Disney's Rent-Seeking: A Singularity of Suck

According to Alex Weprin at mediabistro.com, Disney has recently trademarked the phrase "Seal Team 6".  Seal Team 6 happens to be the name of the Navy Seal team that took down Osama bin Laden:

The trademark applications came on May 3rd, two days after the operation that killed Bin Laden… and two days after “Seal Team 6″  was included in thousands of news articles and TV programs focusing on the operation.

Disney’s trademark applications for “Seal Team 6″ cover clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things...

...Of course, for all we know Disney has been working on an animated feature about a team of anthropomorphic seals in search of adventure, but given the timing of the application that seems… unlikely.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this, but I know it needs interpreting.  The part of me that wants to be charitable doubts what this story implies - that Disney has bought the rights to the next FDNY hat in an effort to capitalize on and exploit suffering - as just too disgusting to possibly be real.  Another part of me is too shocked to be disgusted.  A third part of me sees this as affirming all the unsubstantiated horror stories I've heard about Disney from acquaintances who work in the film world.  A fourth part of me sees the burden as falling on the American people for creating a system that tolerates and even encourages this kind of (entirely predictable and inevitable) corporate behavior in the first place.  Finally, a last part of me perceives this as all of the major problems with modern America rolled into one event: the eponymous Singularity of Suck - an event that sucks so much that what kinds of things will suck in the future becomes qualitatively and fundamentally unpredictable.  

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Featured Find: Osama bin Laden's American Legacy

Tom Engelhardt discusses Osama bin Laden's real significance:

As is now obvious, bin Laden’s greatest wizardry was performed on us, not on the Arab world, where the movements he spawned from Yemen to North Africa have proven remarkably peripheral and unimportant.  He helped open us up to all the nightmares we could visit upon ourselves (and others) -- from torture and the creation of an offshore archipelago of injustice to the locking downof our own American world, where we were to cower in terror, while lashing out militarily.

In many ways, he broke us not on 9/11 but in the months and years after.  As a result, if we don’t have the sense to follow Senator Aiken’s advice, the wars we continue to fight with disastrous results will prove to be his monument, and our imperial graveyard (as Afghanistan has been for more than one empire in the past).

At a moment when the media and celebratory American crowds are suddenly bullish on U.S. military operations, we still have almost 100,000 American troops, 50,000 allied troops, startling numbers of armed mercenaries, and at least 400 military bases in Afghanistan almost 10 years on.  All of this as part of an endless war against one man and his organization which, according to the CIA director, is supposed to have only 50 to 100 operatives in that country.

9-11 Nine Years Later: America Finds Itself

photo from Reuters

"It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this.  If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists.  Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel.  At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader.  Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world." - Osama bin Laden

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