If you’ve been reading Coffee and Scotch regularly, like my mother, you’ll know I have a little peeve with cliched expressions in our vernacular. We tend to overuse these popular sayings to justify or guide our actions. This week I’ve been thinking about the adage, “cleanliness is next to Godliness” for some reason. Have we been quietly waging a warm on germs over the last decade with an arsenal of specialized weapons of mass destruction? If we’ve won a few battles are we closer to winning the war? I set about to create a special UN Commission to investigate America’s Super Secret War Against Dirt (ASSWAD).
While I’m pretty sure I am immortal, as well as omniscient and omnipresent, I count my age in earth years as thirty-three. When my life was in it’s relative youth, I have fond memories of playing outside in the dirt. I don’t say this in order to segway into yet another long winded diatribe about growing up without cell phones or computers, I simply want to establish historical precedent for dirty kids. We played all day and well into the evening and we got good and damn dirty doing it. In fact, I think the quality of the days of my youth were often measured in the layers of mud and grime I had caked onto my skin and clothes by the time the street lights came on and I had to be home. Kids today are different. If they’re allowed out of their bubble and beyond the gravitational orbit of their parents, they certainly are not allowed to go outside and get dirty. So by my reckoning, Operation ASSWAD began sometime in the 90’s.
Like many of today’s modern wars, ASSWAD is being quietly fought on some surprising fronts. The bathroom has become a primary battleground in the war on germs. This isn’t about whether or not you should wash your hands before you handle your equipment or after, that’s a debate for another day. This is about our increasingly maniacal obsession with brushing our teeth. It’s not that I don’t condone proper dental hygiene, it’s just that things have gotten well out of hand. When did the dentists finally break through our Maginot Line of common sense and wear us down with their propaganda campaign? You don’t need to arm yourself with a toothbrush the second you lay down your fork and knife people. Every time I see someone after lunch in the bathroom at work, packing a duffel bag worth of dental equipment and sand blasting bits of spinach out of their mouth, I want to do them a favor and kick their teeth out. My completely uneducated guess would be that our diets are ruining our teeth and that our Pattonesque stance on brushing is not the answer. Don’t get me started on mouthwash, I’m fairly certain government scientists created Listerine to use up our stores of Agent Orange after we withdrew from Vietnam. Incidentally, the same guys created Ethanol a few decades later.
I’ve uncovered another major component of Operation ASSWAD, which is far more insidious than the anti-dentite propaganda campaign. With the success of the Agent Orange program, aptly named Free OJ, the government started a similar operation to dispose of the growing quantities of nuclear waste which were becoming problematic to store. The latest program, code named Wipe Pluto, was designed to re-purpose spent plutonium into a new class of consumer product called hand sanitizer. However, when secret government documents were leaked to the media and Wipe Pluto’s name was discovered, a cover-up story was launched to reclassify the planet Pluto, successfully diverting public attention. Hand sanitizers kill germs through micro doses of radioactive plutonium gel. Notice how hand sanitizers look exactly like the stuff from The Manhattan Project movie? The alcohol smell is added as a sensory diversion. Do we really need personal bottles of hand sanitizer? Do we need it mounted outside the doors to our office and next to the sinks in our bathrooms? Are soap and water not good enough anymore or are we too lazy to use them regularly? Why do we continue to let media fear-mongering drive us like the consumer cattle we have become? Like it or not, we’re on a crusade to wipe germs, bacteria and dirt from the planet. It’s up to you to stop being an ass-wad.
While I’m pretty sure I am immortal, as well as omniscient and omnipresent, I count my age in earth years as thirty-three. When my life was in it’s relative youth, I have fond memories of playing outside in the dirt. I don’t say this in order to segway into yet another long winded diatribe about growing up without cell phones or computers, I simply want to establish historical precedent for dirty kids. We played all day and well into the evening and we got good and damn dirty doing it. In fact, I think the quality of the days of my youth were often measured in the layers of mud and grime I had caked onto my skin and clothes by the time the street lights came on and I had to be home. Kids today are different. If they’re allowed out of their bubble and beyond the gravitational orbit of their parents, they certainly are not allowed to go outside and get dirty. So by my reckoning, Operation ASSWAD began sometime in the 90’s.
Like many of today’s modern wars, ASSWAD is being quietly fought on some surprising fronts. The bathroom has become a primary battleground in the war on germs. This isn’t about whether or not you should wash your hands before you handle your equipment or after, that’s a debate for another day. This is about our increasingly maniacal obsession with brushing our teeth. It’s not that I don’t condone proper dental hygiene, it’s just that things have gotten well out of hand. When did the dentists finally break through our Maginot Line of common sense and wear us down with their propaganda campaign? You don’t need to arm yourself with a toothbrush the second you lay down your fork and knife people. Every time I see someone after lunch in the bathroom at work, packing a duffel bag worth of dental equipment and sand blasting bits of spinach out of their mouth, I want to do them a favor and kick their teeth out. My completely uneducated guess would be that our diets are ruining our teeth and that our Pattonesque stance on brushing is not the answer. Don’t get me started on mouthwash, I’m fairly certain government scientists created Listerine to use up our stores of Agent Orange after we withdrew from Vietnam. Incidentally, the same guys created Ethanol a few decades later.
I’ve uncovered another major component of Operation ASSWAD, which is far more insidious than the anti-dentite propaganda campaign. With the success of the Agent Orange program, aptly named Free OJ, the government started a similar operation to dispose of the growing quantities of nuclear waste which were becoming problematic to store. The latest program, code named Wipe Pluto, was designed to re-purpose spent plutonium into a new class of consumer product called hand sanitizer. However, when secret government documents were leaked to the media and Wipe Pluto’s name was discovered, a cover-up story was launched to reclassify the planet Pluto, successfully diverting public attention. Hand sanitizers kill germs through micro doses of radioactive plutonium gel. Notice how hand sanitizers look exactly like the stuff from The Manhattan Project movie? The alcohol smell is added as a sensory diversion. Do we really need personal bottles of hand sanitizer? Do we need it mounted outside the doors to our office and next to the sinks in our bathrooms? Are soap and water not good enough anymore or are we too lazy to use them regularly? Why do we continue to let media fear-mongering drive us like the consumer cattle we have become? Like it or not, we’re on a crusade to wipe germs, bacteria and dirt from the planet. It’s up to you to stop being an ass-wad.
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