Even More Great American Inventions
Plastic grocery bags guaranteed to spill or break.
Mass telephoning of recorded sales messages (at suppertime).
A minority group endowed with large, unprecedented privileges by law, that continues to complain of oppression by the "privileged" majority.
Advertising and government spending on welfare defined as contributions to the Gross National Product.
Professors of humanities who have no learning, no intellectual curiosity, and no interest in their subjects.
"News reporters" who can't tell the difference between facts and feelings.
Christmas as a spending and consumption orgy.
Manufactured chewing gum (in multiple flavours).
White flight.
The cigarette, the most toxic form of tobacco use.
The pro-war bumper sticker.
Moral éclat by forcing other people into situations that one would never submit to oneself.
Presidential "debates" that are not really debates.
Libraries and bookstores filled with nonbooks.
Las Vegas.
The Easter Bunny.
Entries(RSS)
I once read an article in a popular magazine about the Duke' invention of cigarette tobacco. The basic point was that bright leaf curing changes tobacco chemically by making it somewhat less harsh but, more importantly, making nicotine absorbable in the lungs rather than in the acid conditions of the mouth. The result was a potent and addictive kick. Roughly, the difference between pipes and cigars, on the one hand, and cigarettes on the other, is the difference between gin and beer. The introduction of gin into England helped induce serious alcoholism in the lower classes. I smoked cigarettes seriously for 5 years and slacked off in the next five. I still enjoy an occasional unfiltered Lucky or Camel or a French cigarette, but, as tobacco farmers tell me, modern cigarettes are doped up with various flavoring chemicals and addictive substances that make them disgusting. Filters seem to do nothing, and the tests done on filter cigarettes to show that smokers get lower tar and nicotine neglect the obvious fact that people who smoke filter cigarettes puff harder to get the stuff.
I went on at this length about something I know too little about just to illustrate Clyde Wilson's point. An occasional cigarette--even 10 per day--can be a pleasure, but what Americans are now smoking is toxic waste. By the way, anyone who has smoked cigars with Prof. C. Wilson will know he is far from being a tobacco snob. Anyone who can smoke those Mexican ropes soaked in bufallo dung--expensive as they are--is anything but a snob. I have a box of Pleiades at the cabin, and they are dry and pungent--a bit like cedar--though yesterday, watching the lake, I smoked a Rome y Julietta maduro. The pleasure was a bit marred by memory of the first-rate cubanos I was given in Greece. It is a good thing I am poor, else I should destroy myself.
I have a strong suggestion to Mr. Peters: Take a theme--smoking, if you like--and write a reflective essay filled with anecdotes. The first attempts may be crude and unshaped, but you will learn by doing. Chronicles is one of the last places on earth where such stuff can be published. As John Shelton Reed said in the preface to one of his collections, about a dozen years ago, most of his familiar essays of those years were commissioned by us.
Here is a partial list of additives that are put in cigarettes:
Ammonia: Household cleaner
Angelica root extract: Known to cause cancer in animals
Arsenic: Used in rat poisons
Benzene: Used in making dyes, synthetic rubber
Butane: Gas; used in lighter fluid
Carbon monoxide: Poisonous gas
Cadmium: Used in batteries
Cyanide: Deadly poison
DDT: A banned insecticide
Ethyl Furoate: Causes liver damage in animals
Lead: Poisonous in high doses
Formaldehiyde: Used to preserve dead specimens
Methoprene: Insecticide
Megastigmatrienone: Chemical naturally found in grapefruit juice
Maltitol: Sweetener for diabetics
Napthalene: Ingredient in mothballs
Methyl isocyanate: Its accidental release killed 2000 people in Bhopal, India in 1984
Polonium: Cancer-causing radioactive element
They are added for different reasons; some to make it more addictive, others to regulate burn rates, or keep the tobacco from growing mold, etc. Many of them dangerous. All of them abhorrent. It makes one wonder if smoking pure tobacco, right off of the plant would be very bad at all...
#44 Mr. Willson,
Agreed that a Canadian invented basket ball.
As a boy we played 'hand ball' a game based loosely on the rules of soccer, with the restrictions on hand contact switched with foot contact.
This business of who invented what can get quite intriguing.
Just try to find out who invented the telephone or radio! Fact is numerous people from various countries built the 'pyramid' of ideas and techniques upon which the final commercial product is based.
H.F. Wolff
A good NC friend of mine from a tobacco-growing family only smokes French cigarettes because, as he claims, they not only do not put many additives in, but buy the best tobacco from the US. The most bizarre part of American smoking habits is that Americans smoke lite filter cigarettes out of fear but run the same if not greater risk of contracting cancer as they would if smoking something natural that tastes good. Imagine being afraid of cholesterol so you avoid prime rib and Porterhouse steak and eat at McDonald's. That is as good a metaphor for what is wrong with American life as I can come up with. One question I do keep asking myself is why Americans when presented with something real, natural, satisfying, beautiful--tobacco, wine or beer, painting, music, architecture, fishing--will always choose the equivalent of lite beer in a trailer decorated with Picassos, with 100 horse on the back of a bass boat that goes vroom vroom, equipped with a fishfinder and the most expensive toys that the international fishing industry can devise
#54 TJF
Wish I'd asked that question.
A minor cavil: I don't think Picasso really fits that list. For one thing, I suspect you won't see cubist painting in many trailers; more likely stuff with lots of ducks or airplanes. Further, like him or not, Picasso was half-charlatan, half genius, and since his time, painting has, on the whole, gotten far worse. Try Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon.
Does anybody here have an opinion on smoking cloves instead of tobacco?I tried them a few times but stopped because they were too expensive.Also,where can you buy French or European cigarettes?I'm familiar with the "Kim" brand.Haven't seen any here in the States.
I once worked with a Bulgarian fellow and he told me that he's been smoking since he was a child.In Bulgaria tobacco is smoked pure with no additives.
I should also mention that my grandfather who was a sulfur miner in Italy, smoked EVERYTHING,Americano or European,and lived to the ripe old age of 91.
TJF,
I couldn't agree more about the nature of modern, massed-produced, Wal-Mart sponsored "fishing." I got to chatting with the husband of one of my co-workers, at a company event a few years ago and we both mentioned that we liked the outdoors and fishing, especially. He invited me to “fish” with him in a giant man-made lake, in his 200hp bass boat. I agreed, because I just like getting outside after work. It had every gadget imaginable and went about 75mph. I can't say that I enjoyed the boat or that type of "fishing," which I consider very boring. However, I didn't complain because we had an enjoyable chat and as I said, I just like being outside.
A few weeks later I invited him to go fishing with me on a small stream near my house, where I canoe and camp overnight on an island in the stream. He declined because he said he doesn’t consider that fishing and he said it sounded like too much work. I have canoed, camped, fished and hunted my entire life, including spending multiple days canoeing down dozens of rivers all over the country and, in my mind, that beats a bass boat on a man-made lake any day.
#55 Grumpy...
I don't know the time of demarcation between Picasso's early and later work, but his early work was quite respectable. Unfortunately it wouldn't sell.
My father in the late '60's or so told me that Picasso's later work was a "put-up" job and even Picasso didn't like it, but it sold!
That put-up job sounded far fetched to me at that time but was later confirmed by a magazine or newspaper article.
The article allowed that Picasso was practically starving when some art dealer pointed out to him what did sell. Picasso is to have said to the effect that if that's what it takes, so be it.
And he painted the rubbish so beloved by art connoisseurs then and now.
H.F. Wolff
Even given the list of poisons put into today's cigarettes we are better off smoking them than drinking water containing flouride and chlorine, which are REAL toxic wastes. And with due respect to TJF, we are also better off with gin than with Pepsi! My uncle Put (as in golf--his name was Atwood Putnam) made beer that he considered the most complete food on earth, as long as one added three raw eggs (free-range, of course) to each sixteen ounce mug. That wasn't probably an American invention, but it's one I would like to claim.
I did not mean to suggest that trailer-dytes put Picasso on their walls-- they have too much taste--but that the Genius-Picasso marketed throughout the world was a commercial product that is toxic to the spirit. I remember once hearing Susan Stanberg arguing with Tom Wolfe, when The Painted Word came out. He had mocked--quite properly--Guernica, and Susan argued that all the twisted forms were intended to convey the horrors of war. Why, then, asked Wolfe, did Picasso generally portray such contorted humans? That Picasso had decent academic training says very little. Stravinsky may have been the greatest musical genius of the 20th Century, but most--not all certainly--of his compositions with which I am familiar degrade the listener. The 20th century, though not devoid of writers, painters, composers of greatness, was so twisted that it distorted most of its greatest artists and that includes Eliot and Pound. I think it is possible to draw a line, distinguishing serious and humane men who came close to the abyss and described it and those who hopped in, feet forward. I would put Prokovief and Bartok on this side, and, with some exceptions, Stravinsky and Picasso on the other. Today, however, things are far worse because painters, poets, and musicians lack the skill that would be worth perverting or, in Picasso's case, selling out. But, look on the bright side. The 20th century still had lots of wonderful artists, et al. , while the 21st is likely to produce--if current trends continue--nothing. The best I have seen in recent decades is nostalgia-mongering.
Ice Hockey promoted and played in the South and Southwest.
Windows in office buildings, schools, hotels, etc. that are designed not to open, with air being mechanically circulated and re-circulated.
Citizenship exams conducted by naturalized "Americans" with heavy Punjabi accents.
Stewardesses who are primarily there "for your safety."
John Willson must be right about the chlorinated and flourinated water. There is also a mentality among government 'health' 'authorities' which thinks that if water isn't filtered and chlorinated, then it must be dangerous to drink, and this has gotten so bad that wells used for decades have been condemned as unsafe just because they aren't filtered, and even Mountain Valley spring water, which comes out of the spring, in it's natural state, as the purest water in the world, so pure that NASA used it to store moon rocks in so that they would not be contaminated by earth elements, still must be filtered before it can be sold. How ridiculous! How stupid! How mindless!
So there it is: the mindset which thinks that anything natural must somehow be 'contaminated', 'dirty', 'unsafe'. (Perhaps somehow related to the attitude that farming and rural living are somehow 'backwards', 'uncultured', 'ignorant', etc.) This must be an American invention.
In the modernist mindset, the world should be like one big, expansive space capsule: entirely man made, completely sterile, isolated from nature, synthetic, removed from the soil by concrete and asphault, climatically isolated, with plenty of process foods, and the only time our feet touch actual, real ground is when we 'beam down' to the golf course and stand on turf, not natural grasses or weeds. This is in stark contrast to Mr Peters' experience of wading through freezing water in the woods. It's like a snooty sixth grade schoolgirl, who goes on a field trip and refuses to drink from a spring like the boys do, because the water is coming 'out of the dirt'. Ooooooooo!!!!!!!!
Strip Malls
Hedge Funds
Virtual Reality
The Celebrity as a political, moral, economic, and environmental expert
Permanently flooding an area in the name of flood control
The D.U.I.
Places just outside of our few remaining wild areas, like Pigeon Forge, and West Yellowstone, where one can buy cheap plastic souvenirs, ride carnival rides, and play miniature golf instead of actually exploring the park
Parking Meters
Speed Limits intentionally set too low
Speed Traps
In addition to number 61, GLA's observation on windows in modern office buildings, the buildings that these windows are in: skyscrapers. This is an example of architecture built not for humans, but for ants. Temples to Mammon, where corporate cogs do work that would never be done if money weren't changing hands.
Sorry for the many posts, but who can forget:
video games
science fiction
liberation theology
no-fault car insurance
prenuptial agreements
?
My wise daughter adds these great inventions.
Politicians with beauty stylists.
Political conventions as glamour and glitz performances.
What about:
Teflon and PAM for cooks who cannot season a proper pan; smoked salt and liquid smoke for people who do not smoke meat; gas grills and microwave ovens; barbecue sauce--ketchup and sugar, mostly--for people who do not barbecue; low-fat milk and ice cream; Angus beef--just in case you might enjoy eating meat--Turkey dogs and bacon; Spam (the canned meat); SPAM (email); miniature dog breeds; virtual conferencing; Velveeta and high-toned cheese clubs for people who would rather be eating Velveeta; mashed potato buds; powdered garlic; Valium etc.; lowfat diets that prevent the heart-attack that eases you out of this world so that you can spend 2 years in agony dying of cancer...
If I may, I'd like to add something to Dr Fleming's discussion of the quality of tobacco here and abroad. Anyone who has been outside the United States may have seen a cigarette briefly catch aflame after being lighted. This never happens with cigarettes manufactured in the US. The reason, from what I've been told, is a number of chemicals US suppliers are required to mix with their tobacco to regulate burning consistency.
For any cigarette smokers out there, I'd suggest hand-rolling tobacco as an inexpensive way to enjoy quality foreign tobacco while paying less than the cost of overtaxed packs of the major US brands. And can I suggest that dipping tobacco may be a more vile substance than cigarettes?
Science-fiction fandom as a lifestyle. (England gets credit though, for all the idiots putting down "Jedi knighthood" as their religion on census forms.)
Jeff Foxworthy.
The "worst" (most dangerous) American invention is the precision guided munition.
#27 Horace Grady, "An incredibly new and clever way for White Males to waste their precious time on this planet:Fantasy Football. How about Fantasy Fantasy Football"
That was hilarious. I admit fantasy football is trivial, but then again, so is any board/card game. Besides not much time is invested, you get your players and just move them around every week. That can only take about 2 minutes every week. Not much wasted time, unless you are a total junkie on that stuff.
Science-fiction fandom as a lifestyle. (England gets credit though, for all the idiots putting down “Jedi knighthood” as their religion on census forms.)
Jeff Foxworthy.
The only thing scarier than those Jedi wannabes are the Goth kids that actually get fang implants so they can be vampires. Me and some friends a couple summers ago checked out an industrial hard core dance club in Detroit in an abandoned bottling plant. Oh my, seeing all of those Goth freaks dressing up as Blade blew me away!!! Most looked like they were spaced out on crystal meth or something.
the pet rock
Space Food Sticks
convenience stores
The jury may still be out on whether or not we can add the yo-yo; the dyna-bee; the electric toothbrush, and the slinky. I don't know who invented them.
Reverse mortgages.
Pocket motorcycles.
RealDolls (manufactured, appropriately enough, by a company called Abyss Creations).
Scientology.
"Why do you hate freedom?"
This thing: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/awful-links/awful-link-2877.php
A cult leader as "leader of the free world." Obama will make us wistful for the Reagan cult of name everything that moves or doesn't move after him.