Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial" From Cambridge in the East to Berkeley in the West, and not excluding all the cow colleges in between, there are multitudinous colonies of apprehensive little men and women earnestly consuming the...
...Amusing...
...Michael Jacobson, an organizer of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a scientist in whom a yelp is struggling to be heard...
...for over a decade now intellectualoids have been bombastically testing every American value and every American institution...
...So, my fellow Americans, lead a gorgeous life...
...The aforementioned dangerous substances compose a list designated by Dr...
...As they see it the problem with the Terrible Ten is that those who eat from it die...
...If a modern Galileo were to take pity on them and to explain to them that most of their fears are moonshine just as most of their wonder is ridiculous, he would be put down as an agent of Nixonian conspiracy or worse...
...In fact they harbor so many fears that a pervasive and incorrigible craziness has overcome them, and they are now pressing their nostrums on all fronts...
...He was a life-long supporter of many intellectualoid causes...
...but I cannot see how anyone is coerced into gluttony, and I would defend unto death a man's right to be gluttonous...
...For there is, as mentioned earlier, a pervasive craziness about this business, and one sheds one's dignity when one rises to the dais to debate a loon...
...Jacobson'sliterature notifies us that a wide assortment of evils issues from them...
...These are Amerita's intellectualoids, at least they are mostly intellectualoids, and if their neurotic fears are merely transmogrifications of those uncertainties that every intelligent man has lived with and reflected upon since mankind's first stirrings in the Mesopotamian silt, that is little consolation to them...
...Humbug...
...Now just as the standard statistical life is free from "pointless' ' work, material discomforts, psychological longings, and unsatisfactory sex, so too is it free from bowel cancer, heart disease, and inconvenient strokes...
...Senator Edward M. Kennedy drinks the stuff, and he gives it a little mystery by lacing it with rum...
...Jacobson "The Terrible Ten,- ten loathsome foods that fill every fastidious intellectualoid with fear...
...That is why we cannot dismiss their nutritional fears with guffaws and knee slaps...
...Still others are exorbitantly priced and possibly serve as covers for the Central Intelligence Agency, e.g...
...No social, political, or philosophical matter has been too abstruse for their pretentious skepticism...
...Others are American indulgences the continued use of which threatens international disequilibrium and personal spiritual damnation, e.g...
...In fact the very idea of a standard statistical life is an insult to free men, as should be especially apparent in this age of ethnic pride and free expression...
...At least not until one has lived a life full of happiness, fulfillment, significance, and Scandinavian furniture, a life that is...well, a life that is the standards statistical life as extrapolated by intellectualoids in public interest think tanks...
...Appalling...
...If you doubt the intellectualoids' fury, consider the fervent testimony of an MIT microbiologist, the eminent Dr...
...Keep the intellectualoids down, wink at the stars, and sip a Coca Cola...
...This at least is what consumer-conscious intellectualoids like Dr...
...But the transcendent benefit is that Americans will walk the planet in the pink of health, experiencing all the good things that nature holds, until that far-off day when they blissfully succumb, are tidied up in compacters, and have smile buttons stamped on their bundles...
...A cursory review of American health trends eloquently testifies to the fact that American nutrition is about as exigent a problem as American affluence or American progress...
...For instance some are poisonous, erg...
...So they look to their local gazettes for headlines of calamity and decline...
...The most ludicrous themes known to Western man, themes uttered time and again by the leading scoundrels of history, and the intellectualoid has stuffed them all into one dizzy masterpiece...
...After reading Dr...
...I doubt the wisdom of guzzling large quantities of Coca Cola, but I see no reason to interfere with my fellow countrymen's rights to do so or to produce the stuff...
...With the possible exception of a modest serving of prime grade beef, I am fetched by none of them and cannot even imagine the uses for some...
...Mozzarella cheese will be a source of gallstones...
...He drank two of these beauties just before driving off a bridge not long ago, and he lived to tell about it...
...Today's intellectualoids have cultivated more fears than a medieval peasant...
...This renowned theologian lived a life full of meaning and celebrity...
...Agreed, but typical of the genre...
...nonetheless in January of this year he signed a suicide pact with his eightyyear-old wife and promptly essayed to do himself in...
...Next we shall hear alarming tales about boozing and brawling on Saturday nights...
...But today'scharlatans have an easy time of it, for the intellectualoid is even more gullible than a Tennessee dirt farmer, and he is more numerous...
...These fears are as closely related to their cerebral condition as flies are to a summer picnic...
...bacon and sugar...
...Underdeveloped countries will grow prosperous...
...If he and his associates have their way America will be as free of Wonder Bread as Teaneck, New Jersey, was free of hooch from January 16, 1920, to December 5, 1933...
...Obviously the standard statistical life has some unforeseen drawbacks...
...If recent history has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that what the oaf fears he outlaws, and with the oafs fearing everything from scientific experimentation to white bread, civilized man's liberties are in a tender condition...
...If ever they begin to lose this premonitory faith in mankind's imminent self-inflicted finale, they seek renewal in the anxious pages of the Progressive, the Nation, and the New Republic...
...Actually the quality and merits of thesefoods are immaterial...
...Eat and drink whatever pleases you...
...prime grade beef...
...And finally, off toward the wings, one hears the groan of a forlorn bass carrying man's ageless theme of immortality...
...So let us consider that one evil characterizing every item on the list...
...Even now many of these intellectualoids are shuddering in deadly dread of things so commonplace as Wonder Bread, bacon, sugar, prime grade beef Coca Cola, table grapes, Gerber baby food desserts, and three mystery substances, denominated by them as Frute Brute, Breakfast Squares, and Pringles...
...For instance, Bryan sold his snake oil with tales of Eastern Bankers and spirits from the nether regions...
...Jacobson would have us believe, and it is instructive to consider their case...
...There is then throughout all of these rhapsodies to good nutrition, a bassoon sounding the old lilt for Utopia, for life without social discomfort...
...As the consumerist intellectualoid sees it, death, just like child abuse, relative deprivation, and sexual inadequacy, does not have to happen...
...Table grapes are to be treated circumspectly...
...for it is the idiotic condition of the intellectualoid to remain forever gripped by that vast sense of limitless wonder that always emboldens the semi-educated, making him such an enormous pain to his betters, who put puerile awe behind them sometime during early adolescence...
...If the consumerist intellectualoids have their way, life in the great republic will be less free and vastly more expensive...
...Free men should be allowed to guzzle and to consume what they please, and if they die at an early age what of it...
...Now in days of yore the charlatans had to conjure up delusions remote, exotic, and ominous to set an oaf to quavering...
...Henry P. Van Dusen, seventy-seven, past pope of Union Theological Seminary...
...Excessive ingestion of any is doubtless imprudent...
...To address each complaint would be heavy labor and ridiculous labor at that...
...They are terrorized by breakfast...
...In the hands of a skittish mob it is a threat to freedom...
...Wonder Bread and Coca Cola...
...Jacobson and other consumerist intellectualoids who share this obsession with foods, I think I have finally apprehended the complaint fundamental to all the foods listed amongst the ten...
...They rush to their television sets for the latest soap opera performances of the "evening news" and for fresh confirmation that Darwin was in error—it is not the fittest who have survived but the most inferior, and the most inferior are now hastening us along on a path to catastrophe...
...If the American citizenry abstains from the Terrible Ten it will move a giant step toward realizing the intellectualoids' dream of the standard statistical life...
...What is it that commends Frute Brute to the Terrible Ten and not say Acapulco gold, tiger milk, or Vitamin C? After intense study of the works of Dr...
...And bagels will cause lung cancer...
...From Cambridge in the East to Berkeley in the West, and not excluding all the cow colleges in between, there are multitudinous colonies of apprehensive little men and women earnestly consuming the daily news, scowling, and wringing their hands over the worsening condition of the planet Earth: Though it makes some of them cringe and others become physically ill, they are all in a fever to know every fresh infamy committed by their fellow Homo sapiens—especially their fellow Amerikan Homo sapiens...
...The idea of a standard statistical life is an impudent and pernicious idea...
...They turn to National Public Radio, which they consider an educational experience, and some—those wishing to plumb the heart of our darkness—brave the New York Review of Books...
...What is a problem is the plague of fancied fears and crazy ideas that is being spread by our semieducated intellectualoids, driven by their fears and their charlatans...
...Wonder Bread shall never touch his lips, nor shall Frute Brute besmirch him, for he is an intellectualoid with a mission...
...All in all one would have to admit that the Terrible Ten encompasses a veritable profusion of evil...
...And today, after this great pother of reassessment, the result of it is that intellectualoids all over the country are quaking in their sandals over the metaphysical possibilities of Coca Cola...
...in doing so one discovers not only the depth of our intellectualoids' fears but also the craziness that has overcome them and placed them beyond the pale...
...The horns carry a fortissimo for the most consummate egalitarianism—we shall not only live the same lives but we shall die the same deaths and at the same time...
...Oh one can ingest Wonder Bread with impunity for a few decades .or so, but then the wraith cometh, and the only ones who have profited from the exchange are the tax collectors and the tycoons of Colonial Bakers, Inc...
...The congenital oaf needs his fears...
...jacobson's learned treatise on them, even I was a hit wobbly, for it seems the gustatory arts, as practiced nowadays, are laced with exploitation, voodoo, and homicide...
...The potato will assume its former dignity and the exploitive employees of General Foods will be out of work...
...Certainly the above list embraces a wide variety of foods, and Dr...
...Migrant workers will be educated...
...and, in every era, America has abounded with charlatans glad to minister to these needs...
...Long life is as overrated as guilt-free sex, and I offer up as final evidence no less an eminence than Dr...
...This infantile sense of wonder is what induces intellectualoids to ponder matters that are hopelessly beyond their meager intelligence and that leave them unhorsed and trembling from the experience...
...Of course other benefits will accrue...
...11...
...Pringles represents "the ultimate insult to the potato," a food known to the cognoscenti as "a terrific vegetable...
Vol. 8 • May 1975 • No. 8
