Cod Liver Oil as a Cure for War

Cod liver oil is the curse of Scandinavian immigrants' children. We grew up fearing a parent with a teaspoon in hand.

"It's good for you!", we were told; an obvious sign that it could not be true. It was foul stuff! Nothing that tasted as evil as fish oil could be good for you! We know what our primordial parents never knew, because they were old, and ate lutefisk, and chewed snuff. No! Not snuff! Snus! S-n-oo-ss! Copenhagen.

We knew more about science than they did. Our parents believed that God had created Adam, and then Eve to be his handmaid, and cod fish for them to eat, and cod liver oil for the kids that inevitably result from sleeping with the handmaid.

We knew that was mythological nonsense! We knew that God had made taste buds so that people would spit out things that taste awful; things like battery acid and lutefisk, like horse manure and snus, and like asparagus and cod liver oil.

Teaspoons, dripping liver oil, commandeered toward our mouths, were an ungodly attempt to overwhelm our natural defense systems.

It did not help, years later, to fill capsules with that stuff. We knew what was in there! To this day, the inner-tube smell of a plastic capsule causes my mouth to cringe, and my upchucker to kick into gear.

And now the Army has begun to suspect that fish oil might lower the deplorable rate of military suicides. The problem is real, but it is war that is hell. Adding cod liver oil isn't going to cure war, the way it cured us second-generation Scandinavians of a curiosity about snus, or of fostering a taste for lutefisk. Heartburn is not a cure for war!

I do not want to detract from the real effect of war that the military is trying to deal with, but the cure for that is to be very reluctant to wage war, not to pour oil on it.

I don't hate cod liver oil. It just tastes bad, even if it is good for you.

I hate war.

Comments

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy. Those were skills to be learned and practiced. I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop. He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes. He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade. Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore. The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up. I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth. I knew how to do that. Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down. On the second try, aimi

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

SmokeSound

Search This Blog