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Jewish World Review Dec. 23, 2000 / 25 Kislev 5761
David Frum
This is not the first study to debunk fears that holding a little phone near your head will inflict a fatal disease upon you. Quite likely it won't be the last, either. Mere scientific evidence seems powerless to quell our anxieties that everyday appliances are pulsing with hidden dangers. Cell phones are only the latest fixation of these anxieties. Before them, it was high-tension electrical wires; before that, hairdryers; before that, color televisions. Food scares flare up regularly: cranberries, cyclamates, dyes, nitrates, Alar. The air and water around us are supposed to be swimming in toxins: PCBs, lead, arsenic. And yet despite all these deadly threats, the lifespans of Americans continue to lengthen, infant mortality continues to fall, and health and wellbeing continue to spread. So why the hysteria? The hysteria exists in part because there exists an industry that earns its livelihood fomenting it. Television programs like "60 Minutes" and "Dateline NBC" long ago figured out that nothing boosts ratings like a good medical scare story. Plaintiff's lawyers who earned billions from tobacco and asbestos litigation hunger for the next big suit. Feeding them all is an informal nexus of anticorporate activists and professional worrywarts convinced that American business yearns to murder its customers. But even this vast fear-mongering industry could not achieve success after success if Americans were not ready to listen and believe. So there's the big question: Why do we want to be frightened? Why are we so quick to believe the worst? Ninety-five years ago, Upton Sinclair jolted the country with his account of exploitation and filth in a meatpacking plant, in the novel "The Jungle." The book heightened the pressures that led to the first federal pure-food law in 1907 and the creation of the ancestor of the Food & Drug Administration. Back then, Americans worried about food's natural tendency to rot and welcomed science's efforts to preserve food and kill germs. People may be baffled by modern packaging, but it started as a replacement for the old cracker barrel in which thousands of biscuits lay mixed together exposed to moisture and to rot. Who remembers all that now? The first modern food scare hit the United States in 1959, when just before Thanksgiving the nation's cranberry crop was alleged to have been poisoned by farm chemicals. The image of the additives, preservatives and pesticides that eradicated Upton Sinclair's germs was abruptly transformed from the healthful agents of heroic science to the sinister chemicals of greedy agribusiness. Modern-day Americans remain clutched in the grip of the old Romantic fantasy: that nature is benign and that, as the old poem has it, "only man is vile." But a fantasy it is. More people die from botchulism than because of preservatives, yet we fear manmade chemicals much more than natural bacteria. Broccoli swarms with natural toxins a thousand times more powerful than any pesticide, but we chomp into the stuff with gusto while paying extra for organic produce. If that cup of yogurt pushes you up over your proper weight, it is a much more potent source of cancer and other illness than a thousand hours of cellular conversation. Those women mountaineers in shampoo ads are absorbing more radiation from the altitude than they would if they lived for a year beside a nuclear power plant.
As for the cell phone: Yes, it is dangerous. In the car, it causes accidents. In restaurants,
it may provoke your neighbor to fling a glass of wine into your lap. Isn't that enough to worry
12/15/00: Dems making nice-nice? Fahgetaboutit
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