Wonder Bread, Mortgage Derivatives, and Thermonuclear Destruction

Consider the supreme irony of our age. The best minds of modern times have labored ceaselessly to supply comfort, security, and immortality to everyone, but ultimately succeeded only in creating universal suffering, mortal danger, sickness, and death.

My earliest memory of television involves Buffalo Bob Smith telling his audience that Wonder Bread builds strong bodies eight ways (later expanded to "12 ways"). But he neglected to mention that it destroys them 15 ways, since adding a few nutrients back into the end product doesn't compensate for destroying nearly all of wheat's nutritional value in the white-flour rolling and refining process, leaving only a stripped-down starch which converts to glucose immediately upon entering the body.

Dubbed "the original fast food" by Michael Pollan in his brilliant "In Defense of Food," white refined flour, along with its brother, high fructose corn syrup, is the main culprit behind the associated plagues of obesity, diabetes, and coronary-vascular diseases. It's what happens to food and to human health during our enlightened age, an age of "progress," for an Industrial Age finds itself incapable of producing anything other than industrial food.

Likewise, the immense power of industrial monopoly capitalism, so extraordinarily creative and beneficial in some ways due to its capacity to generate wealth, has proved itself in the long run an engine of our destruction, and an infernal machine that demolishes the economic security of millions. With its historically established cycle of boom, mania, panic, and collapse, the American variety of Big Capital has proved itself a particularly virulent form of the illness, having caused two world-wide production and employment catastrophes in the last 80 years, both of which made smoking, stinking ruins out of most of the world's economies for a protracted length of time. Here again, that which the prophets of the Industrial Age promised would free us from poverty and the soul-crushing burdens of continuous toil have only made the situation worse than it was before.

If you can understand the relationship between Industrial-Age food and Industrial-Age capitalism, you can understand the relation of both to Industrial-Age warfare, which may literally destroy us all. For in seeking a weapon which would make war impossible, industrial warriors, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, unlocked secrets forbidden since our time in Eden, and as a result we are now threatened with being burned alive.

We know it can be done, because it's been done.

For a look into the profoundest horror of Industrial/Thermonuclear Age, read David Samuels' "Atomic John" in the December fifteenth New Yorker. It profiles the work of John Coster-Mullen, an ordinary citizen who wrote a book describing the technical inner workings of the bombs dropped on Japan, including much information kept secret until now. Not an anti-nuclear polemic, Coster-Mullen's work is a detailed, deadpan technical analysis of Little Boy and Fat Man. Written accurately and brilliantly by an author who lacks even a bachelor's degree, "Atom Bombs: The Top Secret Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man" shows how the best intentions can produce the worst results, and do so with ordinary nuts-and-bolts-type hardware, a modern-day energy source, and a severe misunderstanding of the natural limitations on human existence.

The natural limitations on human existence! Consider that for a moment, and then consider the prophecy, delivered by our own race of prophets:

"God gave Noah the rainbow sign;
No more water; fire next time."
--Antebellum spiritual,
Quoted by James Baldwin