So now the gorilla can change a Twenty?

The makers of "EnviroKidz Gorilla Munch" breakfast cereal continue to make money from the O'Hannigans because their product is gluten-free, which is important for some of us.

But their marketing department ought to be fired en masse.

I can forgive the 'z' on "Kidz" as an annoying attempt to be trendy in the face of stiff competition from behemoths like Kellogg's and General Mills. Why, though, does the Gorilla Munch box have a bullet point saying "1% of sales donated to wildlife"? What's a raccoon supposed to do with the cash-- buy a Starbucks' card?

It's only when you get to the fine print on the back of the box -- if you get there-- that the bullet makes a bit more sense. EnviroKidz donates to the Gorilla Fund in support of anti-poaching patrols, rather than to the gorillas themselves, which means part of the profit from Jane's breakfast cereal probably puts fuel in the ten-year-old Toyota Landcruiser used by a hard-working park ranger in Rwanda. As one of Rod Dreher's "crunchy cons," I'm down with that. Maybe the always-interesting-and-sometimes-illegal Dave Foreman is, too. At least EnviroKidz is donating greenbacks (hah!) rather than carbon offsets. My kidz think that's cool.

But inside the box it gets even worse, as I noticed this morning. Ad copy talks about the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. No problem there: I'd expect nothing less from a hippie cereal with a name like Gorilla Munch. It's trail mix wearing shoes, or Corn Flakes made by patchouli-scented yoga masters. But one panel tells the story of a baby gorilla named Isaro.

Over to you, guys and dolls of Envirokidz:

"Isaro is an incredibly bold year-old infant female that lives in a family chaired by a silverback called Titus."

Didja catch the reference to "chaired?" They could have said "led by" or "headed by," but instead they went for the non-sexist business connotation. Titus thinks he's the biggest, baddest gorilla in a pack of nine; EnviroKidz suggests that he's just warming a seat, because maybe next week a girl gorilla could "chair" the family. You never know. Those furry primates can't possibly be as patriarchal as too many humans seem to be-- or so the word choice here would imply, coming as it does from some graduate school list of words approved by first- or second-generation professors of "Womyn's Studies."

There are better ways to trumpet a corporate commitment to harmony with the environment. What EviroKidz promotes, however insidiously, is social engineering 101. First you take their words, and then their minds will follow-- straight to a web site that asks ungrammatical questions like, "Do you want to be an EnviroKidz?" and doubtless from there to a plea with parental units to please please please reserve the director's cut of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" as soon as Blockbuster or NetFlix makes it available. Because it won as Oscar, you know. At the first "Green" Oscars.

And yet Hillary Clinton has the nerve to complain about an alleged resurgence of a vast right-wing conspiracy.