I have just returned from our neighborhood grocery.  On entering the store, I was delayed by two people pausing to sterilize their hands at a machine set up for that purpose.  I shook my head at this spectacle, causing the woman in front of me to apologize for delaying my entrance.  I explained that I was responding not to the delay, but to the sanitization ritual that has become so commonplace in our world.  (I have seen one such device in a public building, urging people to cleanse their hands with the chemicals so provided, adding that such an act would “help protect the environment.”)

One finds expressions of this ritual for sterilization in a number of settings, one of the more recent being the stampeding of the boobeoisie into getting Big Pharma’s lucrative “swine flu” shots.  The world must be made sterile, free of even the tiniest microbe that might discommode us.  (I enjoy showing my students microscopic photos of the creatures that live within the pores of our skin, and who come out at night to cleanse our skin of the oil and dead cells that accumulate.)

There is more than the obvious neuroses involved in so many of us wanting to sanitize the planet: the environmental movement feeds on this mindset, of course.  But as Robert Proctor observed, in his important book, The Nazi War on Cancer, so many of Hitler’s programs were rooted in this neurotic disposition.  The desire to eliminate cancer, cigarette smoking, and other unhealthful conditions; the promotion of health-foods and conservation practices; all reflected a commitment to sterilizing society.  With “disease” as a ubiquitous force to be opposed by various state programs, it became easy to think of other people as diseases to be eradicated.

Does this make hand-sanitizing machines some kind of totalitarian threat?  Of course not.  But the thinking that causes people to line up not only to sterilize their bodies against nature’s hidden threats, but to “protect the environment” in the process, reflects a kind of thinking that, as history has shown us, can easily be mobilized against any thing or any one designated, by those in power, as a “threat” to be eradicated.

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