Against Sin
Mayer, Milton
Against Sin by MILTON MAYER "TT'ollow not a multitude to do evil," is what the Lord God Jehovah told my ancestor Jeremiah. I make bold to cut it down to, "Follow not a multitude." If the Silent...
...and God's justice sleeps a little longer yet...
...If you tell the American motorist to spend a hundred dollars to eliminate exhaust fumes from his car, and threaten him with slow death if he doesn't, he will take death every time...
...Who cared...
...Dow Chemical will be delighted to subsidize the pollution demonstrations until the whole thing blows over...
...Of course the young environmentalists will not go around the corner to deposit a pop bottle in a statutory depository any more than their elders will deposit a beer can or than President Nixon will give up his airplane and Go Greyhound...
...If the Silent Majority is going anywhere, it isn't going anywhere good...
...This season's Battle of the Century is against pollution, and Life magazine, which calls it "everybody's issue," has come out four-square, rock-ribbed, and copper-sheathed on the side of the angels...
...The only people who can afford the ultimate cost of ecological management are the taxpayers, but you can not get the money out of them unless you threaten them with instant death and promise them instant salvation (from Communism, for instance...
...A Nixon will— and only because it is advantageous...
...still less, however, with an octogenarian who plants an oak...
...With his quality-of-life pitch President Nixon has at last found a way to take the wilted flower children into camp...
...The reason that the country is becoming uninhabitable is that its inhabitants are in the market for bigger and better goodies, the end product of which is pollution...
...Now, then, is the time for all good men to take a good look at pollution and see if, after all, there isn't something lovable in it...
...or at least it hasn't yet...
...It is people who are polluted—not places...
...The ecologists...
...Since 1899 it has been illegal to use the navigable rivers of the United States for disposal...
...The environment kick is only the latest of a long line of gimmicks whose time has come...
...thar's gold in them thar hillbillies...
...It is true that the country is strangling, and the ecologists have been trying to tell us so for a century...
...the poor go on crying, "Peace," "Land," "Bread...
...And if Richard M. Nixon is going anywhere, it is because the Silent Majority is already there...
...They will not put out their cigarettes in the ash tray instead of on the floor...
...As for dear old Dad, the small-time polluter, whose name is Legion, he does not care if he lives or dies, or how he lives or how long as long as it's up...
...it is the least, and, if they want campaign money, the most, they can do...
...K. Gandhi once said that if civil disobedience ever got a foothold in the United States it would sweep the country overnight because that's the kind of country it is...
...Los Angeles has been strangling for twenty-five years, Pittsburgh for fifty, Gary for seventy-five...
...The only people who are not on the ecology jag are the ghetto poor...
...Richard M. Nixon and his barons and his beer-bellies and his jumping johnnies of the campus all cry, "Ecology...
...With his accustomed intrepidity, President Nixon has assumed the leadership in this season's Battle of the Century...
...This country is dying of war and greed and inhumanity faster than it is dying of pollution, and Standard Oil hasn't leaped into the ecological fray because it loves your great-grandchildren...
...They do not care how much they have to pay for burying atomic waste because they see atomic waste as an immediate threat to their unending consumption of unending goodies...
...Who really cares now...
...And the big-time polluters are the people who put "some of their money into President Nixon because they knew they could count on him to see to it that they kept the rest...
...The American people—as witness Prohibition—are the most kick-prone daffies that ever were...
...Who cared...
...The Congressmen are exercised because their party-pack constituents want them to be exercised...
...But a Nixon is a long-term investor in advantage (not to be confused with Marx's London businessman who will cut off his own right arm for a quick profit...
...It would cost more to dispose of waste than the market would bear, and if garbage collectors are going to demand a living wage it is cheaper to kick the garbage around until it gets lost...
...He has got them rioting for something nice and wholesome now instead of polluting the landscape with paving-stones thrown at policemen...
...They will not turn down the din that pollutes the public ear...
...The red-eyed reformers, the conservationist crazies, and the dwindling ranks of resistance to the science sellout...
...There has never been any mystery about strip-mining, deforestation, black smoke (or black lung), bad meat, toxic pesticides, detergents, the legal litter of garbage dumps and auto graveyards, the infusion of lead into gasoline, or the hideousness of offshore derricks given the Fat Cats by the Beautiful People of Camelot and the boodlers of Sacramento and Baton Rouge...
...What do you think they are—straights...
...Until people want to live socially they won't, and until you can get them to want to you can not do anything with them except cheerlead...
...Fastidiousness doesn't fascinate them...
...The supposition that people will do the right thing if it is advantageous is of limited validity...
...Who cared when Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring...
...What do you think they are—Communists...
...The young will not reduce the electric power industry's pollution by turning off the lights...
...How can it be all bad if President Nixon is against it...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
