More Monocle and Top-Hat Types

Evidently, the pesticide lobby is not happy about Michelle Obama's organic garden. When they forwarded their letter around, the attached intro evidently noted:

While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.

All I can say is that PR is clearly not their area of expertise. At best, this letter will be viewed as vacuous press release and Michelle Obama will ignore it. At worse, they'll come off as (unsuccessfully) trying to corrupt the First Lady. I really doubt Mrs. Obama will say, "I see the light! The White House garden clearly needs more poisons!" It's really putting it out there to come out as against something as wholesome and uncontroversial as organic gardening.

(Also a slight side note about them addressing the letter to "Mrs. Barack Obama". I know that's traditional, it just seems the tasteless form of outdated.)

The rest of the letter is the usual propaganda about how "conventional agriculture" saves the day by increasing yields and freeing people to do more interesting things than farming. As for the former, if increasing yields was really the objective, agribusiness wouldn't be so gung-ho about monocultures. As for the latter, agricorps benefit from picking off small farms, and thus want to paint farming as unpleasant, dirty, and monotonous (still kind of odd to see them denigrate the people who work in the industry they're in), but promotion of this type of highly mechanized, impersonal, large-scale, monoculture-focused, drop-chemicals-from-a-distance agriculture is part of the reason why agriculture is more boring / unpleasant / dirty than it might otherwise be.

But that sort of serious talk detracts from the funniness of the situation.