Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [58]
But one night, at a party at a friend’s house, an acquaintance remarked that he and his family “try to get up to our cabin on the Croton Reservoir every chance we get.”
I asked, “How can you have a cabin on the shores of our drinking water?”
“Oh, it’s not right on the reservoir. It’s across the road.”
“You mean, there’s a highway that surrounds the water we drink? What about all the runoff from the road, all those oil spills and tire shavings and the like?”
“Oh, they sterilize everything once the water gets to New York City,” he replied.
“You can’t sterilize anything once it gets here!” I protested. “By the time it gets to New York it must already have every known germ-killing agent available to mankind already in full battle mode.”
He then went on to rhapsodize about how wonderful it is to boat around the reservoir.
“BOAT?” I cried. “You’re boating in my drinking water? ”
“Oh, sure—and fishing, too! The state lets us keep our boat right on the shore.”
That was when the cases of Evian began entering my apartment.
Of course, the downside of drinking bottled water (other than the outrageous cost) is that, like the recycling bins, it prevents me from giving a moment’s further thought to the state of our water in America. As long as I can sell enough books to afford my “French” spring water, why should I waste any time worrying about the PCBs General Electric has dumped in the Hudson River? After all, hundreds of years ago the Indian dumped their refuse into the Hudson, and the early white settlers used the river as a nonstop sewage drain. And look at the great metropolis they went on to create!
Manhattan is also a great place to get a steak. Until a few years ago, I don’t think there was day in my adult life when I didn’t eat beef—and often twice a day. Then, for no distinct reason, one day I just stopped eating it. I went a full four years without a morsel of cow passing my lips. I have to say those were the four healthiest years I’ve ever had. (Note: Guys like me define bealtby as “I didn’t die.”)
Maybe it was hearing Oprah Winfrey say on her show back in 1996 that learning about mad cow disease “just stopped me cold from eating another burger.” Of course, Oprah then had to contend with a threat that was equally dangerous: the Texas cattlemen, who sued her (and the former rancher and beef lobbyist who appeared on the show to speak about the dangers of mad cow disease) for $12 million. They claimed that Oprah and Howard Lyman violated a Texas statute that prohibits the false disparagement of perishable food products. (Please note that it was Oprah who said she was “stopped cold from eating another burger,” not me—because, again, nobody here wants to be sued.) Oprah won the lawsuit in 1998; then, just to mess with their heads in Texas, she declared, “I’m still off hamburgers.”
I, on the other hand, have unfortunately fallen off the chuck wagon, nibbling every now and then on poor Elsie. You’d think I would have learned my lesson back in the mid seventies when, instead of eating beef, I ate fire retardant.
Like millions of Michiganders, I spent a year ingesting PBB, the chemical used in kids’ pajamas—and didn’t even know it. The PBB came in the form of a product called Firemaster, manufactured by a company that also happened to make cattle feed. At one point they accidentally mixed up the bags they poured the stuff into and sent the fire retardant (labeled as “feed”) to a big centralized operation in Michigan that distributed the feed to farms all over the state. Soon the cows were eating PBB—and we were eating the cows and drinking their milk, fall of PBB.
The problem with PBB is that the body doesn’t excrete it or eliminate it in any way. It just stays in your stomach and digestive system. When this fiasco was uncovered—and we learned that the state of Michigan had tried to keep the news from the public—the residents of Michigan flipped out. Heads rolled, politicians were thrown out of