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Rather than submit to calling the doctor for every ache and wheeze or believing every pronouncement by the medical profession or listening to the advertisements by the drug industry, the Sardine views skeptically the entire Health Utopia's value system, which smacks of improbable offers of a better way to live. Although, being "self-serving" would be the least of the Utopia's faults. The naivete of the Health Euphorians, who cannot imagine any other course of life but their version of a healthy one, allows them to operate within a critical impunity once held for the religiously excited. All roads of the Health Utopia run through one ideal place in the utopia's mission to dominate our lives. A cure for death! If it was feasible to conquer death, the victory would create abysmal problems. Life would lose all imperative. The expectation that death can be avoided would unravel our fundamental motivation for living. Besides, Jonathan Swift had made the best argument against the desire for immortality in the third book of Gulliver's Travels. Yet, it's how the modern health industry has used the promise to avoid dying...the very fact that the Utopia uses it. Starting with the vaunted "war against cancer." For fifty years, the war has been promoted, funded, fought on the basis that a 'cure' was just a few research years away. The fact that wars against other diseases, like smallpox and tuberculosis, had been 'won' merely whetted expectations of an anxious public. The progress in medical technology itself may be its own worst enemy by causing expectations to soar, for there will come a time when the numerous inexplicable deaths in hospitals by negligent physicians, care-givers, and equipment will have to be answered for. The Concorde was grounded after only one accident! And the SST's record was comparably better than most hospitals'. And while the Utopia seems to have a crisis somewhere within its limits - the resurgence of tuberculosis, AIDS, West Nile virus, new and more resistant strains of flu, biological warfare - the citizens of the Utopia seem unperturbed. Or if there is a breakdown of faith in the Health Utopia, a new scientific avenue of hope is opened. Most recently, it has been DNA research. Many wonderful and curious effects have surfaced. Stopping diseases at their source is only one of them (cloning and crime research would be others). Creating humans resistant to the disease. Isolate the building blocks of life. Then an 'aging' gene is found. Stop aging and you can eliminate the fertile region (old age) where most cancers and other maladies multiply and kill us. What person wouldn't cheer this advancement? Who's not afraid of death? The genius of the Utopia's promotion through the available media has been to underline this singular goal. Local news stations, for example, have their own health reporters, who have a greater priority over sports segments (unless sports medicine is the topic). These stations also have a morbid interest in esoteric operations like heart-liver transplants and the separation of Siamese twins. Not to mention, every health report comes with some warning or safety tip relating to cancer or heart disease. The proliferation of prime time television hospital and doctors shows rivals the recent malignant fascination with the life and times of lawyers. Joseph Stalin - a pre-Utopian - exercised the fear of death explicitly for his citizens and certainly may have mirrored his own demons; the Utopia Euphorians hold a theoretical hammer and scalpel over our heads. The beauty of it is how these health promoters disguise their own fears behind charities, telethons, and humanitarianism. One battle in the health campaign to defeat disease and death is being fought against the cigarette. Now, this fight often takes on the appearance of the war itself because of the involvement of states of the United States to sue the tobacco companies out of existence. I refuse to quit smoking in protest against the Health Utopia convincing the government to wage this war against the tobacco industry. The climate regarding individual responsibility is such that the courts have legitimized the fact that people have no wills of their own and can't stop smoking when they want to (or when they know that excessive smoking can debilitate and kill). Utopian pioneers (30 years ago) began to convince people - capitalizing on another of our strong weaknesses - that our sins and self-centered activities were addictions. It didn't take long for the DNA crowd to bolster these pioneers with other evidences that people have no will. Indeed, most former selfish and weak behavior has become a disease! Everything from gambling, to having sex with too many partners in one day, to the fact that you are a chronic failure because your great-great-grandfather was a boozer. This is not a defense of tobacco companies which, among other things, have tried to increase the real addictive qualities of their cigarettes. I'd rather defend the Nazi Holocaust. I object to the time and energy our government (and lawyers in class action suits) uses to stop this relatively small menace. It's the equivalent to the political realm being immersed in the tiresome controversy over gun control. Beyond creating impossible life and death decisions for the old and severely injured and dabbling with the basics of life itself - DNA research, test tube babies, fertility drugs, surrogate motherhood, replaceable body parts as if humans were machines - my basic problem is that the human species doesn't deserve to be perpetuated. What do I mean by 'perpetuating ourselves'? I'm not saying we should stop populating the world, healing the sick, or eating nutritious meals. We must face the fact that life itself is not being enhanced by our presence. Up to the Industrial Revolution we weren't a great problem, although humans have had an unbalanced view of its own animal nature. The last two hundred years have seen the acceleration of human desires beyond avarice or any of the other deadly sins - we're beyond sin! How else could be think about tampering with the aging process? The Health Utopia represents a society of conduct bearing us to the pervasive view that Life will be enhanced by extending human lives indefinitely. It's as great a folly as trying to create a 'better' human through eugenics. Double absurdities like these two cannot become a positive rationality!!
The Sardine's essays, articles, and stories have appeared around the Internet in the last few years at 3 A.M., Facets, Eclectica magazine, Fiction Funhouse, The Fiction Warehouse, 5_trope, and several film journals. Who and what he is probably will be revealed at various points through the articles appearing at this site. The first fifteen installments of his saga can be viewed at the old Unlikely Stories.