Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [59]
Well, the quarter-century fuse has run out, and I guess the good news is that my stomach has never caught on fire. But I’m still sitting here full of anxiety, waiting for the other hoof to drop. I can’t help thinking about Centralia, Pennsylvania—the town where residents continued about their daily business while underground fires raged on nonstop for years. Science does NOT have an answer for everything! Are millions of Michiganders fixing to develop fleece-lined cancers and kick the milk bucket? Or will we just lose our minds and find ourselves working for a candidate who can’t win but can do a lot of collateral damage?
I don’t have the answers, and neither does anyone else. If you know a native Michigander ( and I guarantee there’s one within shouting distance of you right now, thanks to the Reagan sponsored diaspora of our people in the 1980s), ask her about PBB and see the ashen look that crosses her face. It’s the dirty little secret we don’t like to discuss.
But there’s a much greater bovine threat afoot among us today~ one that knows no state or regional boundaries, one that deserves the Poeian moniker it wears like a bell around the neck.
Mad cow.
This is truly the scariest threat the human race has ever faced. Worse than AIDS, worse than the black plague, worse than not flossing.
Mad cow disease has no cure. It has no preventive vaccine. Everyone who gets it dies, without exception, a gruesomely painful death.
And the worst part is that this is a man-made disease—born of a moment of human madness, when we took innocent cows and turned them into cannibals. Here’s how it started:
Two researchers went to Papua New Guinea to study the effects of human cannibalism and how it made many Papuans go insane. They discovered that what these people were suffering from was a transmissible spongiform encephalopathic disease (or TSE). The native people called it kuru. What happens in TSE is that rogue proteins—prions—latch onto brain cells and twist into abnormal shapes. Instead of breaking down the way a good protein is supposed to do, these guys hang out and make a mess of your nervous tissue, leaving your brain full of holes like a wheel of well-aged Swiss.
Turns out that in Papua New Guinea, these prions; were being spread by cannibalism. No one seems to know where these prions originally come from, but when they get into your system they wreak havoc. Some suggest that a mere speck of prion-infected meat—only the size of a peppercorn—is enough to infect a cow. Once the little buggers are released from the beef you’ve ingested, they spread like an army of Pac Men, heading straight for your brain and devouring everything in sight.
And here’s the unbelievable part—you can’t kill them ... because they’re not alive!
The disease first entered the food chain in Britain through sheep, then spread to cows, when they were fed ground-up body parts of their fellow sheep and cows. Ultimately the diseased beef was sold to the British public. The disease may lie dormant for up to thirty years before it unleashes its holy hell; only after the deaths of ten young people in 1996 did the British government acknowledge that something was wrong with the meat supply—something they had suspected for ten years.
The British solution for eradicating the source of the disease is to destroy any cow suspected of kuru, or mad cow disease, by cremation. But when you burn them, the threat doesn’t disappear; you can’t kill them, as I said. The smoke and ash just carry them to another new location, setting them free to find their way once again to the British dinner table.
Americans are not immune from this deadly disease. Some experts estimate that some 200,000 U.S. citizens diagnosed with Alzheimer’s may, in fact, be carrying the alien protein and that their dementia is actually a form of mad cow.
Britain and many other countries have since banned the cannibalistic feeding of animals to their own