Despicable Dispensers
THE fixtures and rituals of the new compulsory state religion of hypochondria include something pervasive and loathsome that I would like briefly to bring to your attention. I know, it’s a small thing. But it’s small and it’s fake and it’s ugly and it’s powerful.
It’s at the supermarket checkout. It is in front of elevators. It’s on restaurant tables next to the salt and pepper. In office buildings, it’s at every turn. Even now when our economies have been generously “opened up” by our lying masters, push dispensers, small bottles or wipes are everywhere. These are the equivalent of holy water placed in the vestibule of churches. One does not enter without manifesting one’s faith.
Unless one is an apostate. There are many reasons why I refuse — religious, scientific, political, aesthetic and economic reasons.
“Hand sanitizer” — the pretentious, pseudo-scientific name is all you really need to know about it and people less susceptible to mass marketing, people less lazy about words and their meaning, would consider this term crass marketing or such a bad joke they would refuse to use it. It conjures technocracy, hyper-sterility, impersonal metropolises with flying automobiles and astronaut uniforms. “Pass me the hand sanitizer, please,” one robot says to the other. People would say, “Pass me the soap.” It conjures group think, the death of individuality, a dystopian dearth of messiness. Can personality exist where there is no mess? Can love exist where personality is not? There is some mysterious relationship between our selves and bacteria. The hand assimilates invisible hordes. The human race would have been wiped out long ago if this interaction was typically lethal. A hand without regular contact with the universe of microorganisms is like a street without trees or a garden without bees or a face without a mouth and nose. It’s lifeless. It’s divorced from nature. And isn’t that the point? To put us at enmity with our own bodies and our Creator’s miraculous ingenuity? It’s funny how the very same people who promote this mythology of germ theory are always talking about preserving the wilderness. You are a wilderness. Every human body is a lush wilderness of teeming microorganisms. (more…)
