Godzilla And Carrots

Knowing I had seen it, a friend asked me if they should take their young ones to see Godzilla Minus One.  And that was a resounding NO.  The tone of the movie is far too much like the first two Godzilla movies - the aftermath of destruction in Japan and the horrors of nuclear weapons.  And a spoiler alert - unlike these first two (only separated by about a decade from the end of WWII), acknowledgment that there are no real winners.  The culture and policies of the Japanese government as well as the US race to be top of the food chain lead to the decisions made in the heat of the moment.  Heady stuff for teens thinking they are going to see a campy kid’s movie where a giant monster or two clomps around and gets into a rip roaring fight between movie enhanced ideas of good vs. evil.

When history is documented, the material gets skewed for the victors as being champions of a just cause.  Effective warfare including business as a form of warfare has always required some form of misinformation.  The goal has been to be known as the champion for the good kind of misinformation that helps you defeat the bad misinformation of the other side.  For time and space reasons the goal here is not to go deeply into the plot of the Oppenheimer movie.  I could choose a more middling ground of the misinformation for D Day - and maybe get argued against that those propaganda and secrets are just as bad as the Manhattan Project aftermath.  The goal is to introduce you to a seemingly harmless misconception that resulted from WWII secrecy.

Carrots help with night vision.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/

Research and development of war tech is an ongoing process for keeping ahead of the other guys.  And both sides are assuming the other guys are the bad guys in times of relative peace.  But when the bullets are flying and the shit has hit the fan things go into overdrive.  Suddenly, instead of a scapegoat to be thrown under the bus, the scientists become the best friend of those politicians who are insisting on “it’s us versus them”.

Radar is a familiar and even its accelerated development in WWII is familiar.  It has huge practical not for war uses.  It’s a good example of science building on science and leading to more advances.  It also can have a practical application for annoying flat earthers if you want to work that into your debunk, but let’s not get too far off track.  But with planes actively flying and dropping bombs on people who mostly wanted to get through another day without having a bomb dropped on them radar = good.  Whether that be early warning to hide in a bunker or abetting shooting down enemy planes at night, the misinformation division took advantage of working with what they had.  Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em.  The Germans already have folklore surrounding carrot chomping.

Theres no way we’ve been dumping a lot of money into our expensive top secret radar improvements, our pilots just eat a lot of carrots.  Nothing to see here, enemy spies.  Nudge nudge wink wink.

The claims of whether this actually worked to a degree enough to make it worthwhile are dubious, but to this day the idea that carrots help your vision persists.  The idea and science that the Vitamin A source within carrots is good.  But there’s not a way to throw away your corrective lenses by chomping down on huge quantities in f carrots.  The excess just goes to waste after your body gets enough of what it needs.

In the meantime Hollywood made some other fun sci fi movies about arctic radar and carrots (The Deadly Mantis,  The Thing from Another World).  And the super vegetable idea made it to an episode of Gillian’s Island.  (Season 3, episode 3 “Pass the Vegetables, Please”). 

And in the meantime the wellness grifting community got a shot in the arm for the false idea of vegetables and megadoses of vitamin supplements not just being helpful beyond their actual value, but a cure all for diseases and problems of all sorts.  Again we see the exponential pace of technological progress outpacing the social progress on getting a large subset of gullible people fed (sorry) a diet of seemingly harmless misinformation.  An education including science literacy is way more expensive than buying carrots.  And I’ll argue that wealthier people getting involved in Scientology’s megadoses of Niacin idea (The Purification Rundown) shows that it isn’t just the less affluent that can get hooked on snake oil bad ideas.

The Godzilla Minus One movie is naturally intended to be a method of generating income, and certainly multiple sequels are already being redone.  In the past, even in the sillier days of Godzilla movies the bad monsters could be an allegory for major real life issues and problems, the way they tackled pollution in Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster.  My life will be complete if these sequels include a giant carrot monster that the civilian population helps Godzilla destroy by use of radar.  Mostly because I’m sure that in addition to 5G the grifting crowd will concoct some fun stories about how the government has been poisoning us with radar waves, radar is turning people gay, and you can turn your microwave into a radar to detect the Vril landing craft.  And then I get to do a whole bunch about f gematria on that to twist it to say whatever I want.