By Steve Early for Counter Punch - My favorite Helena Bonham Carter film is called Margaret’s Museum. In it, she plays Margaret MacNeil, the young widow of a Nova Scotia coal miner killed, on the job, like others in her family before him. Margaret’s grief leaves her mentally unhinged in a community steeped in fatalism and acceptance. After her release from an asylum, she turns her seaside cottage into a museum depicting the human toll of underground mining. The sign outside, drawing few tourists in the late 1940s, says simply: “The Cost of Coal.” As the movie opens, a man and woman drive up to Margaret’s home on Glace Bay and seek admittance. A moment later, the female vacationer comes running out the front door, screaming in horror. As we learn later in the film, the exhibits include fluid filled jars with the damaged lungs of Margaret’s grandfather, her late husband’s tongue, and her young brother’s penis, preserved because, as she explains, “it was the most important thing he had” before his untimely death on the job. I thought instantly of this movie, in late July, when I was the sole Sunday morning viewer of exhibits in a Winsted, CT. museum similarly suffused with righteous indignation over the human cost of hazardous products and dangerous occupations. The American Museum of Tort Law was created by Ralph Nader to remind visitors how workers, consumers, and our environment have all suffered when auto and asbestos manufacturers, Big Pharma, the tobacco industry, or fast food chains put corporate profit ahead of public health and safety.
