The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [132]
“Today’s healthism fanatics, nutrition cheerleaders, lifestyle correctors—they’re ruling people’s lives the way the Church used to. They want us all in a perennial state of Lent. Instead of conspicuous consumption, they want conspicuous self-denial. If it’s pleasurable, let’s do some studies and find something wrong with it. Let’s get everybody believing that if they eat the food we tell them to, they’ll be leading the ‘good life’, will live forever, be beautiful forever, paragons of morality. And anybody who smokes or drinks, anybody who eats a hamburger or a fried onion ring, will be excommunicated, cast off as undesirables, untouchables.”
Norval was speaking slowly, to give the impression this was unscripted, an old trick of his.
“OK, Norval, you’ve made your point, so now—”
“The world has become afraid. Worriers and hypochondriacs. Candy-asses and bores, the bland leading the bland. Parents are the worst. ‘Put your helmet on, Bobby, you’re opening a can of Coke.’ Where’d you say the liquor cabinet was?”
“I just finished saying that I don’t want you—”
“Keep everyone afraid and they’ll consume—it’s the new corporate motto. The drug companies in particular—they’re the real fear factories, the scaremongerers, along with the doctors of course, who can cram more patients into their schedules by prescribing the drug-of-the-month. But do we need all this shit? There are fifteen thousand new drugs a year. We don’t have enough diseases to go around. So what do the drug companies do? They hire psychiatrists to invent more. What was it Oliver Wendell Holmes said? You with me, Noel?”
“Said about what? He said a lot of things.”
“Well, what are we talking about? Drugs.”
Noel heaved a tired sigh. “That if the world’s entire pharmacopoeia were thrown into the sea, it would be better for mankind, but worse for the fish.”
“Exactly.”
“But he said that in the nineteenth century.”
“And do you know what old people say—really old people—when they’re asked about the secret of longevity?”
“Yes, because I’m the one who told you.”
“‘Stay away from doctors, never take any medicines.’ They all say the same thing.”
“But in my mom’s case—”
“The French Revolution,” Mrs. Burun interrupted, but let the words hang in the air.
An awkward patch of silence followed. Noel held his breath. Mrs. Burun took a long drag on her cigarette.
“What about the French Revolution, Stella?” said Norval.
“Norval, please leave her—”
“Changes in health philosophy,” Mrs. Burun replied, dropping her cigarette butt into her glass and watching it sizzle.
“Really? What kind of changes?”
A look of doubt began to creep into Stella’s face. Is this relevant? Or have we moved on? What was the last topic? Coercive health, or over-medication? “Nothing,” she said. “I think I … I think we’ve moved on … we’re talking about something different …”
“We were talking about health philosophy. What happened during the French Revolution?”
“Norval,” said Noel under his breath. “I suggest we—”
“Changes,” said Stella, “based on the idea that proper diet and lifestyle were the best ways to make people obedient, compliant … And in Germany, around the same time, the merchant and upper classes got more or less the same idea. That the best way to keep things running smoothly, to prevent unrest or change, was to make sure that workers were healthy, fit.”
“Like feeding the galley slaves to keep the boat moving,” said Norval.
“They even had terms like ‘medicine police’ and ‘health police’. And then of course the eugenics movement came along, suggesting that only the ‘superior’ variety of people should propagate.”
“Not a bad idea, actually …”
“So then poor health, which was previously seen as unavoidable, as bad luck, was seen to be the result of bad habits, or bad lifestyles. And from there it was a short leap to a new theory—that control of breeding and lifestyles was the legitimate business of governments.”
“The philosophy of the Third Reich,” said Norval.
“Exactly,” said Stella.
Norval reached over, clinked glasses with Stella. “Noel, we need bad habits, for Christ’s sake.