal operations mysteriously disappeared. Still, only the paranoid regard this case as other than an accident. In no way related to the abuses she helped expose, grounds at the plant were still being decontaminated 25 years on.

RUDOLF HESS

Rudolf Hess was the longest-held prisoner of World War II. He was interned at Landau Prison until 1987 when, like all inconvenient figures, he hanged himself with electrical cord. Nothing should be made of the fact that the 93-year-old Hess was physically unable to raise his hands above his head. No mention should be made of the overwhelming evidence that in 1941 he had embarked from Germany on his way to Scotland to meet with members of the highest levels of British establishment after the fall of France in an attempt to end the war before it reached catastrophic levels of devastation. (The earliest period of that conflict was called the “Phoney War.”)

Moreover, one is requested to ignore the verified reports that not long before the incident, even Winston Churchill’s cabinet came quite close (save Winston) in voting to end hostilities and sue for peace before widespread destruction ensued. As to Hess, upon landing short of his destination he requested to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton. Unfortunately for the course of Western Civilization, this was denied and his cache of documents was removed from him. For the next several decades he was held (in isolation) far longer than those who actually committed wartime atrocities. As a possible release neared, he killed himself with no witnesses, though in 2008 Hess’s medical caretaker publicly stated the British SIS had aided Hess in exiting the mortal plane. Though immediately fired for this outrageous act of honesty, that man has thankfully not otherwise suffered.

All of the above people died by accident. Although they knew things that powerful people preferred they did not know, none of them was inconvenient to the powers that be. None of them had millionaires and politicians as enemies.

This is clearly the best of all possible worlds. Neither business nor government has any but the noblest intentions. Decent people are always rewarded justly and richly, and no one ever gets killed for doing the right thing.

Thus, we know that the one man with a semblance of conscience in the Murdoch hacking case had a simple narcotics overdose. Any contrary notion is idiotic, conspiratorial, and laughable.

In novels and films the hero is lauded for his efforts at illuminating this world’s evils. In reality the hero is usually not identified at all, except perhaps by his remains.

And now if the author will be excused, one must need return to bright coloring books, composition of cheerful songs concerning equality, and the reading of fairy tales and fables.