Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

[Monte Davis]

Surely a lot of it is driven by marketing and advertising of cleaning products and OTC drugs. From their purveyors’ point of view, the great thing about invisibly small microbes is that you can easily identify their dangers with ANY soil, ANY smell, ANY real or metaphorical impurity. So you can sell Modern Science without giving up any of the age-old repertoire of the Unclean. We are encouraged to imagine our gut, sinuses, vaginas etc. like those transparent pipes in the Liquid Plumber ads – isn’t it satisfying to see all that (ewwwww) yucky stuff washed away like a good high colonic?

 

Never mind that if they *weren’t* dim, twisty, a-drip with mucus and densely populated by symbiotic and commensal microbes, they wouldn’t work and we’d die.      

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2012 10:10 PM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

 

 <https://twitter.com/TheEconomist> Description: Image removed by sender. The EconomistThe Economist ‏@TheEconomist 

Paranoia about cleanliness has risen to the point that sterile modern living can weaken people's immune systems 

 

 

I haven't read this article (yet), might not, since I've heard the claims before but encountering some relatives anew

with a 'paranoia about cleanliness" leads me to ask if demonizing dirt in the environment is one place Puritan-based

demonizing can go semi-repressively

, dya think?, ---when one is not demonizing others' characters or beliefs in our world---except as

they are clean freaks....

 

Your riffing appreciated......

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