Five Amorphous Question Marks

Some shallow impressions of the new America of 2010 before my declarative and non-declarative memories and American sense of etiquette are fully restored:

(1.) My mind meld with the Great Economic Spirit upon entering the country suggests things are back on track.  I now look forward to - instead of dreading - the opportunities for putting bread on the table when I come back here more permanently next summer. 

(2.) For all the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day, this time was actually the easiest I've had it in the last five years, and I've been badmouthing the government and the TSA all over the Internets.  Even though our ESTA information was lost, we were not presumed to be terrorists, my children were not groped, and no one got his or her junk touched.  I attribute this entirely to the hooplah and big stink about security theater and don't touch my junk and opt out day.    

(3.) The autism bubble is about to burst.  Joe Kennedy famously exited the stock market just before black friday after his shoe-shine boy gave him a "hot stock tip".  Well, I just saw an advertisement for an autism screening service on a highway billboard in Dorchester, Massachusetts with an 800 number affixed.  It's time we realize that some - definitely not all - of autism can be explained as round children raised on free range information not fitting into the square holes of the Victorian Era factory classroom.  It's time we force liquidation on Autism Inc. and start paying more attention to knowledgeable people like Temple Grandin. 

(4.) Watching Sesame Street makes me proud to be an American.  I don't know why, but, minus a few obnoxious Elmo panderings to fad "musicians" like Katy Perry, Sesame Street seems to embody all the best parts of my culture.  I mentioned this to my wife, who told me that Sesame Street used to be on NHK's morning kids lineup, but it was replaced by the dreaded Eigo de Asobou with walking stereotypes Eric and Jenny just a few years ago.

Of course it was replaced, I thought.  I imagined some black suit, black tie wearing NHK bigwig ojisan with some family tree connection sitting in a plush, black leather chair in a black corner office with floor to ceiling windows at one of the top floors of some black office building in black Tokyo who can speak no English and spends all his time playing golf and visiting hostess bars making the decision to cancel Sesame Street to throw a bone to a few of his drinking buddies.  For some reason in my fantasy he spoke like Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: "Shredder, Japanese people are uniquely unique and especially special.  Japanese people are not like foreigners.  Japanese people must have their own unique and special way of learning English that is different from the way foreigners learn English, because Japanese people are so special.  Blah blah blah Japanese people blah blah blah foreigners.  There must be Japanese way for Japanese people!"

Hearing that Sesame Street was cancelled in favor of Eigo de Asobou from my wife blew my mind, just when I thought English Education in Japan couldn't get any dumber.  I am seriously entertaining the possibility that the puppet masters want the people to fail at English.  The Japanese education system is a classic case of designed stupidity such as my own Catholic Church must envy.

(5.) Bad nutrition in the U.S. may have peaked.  I don't mean that in a positive, hopeful light so much as I mean I can't imagine mainstream concepts of what us good for us getting any more bizarre.  I went to buy infant formula tonight and there were about fifty different varieties from each of three companies with a hand in the infant formula market cookie jar.   Each variety differentiated itself from its "rivals" by, for example, "Containing Twenty-Eight Essential Vitamins and Minerals!!!", "Now, With Six Varieties of Omega-3 Fatty Acids!!!", or "130% Daily Allowance of Vitamin C Per Serving!!!"  Each variety was at least four times more expensive than the formula we buy in Japan despite all the "competition" we have here in America.  I wanted to buy none of them, but sometimes baby gotta drink formula, guy.  I looked for something with ingredients that weren't created in a lab sometime in the last thirty years, but found nothing that wouldn't catalyze a deterministic chemical reaction someday resulting in type-II diabetes.  Luckily we have only twenty days of American catalogue-nutrients before we can start eating Earth-food again. 

Even at my house, even when my mom is getting her black bean, arugala, sour cream, colby cheese, cumin dip for baked whole wheat chips ready for her red wine and dark chocolate party with her foodie bobo friends, I found bags of cheese curls with added calcium and simply massive doses of Vitamin C in a wide variety of products after rummaging through the cabinets for only 10 seconds or so.  As for Vitamin C as a supplement in particular, the famous Nobel Prize winning chemist Linus Pauling was the first to popularize Vitamin C as a cure-all which prevented infection and boosted the immune system.  (He also thought DNA was a triple-helix facing outward.  Guess the guy had never heard of William of Ockham.)  Scientists and other learned scholars now know this is quackery, but the public perception of Vitamin C as a miracle substance continues.  Food processing pop-chemistry giants rejoice.

My advice to America as far as nutrition goes is to immediately start doing the exact opposite of whatever it's doing: instead of eating something composed entirely of heavily-processed empty calories with added products of chemical reactions, such as Doritos with "Fourteen Kinds of Essential Magnesium and Zinc!" and then driving your heart to the threshold of explosion on a treadmill for nine minutes everyday, eat something composed entirely of food (with added flavoring if you really need it), like a fresh, warm slice of oven-baked bread with cool butter; then go for a walk by the lake. 

It's like all food in this country has been carefully dissected and then reassembled for us in ways that maximize profit for the most efficient synthesizers of individual nutrients and nutrient components.  Economies of scale, structural self-awareness, corporate safety nets, and machine technology will continue to make it easier and easier for massive corporations to extract albumen than for farmers to produce eggs. 

At some point we must choose between remaining a nation of Hutts and our own health.  For the latter, eat as your ancestors did and give thanks to the Great Spirit for allowing you the same privileges as those doubtlessly superior people.  Humans have a bad track record when it comes to challenging evolution.  Nutrition is not a role-playing game.  There aren't "Vitamin C hit points" and "calcium magic points".  No one is dying of scurvy or developing a nasty case of the rickets.  No one is bow-legged or pigeon-toed.  Under-nutrition is not a problem.