Category: Culture

The War On Dirt

dirtWe are literally cleaning ourselves to death.  Go to any household in the 1st World and you will find a cornucopia of chemical weapons worthy of Saddam Hussein in his heyday.  We’ve got antibacterial sprays, wipes, soaps, foams and a multitude of cleansers — all there to keep us safe from an evil array of nameless germs we’re convinced are waiting to ambush us.  And these aren’t even the dangerous ones like typhus, smallpox or cholera.  No — we’ve gone to all this trouble to try and fight off a runny nose.  (Good luck on that one, BTW)  But the question is does it do any good?  Nope!  In fact, ask any epidemiologist and she’ll tell you all we’re doing is helping Mother Nature cull the herd.  Plus, if we keep this stupidity up, we’re going to get ourselves in some serious trouble.  It isn’t a very complicated process, so here’s the Twitter version.

Antibacterial anything might be effective in the short term and, as the advertisement says, “kills 97% of all germs on contact.”  Yeah, that’s pretty cool!  But what about the other 3% who survived the attack?  Those tough little bastards are still hanging out, waiting for the all-clear signal to mutate and breed.  And guess what?  You just gave them a vaccination.  Suddenly, the next generation of wiggly little uglies aren’t all that worried about the active ingredient in Lysol™ (or anything else, for that matter.)  Now — clean your kitchen counter once a day for a year.  You’ve certainly killed off billions and billions of germs, no doubt — the weakest ones.  Unfortunately, what you have left is a strain of bacteria that’s had 365 cracks at the Immunity Challenge, and they’ve won every one of them.  Basically, you’ve bred a race of ass-kicking bacteria that’s sittin’ there, drinkin’ bleach as if it were red wine.  It simple genetics, folks.

I’m not saying we should go medieval on the world and revert to the dirt of past eras.  That’s just icky.  However, if we don’t lighten up on the chemical warfare, one of these days Mr. and Mrs. Bacteria are going to bring the kids over to play, and they’re not going to knock on the front door; they’re going to kick it in.

How Are You Feeling Today?

medicalIn the privacy of our own minds, we’re all hypochondriacs.  Every unusual bump, bruise, ache or pain is a self-diagnosed alarm of our impending doom.  “Death be not proud: I see you there!”  This isn’t weird; it’s perfectly natural.  We all do it because our bodies are such marvellously integrated organisms that when they’re not working perfectly, our brain goes on Red Alert and wants to know why.  We unexpectedly become aware of all the rhythms of our heart, lungs, liver etc. that normally chug along unnoticed while we’re doing other things — like watching TV or reading incredibly interesting blogs.  It’s much the same as being aware of your tongue.  Suddenly, there’s this huge thing in your mouth and you don’t know what to do with it; where to put it, how to keep it from roaming around restlessly or licking your lips.  (You just licked your lips, didn’t you?)

The reason we’re not normally aware of our tongue, or our fingertips or our clavicle (whatever that is) 24/7 is that it would drive us nuts. The brain knows this and shoves all our everyday bodily functions back into the subconscious until they’re needed.  That’s why people don’t remember pain.

Pain is that incredible device that tells us something’s wrong.  We feel it, but it’s primeval.  When we accidentally discover the bread knife is sharp, our brain doesn’t analyze the situation the way it would a beautiful sunset.  We just loudmouth an obscenity (or something less verbal) and drop the knife.  Like breathing, it’s an automatic response.  But, here’s the magic.  After a band-aid and a couple of days, we forget what slicing a finger open feels like — the actual feel of it.  The brain has pushed that nasty business back into our subconscious to protect us.  Otherwise, we’d spend our entire lives howling in remembered pain.

But here’s the other cool bit — and the reason we’re all closet hypochondriacs.  Even though the brain protects us from being consciously overwhelmed by pain, it also subconsciously remembers what pain can and will do to us. So, yeah, at 3 in the morning, chances are good that stomach ache is just the bean burrito we ate at midnight.  However, our friend the brain has to make sure it’s not kidney stones, a ruptured spleen or a burst appendix.  Therefore, it starts chirping away like a canary in a mineshaft.  The trick is we need to remember, it’s 3 in the morning: Google and WebMD are just going to make it worse.

We’ve Run Out Of Villains

zombieA couple of years ago, I thought one more season of The Walking Dead was finally going to finish all this zombie crap — for good.  Wrong!  In a couple of weeks, AMC is going to be back at it again with Season 6.  (Not only that, but word around the campfire is, the production team has plans for a Season 7, and an 8, 9 and 10.)  It’s like Route 66 with butcher knives.  Plus, now they’ve come up with some nonsense spinoff, “let-me-explain-the-apocalypse prequel: Fear The Walking Dead.  What’s the deal?  The original Night of the Living Dead lasted 96 minutes.  Rick and his minions have been killing zombies for 5 years!  How many different ways can you blow somebody’s head off?  And more importantly, why is any audience still interested?

I’ve figured it out.

As a society, we’re starved for villains, and zombies are the last ones available to us.

Check it out.

1) Hollywood has clichéd Evil Corporate America out of existence.  When a movie has a white guy in an expensive suit in it — he’s the bad guy.  D’uh!  Audiences have been there/done that so many times even Disney has quit trying to sell that lame old story line.

2) No film maker is ever going to risk making the ethnic guy the villain.  That’s like throwing gasoline on the Eagerly Offended fire.  Every self-appointed activist this side of Mars would be on his ass faster than you can say “Don’t you ever show your face at Sundance, again!”

3) Point #2 goes double for all other identifiable groups.  Try making a gay guy evil, or a single mom, or a paraplegic and the Social Media would go berserk.  They’d threaten to blow up your car, burn down your house, slap your face, kick your dog and pee in your porridge — you insensitive bastard.  The last time a guy in a wheelchair was the villain of a movie, it was Kenneth Branagh in Wild, Wild West and even Salma Hayek’s boobs couldn’t pull that dog out of the fire.

4) The entertainment industry has made bad guys look good.  Tony Soprano was a Mafia Boss.  He was a criminal.  He stole things.  He cheated.  He lied.  He killed people.  WE SAW HIM DO IT!  But who cares?  We were still cheering for the guy when family night got cut short by the blackout series finale.  Dexter?  Totally psycho!  Walter White in Breaking Bad was a meth dealer.  A METH DEALER!  There are no redeeming qualities to that profession.  Yet there are people in this world who think the moral of that story is we should pay teachers higher wages!

So who’s left?  British accents and pretty girls.  And even that doesn’t always work.  I cheered for Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl just because she knocked the snot out of Ben Affleck.

No, folks.  We’re stuck with zombies for the foreseeable future.  In a society where vampires are cozy, crime is a career choice and everybody’s entitled to a rainbow, zombies are the last bastion of evil.

And to demonstrate just how far our world has descended into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, never once — in the entire Walking Dead series — does anyone ever say the word “zombie.”  I think the producers are scared skinny that Z.A.C (the Zombie Awareness Coalition) is lurking in the shadows somewhere.