Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou

PREFACE:
WARNING: THIS BOOK COULD BE HARMFUL TO YOUR HEALTH

“A man’s own observation,

what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of

is the best physic to preserve health.”

—Francis Bacon

Not long ago, I read—and not without some alarm—that the federal government is taking action to require a warning label on—eggs. At first, I couldn’t quite believe it. I mean, the “incredible, edible egg” is the most fundamental of foods. Nothing could be more perfect; nothing could be simpler. You can boil it, fry it, scramble it, poach it, coddle it, bake it. It’s the most versatile of foods—most vegetarians will even eat one—and it’s mostly good for you. At least I thought so. But now, I learn, an egg is potentially “harmful to your health.”

Now, I’m aware that any number of foods we commonly spend way too much money for at the supermarket carry warning labels. Poultry and pork, fish as well as many beef cuts come with a standardized label advising the consumer to pay attention to “Safe Handling” rules. These include thoroughly washing both hands and utensils as well as cooking vessels prior to and after touching the very foodstuff that we’re planning to ingest, to be alert to correct cooking temperatures, and to make sure to properly refrigerate or freeze all leftovers. Similar or even direr cautions are at least implied in the standardized list of ingredients that the government demands be posted in tiny, almost illegible font on all food products we consume. (Curiously, no such warnings are required on fast-food. One should expect that a sign on the door of a chain food emporium might read, “Warning. The grossly overpriced and prefabricated victuals you’re about to consume contain almost no nutritional value but are packed with calories, fat, and other potentially harmful but tasty additives designed to make you swell up like a bullfrog in mating season.”)

Such cautionary labeling makes sense when you’re dealing with canned or processed meats such as the American hotdog or the ever-reliable-in-a-midnight-snack-pinch can of Vienna Sausages, which, my vegetarian daughter assures me, contain ingredients that would revolt a buzzard if the feathered diner could read them; but one does have to wonder if such warnings are necessary on a box of saltines (ingredients: flour, water, salt) or package of frozen green beans (ingredients: green beans, water), orange juice (ingredients: orange juice), a carton of milk (ingredients: milk), or common dairy products such as cheese and butter. Even a loaf of bread—that staff of life commodity—contains a full list of ingredients that, when combined with other warnings, utterly ruins the unparalleled indulgence of a bologna sandwich on white with mayo. Tuna fish, deviled ham, bacon, and even sardines have all been branded with cautionary revelations, much to the detriment of American Epicureanism.

Such notices might be useful to dieters, naturalists, and the odd hypochondriac. There is no doubt that they prevent cancer and complications during pregnancy. They probably prevent vast epidemics of gastroenteritis, indigestion, dyspepsia, as well as guilt-free satisfaction. But warnings on eggs? Are they necessary?

Some people’s cholesterol levels forbid the ingestion of henfruit, but even they must admit that it’s pretty hard to abuse an egg in some manner that would be dangerous. I have heard of folks who inadvertently got a piece of shell in their eyes or stuck in their throats, but I should think such cases are rare. A rotten egg announces itself sulfurously, so there’s small chance that anyone would eat a bad one. The government, however, apparently thinks that even a farm fresh egg represents a sufficiently significant danger to the general population to warrant a stern warning.

This leads me to the suspicion that the federal government may not have enough important stuff to do. God knows, they’re not overworked in the area of international affairs and domestic concerns such as promoting peace, relieving the trade deficit, or writing a tax code an ordinary MENSA member can understand. I’m coming around to the opinion that the only thing in our society that really needs a warning label is the government. It strikes me that almost everything government does is harmful to somebody somewhere, and usually, the harm comes from the proper, rather than the
im
proper use of it.

The business of affixing warning labels to almost everything we eat or use seems to be a sign of illogical extremes if not just plain old “make work.” Perhaps it’s time for somebody to say “cut it out.” Maybe we should admit that it shouldn’t take a college degree for a person to cook and eat an egg in comparative safety and comfort. A teenager who is otherwise too inept to pick up his room or take out the garbage can do it. Actually, as has been demonstrated in televised demonstrations, a monkey can do it. To my knowledge, no monkey, not even a battery of laboratory test monkeys, has been harmed by eating eggs.

Monkeys also eat fruits and nuts. So can people. Is it possible that an orange or a pecan might also be harmful to one’s health? My guess is that the government has already commissioned a study of this likelihood. It would not surprise me to find out that some research institute somewhere has been given millions of tax dollars to conduct experiments and issue a report. Research institutes have to have something to do, and they’re chock full of laboratory animals eager to be tested. Doubtless, in a few short years, every peanut we buy at a ball game will come with a tiny label: Ingredients: Nuts; and every banana we select for our morning’s healthful bowl of bran flakes (Ingredients are listed in about two or three micro-font column inches and include items with syllables such as “xtrose,” “ethylene,” “oroform,” “dio,” “mono,” and “euro” and words such as “processed,” “enhanced,” “reduced,” “hydrogenated,” “laminated,” “galvanized,” and “undercoated”) will contain a label: Ingredients: Banana.

###

The real question about warning labels, though, is whether or not they do what they’re intended to do, which is not only to inform but also to keep us from doing the wrong thing. The first such printed prohibitions I ever remember seeing were on mattresses: the famous “do not remove this tag under penalty of law” tag. That was a warning with some teeth in it. I have no idea why that tag is so important to what is today never called a “mattress” but has been renamed a “sleep system,” but I can assure you that every piece of bedding in my house still has its tag intact. So do a number of throw pillows and even the dog’s bed. I don’t have any idea what the penalty for removal might be, but I don’t want to risk arrest by the Sleep System Police, which is, I think, a sub-bureau of the FBI or Homeland Security. If I removed one, I might wind up in prison in Cuba, which officially doesn’t exist, according to the government.

The next warning labels that caught my attention were, naturally, on cigarettes. The “harmful to your health” signal that came out in the late 1960s seemed ridiculous to me, or at least redundant. From the time I was fourteen, my mother had been telling me that cigarettes would stunt my growth. Now, at nearly sixty, I stand just about 6’ tall and weigh none of your damned business; I don’t think they did. I do believe that smoking can cause a variety of dread diseases in laboratory animals, of course. Most of these are catalogued on every pack of smokes I buy. I do know, because it’s a widely publicized fact, that if when some research institute somewhere hooked up a mouse to a machine that forced it to breathe cigarette smoke constantly for twelve-hundred seventy-two straight months—with time off for a sip of coffee or maybe a cold beer—he developed cancer and heart disease and emphysema, and there were complications with his pregnancy. No one wants a dread disease, and certainly no one wants a complicated pregnancy. But I truly don’t think anyone was ever discouraged from smoking because of the warning label.

Other warning signs have been around for a long time. Perhaps the first one in history appears in Dante’s
Inferno
as the inscription over the gate to Hell. It reads: “All Hope Abandon Ye Who Enter Here.” Like most warning signs, it was put up by the government (something confirmed by the awkward syntax), and like most, it was largely ignored, not only by the average sinner bent on eternal damnation, but by Dante’s narrator, as well. It was meant to frighten any sinners who showed up and demanded entrance, although it seems to me that if they wound up there in the first place, it was probably too late for a warning label to discourage them from coming right on in.

More familiar to most Americans are warning signs on streets and highways; by and large, they are ignored. Posted speed limits are regarded as humorous suggestions for the most part; cautions about wet pavement, icy bridges, and steep grades are generally considered to be replacements for wittier reminders that used to greet motorists:

HARDLY A DRIVER

IS NOW ALIVE

WHO PASSED ON HILLS

AT NINTY-FIVE

BURMA SHAVE

That was a warning with some wisdom behind it. In spite of contemporary replacement warning signs, drivers often take curves at ninety-five, or at least at seventy, even when the sign clearly advises that twenty-five miles per hour is the maximum safe speed. The same thing’s true of exit ramps and parking lot speed limits. People tend to take school zone speed warnings more seriously, though; from time to time, they obey red lights and a few other cautions, especially in areas with a vigilant constabulary eager to increase the city’s revenues. That’s because, like mattress tag removal, a traffic violation is backed up by “penalty of law.” A hefty ticket can certainly be harmful to one’s pocketbook if not to one’s health.

This may be a path the government should investigate more thoroughly. Perhaps we should start fining people who ignore all warning signs. Eat an egg, get slapped with a fifty-dollar fine; smoke a cigarette, pay twenty bucks. Drink a glass of chardonnay while pregnant, add MSG to a plate of sesame chicken, fail to wear safety goggles and heavy work boots while using a power trimmer, use a 100-watt bulb in a 60-watt lamp, put gasoline in a glass container, or use a telephone in a thunderstorm, pony up a C-note for Uncle Sam. If our government and its bureaus are going to spend all this money to warn us about these things—particularly about things only a brainless cretin would try in the first place—we should be forced to abide by them or suffer the consequences. There should be a stiff penalty for flying in the face of sound laboratory-tested evidence. Just think of all the animals that have been sacrificed to prove that these dangers exist.

###

The government has been busy in its assembly of warnings, especially in the last few decades. Almost everything we do has some potential danger that we need to know about. One of the first was our use of saccharin. People were happily substituting this chemical sweetener in place of refined sugar because somebody somewhere decided that sugar was harmful to one’s health. (Not incidentally, our government also decided to boycott Cuban sugar, one of its more decisive moves that, like most government moves, was ineffective, except to raise the cost of sugar to American consumers, most of whom didn’t know—or care—where Cuba was in the first place and who, in the second place, were satisfied with saccharin.) Anyway, saccharin worked; it helped keep unwanted pounds off fat people and anxiety levels down among those who liked a bit of sweetness to their morning cup of Joe or bottled soft drink. Then some scientific institute somewhere spent a whole bunch of government money and discovered that if a laboratory rat ate sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of saccharin at one sitting, he would develop cancer. Or maybe he would have complications during pregnancy. Of course, sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of saccharin represented something like ten thousand times the average human’s consumption of the product in a seventy-year period; and anyone who eats sixty-two-and-a-half pounds of anything at one sitting probably deserves to get sick. But we had to be careful, so saccharin also started carrying a warning label.

That was more than fifty years ago. Now, almost everything comes with a warning label, even things that probably don’t need any cautionary admonishments at all. Take guns, for example. If you buy a handgun, say a .38 Special, you will find in the box a slip of paper that reads: “Discharge of this firearm can result in injury or even death.” Well, one would
hope
so. It is, after all, a pistol. It’s only practical function (other than to make the user feel as if his penis is five times its ordinary size) is to visit injury or death on someone toward whom it’s pointed. If it didn’t, then it would be a disappointment to the shooter; actually, if it didn’t, the result could be injury or even death to the shooter, particularly if the shooter was a law enforcement officer throwing down on, say, an alleged bank robber, or possibly a
sleep system tag
remover.
What kind of person would want a pistol that would fail to cause injury or even death? I’m the sort of person who doesn’t want to cause anyone any injury or death, and I’m content with the anatomy I was born with, so I don’t buy handguns; but if I did, I would hope they’d do what they’re supposed to do, whether they’re used properly or not.

Still, the march for warnings continues. Not long ago, I received a power drill for Father’s Day. Right on the front of the owner’s manual, in huge block letters, I was informed that “use of this product under water can result in possibly deadly shock or severe injury.” I am willing to accept the probability that someone somewhere wants to drill something under water, but one would presume that such a person would be familiar with tools for underwater use. How often, I wonder, does some gomer grab his standard power drill and head out for the nearest lake or river, eager to get in a little submerged carpentry before supper? Is this warning really necessary?

Apparently so. Today, warning labels about the use of products in water are found on all kinds of things: plasma screen television sets, CD and DVD players, electric hedge clippers, even computers. Alarm clocks, cordless phones, flashlights, exercise treadmills, ceiling fans, and blood-pressure monitoring machines all arrive in packaging carrying stern warnings against use under water. This suggests that millions of Americans buy these products and immediately start looking for a hot tub to dive into to try them out. Perhaps the only thing stopping them are the warning labels.