MOUNTAIN VIEW: That Smells Real Nice _http://www.swvatoday.com/comments/mountain_view_that_smells_real_nice/sports/5023/_ (http://www.swvatoday.com/comments/mountain_view_that_smells_real_nice/sports/5023/) By LIZA FIELD Sometimes I wonder what part of the human brain came up with those dizzying, throat-stopping, rancid-odored drier-sheets and air-“fresheners.” —The insane part, I reckon; the part happy to be unhinged from reality. These chemical potions—usually dubbed names like “Country Fresh!” and “Morning Sunshine!” and “Mountain Breeze!”—have nothing to do with the countryside, mountains or fresh air, and are in fact implicated in everything from nausea to respiratory disorders to skin problems to cancer. Want to dry off with a “Nature’s Fresh-n-Soft” slathered “clean” towel? Alright! First, hold the towel to your face and inhale deeply—Mmmm!—like the happy folks in the commercials! If you feel slightly nauseated or need to cough, don’t worry; that’s a natural reaction to this “Natural-Soft” toxic soup of unnatural ingredients. Since “natural” is by no means the point here, ignore your body’s innate response and continue rubbing yourself down with this “fresh-dried” slatherment of benzyl acetate, limonene, ethanol, chloroform, pentane and other carcinogens and neurotoxins! And if you feel at all hesitant in coating yourself (and then overpowering anyone who comes near you that day) with the industrial-strength “fragrance ” that you can’t quite convince yourself smells divine, realize that these fragrances do serve a “real” purpose. Because the toxins used in “softening” fabric do heat up in the drier and smell like a genuine, gosh-awful, chemical-plant smokestack, strong perfumes are needed to mask that reality. And in order to convince consumers to tolerate these strong, pretend-nothing’s-wrong-here perfumes, a useful marketing ploy has proven handy: promote the negative characteristic as, in fact, desirable! Shouldn’t all laundry smell like—mmmm!—funeral-parlor preservative? Ah, forever-fresh! This disparity between the product’s reality and the image it promotes may seem comical (or depressing) spelled out this way. But that such a disparity regularly strikes us as unremarkable—in fact, quite the usual—indicates something of how normalized we’ve become to the blatantly-fake, and how easily we collude in the enterprise of calling one thing by a completely contrary label and collectively agreeing that Yes, like the emperor’s new clothes, it is wonderfully so…so…what-it-isn’t! Quite a few conditioners, deodorants and skin lotions (with names like “ safe-stuff,” “healing balm” and “pure-guard”) belong in the same category, reeking of putrid chestnut blossoms and adding a variety of chemical stiffeners or softeners, propylene glycols and aluminums and formaldehydes known to impair human health. Since the skin is a thin, widespread organ meant to expel toxins rather than be slathered in them, our common use of toxin-laden cosmetics, lotions, drier sheets, nail polishes and hair conditioners is one of the immunity-compromising practices implicated in rising cancer rates. Should the representation of a toxic chemical-bath as “Nature’s Down-Home Pure-itude!” be outlawed, then, since it encourages the consumer to inhale, wear and sleep in a cloud of carcinogens? Deregulation-enthusiasts like Rush Limbaugh would say “No.” This is America; everyone has the right to make a buck however he chooses, whether by deception or truth. And since money is of more worth than unmarketable values like truth, in the free-enterprise system that seems to comprise the whole of our reality, we can’t go around making laws that impair our pursuit of it. How could deception be regulated anyhow? Deception (and the eagerness to be deceived) has been around at least as long as the earliest stories of man. According to Genesis, Eve quickly reckoned the serpent was promoting something good-for-her. Esau seemed happy to trade his birthright for a mess of potage, and Moses easily duped the fed-up, tired-of-frogs Pharaoh into letting the Israelites leave town for a small escapade. Something in us apparently wants to be deceived. We want to believe we can really buy fresh countryside in an aerosol can, or bring back a happy, rural childhood by using drier sheets labeled “Country Mornings.” Certainly the false prophets that Jeremiah and other Hebrew figures railed against would have been out-of-business had the people not said “Preach to us soft things. Speak to us of ease!” We want to be told there’s no problem, and thus avoid the pain of change—an illusory goal in itself. More than any other species, humankind seems to have a profound gift for self-deception. While it may have evolved as a coping mechanism to deal with intolerable conditions, we seem often to make liberal use of it in order to avoid the pain of facing any disagreeable reality. But reality is innately healthful, since avoidance of reality would require life, itself, to become unreal. More on this really endless topic, next time. Reader Reaction: This commentary hit home with a bang. I live in a small town in the middle of Montana, and I hate stepping outside expecting the fresh air this area is known for, and instead getting a nose full of dryer sheet sludge. Not only is it not good for anyone to breathe, but most of the time it’s like a cup of coffee with 30 spoons of sugar — a hint of something maybe recognizable but totally overrun with some kind of chemical cloud. And it can beat up on anyone who suffers from asthma or RADS or a damaged metabolic system. Thanks, and keep writing. Posted by MontanaJohn from Montana on 04/18 at 07:09 PM (http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20090420/ad9332fe/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel
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