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| Art by B. Smart (get it?) |
The above is a May 1955 press release by the Los Angeles-based anticommunist (and anti-social justice) organization Keep America Commitee, which begs the question, keep America what? Sickly? How do these supposed threats to a kept Amercian stack up 70 years later? Let's start with the middle one. I've never met a single person born after 1960--the vast majority of the 2025 United States population--who's been stricken with polio, so I'd say Jonah Salk's legacy is secure. As for Mental Hygiene being a subtle and diabolical plan to transform a free and intelligent people into a cringing horde of zombies, well, I'm afraid that one is true if the 119th Congress is any indication. I'm just wondering why it took so long.
That leaves fluoridated water, which is apparently a threat again, at least according to the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. The Secretary has instructed the Center of Disease Control to recommend that cities and counties stop adding fluoride to their water supplies. Since the CDC just lost its 20-person Division of Oral Health in a recent round of budget cuts, there's been little pushback from the agency. Plenty of dentists from outside the CDC think the de-fluoridization of water is a terrible idea, but the Secretary, who has neither a D.D.S or an M.D. after his name, has shown he cares not a whit what the medical establishment thinks, and has gone so far to threaten government scientists from publishing their findings in medical journals. So what's his beef against medicine? He thinks it's corrupt. As someone who believes that any institution or establishment that's become too powerful potentially can go corrupt, I have a certain sympathy for that point of view. However, as the Secretary works for the Executive Branch of the federal government, itself an increasingly significant source of power...
...I'd just as soon take my chances with The New England Journal of Medicine. Corrupt away!
