By Michael Jewell
Early mornings make for interesting television. I love to stretch out my breakfast, savoring the sunrise with a hot cup of tea against the backdrop of Kevin Trudeau infomercials. He’s on three or four channels at 6 a.m., hawking his series of books compiling the “natural cures THEY don’t want you to know about.” The THEY in question, of course, is a congregation of all the bogeymen of the left-leaning brain. The government, pharmaceutical companies and multinational corporations of every stripe are evidently embroiled in a diabolical plot to keep people sick and profit from it. I used to fall head over heals for his shtick, and who could blame me? Trudeau takes my healthy liberal distrust of too much power in too little hands and jettisons it into the paranoiac stratosphere. He’s very slick. But then again, it’s his business to be.
Now, I’m no fan of multinationals. They are a sinister presence, but as much as I want to believe it, there is no conspiracy. In fact, the over-arching plot is one of the biggest tripwires for a well-tuned bulls— gland. Although plain ol’ evidence is the only true way to establish if I’m being had, I have several indicators that do a good enough job of tipping me off to a scam in a pinch.
The bulls— gland isn’t a gland at all, but a state of mind that is ever watchful for bulls— in its myriad forms. Like an organ, it neutralizes bulls— before it can do its harm, and like a muscle, it must be aggressively maintained. Some bits of bulls— are harmless, like a belief in faeries. Others, like the notion that a bundle of herbs can cure genital herpes, are catastrophically dangerous.
It is so important to keep my bulls— gland flexed and healthy because of the very real dangers of ever-present poppycock. Now, whichever type of hormone-free milk I’m supposed to buy matters little. No, I’m talking actual danger, like when South Africa’s health minister heals AIDS patients with a “natural cure,” or when parents deny their children vaccines for fear of a nonexistent autism link, or when FLDS women give their teenage daughters away to tyrannical septuagenarians in “spiritual marriages.” The world is in much worse of a state than it should be because of these people’s distinct lack of a working bulls— gland.
Trudeau’s appeal to my resentment, my suspicion and my desire for an easy solution to complex problems are designed to be downright epiphanous to the untrained mind. What he doesn’t know about is my well-honed sense of exactly when I’m being manipulated. His fallacious claims have landed him cease and desist orders that he transcends with the grace of a king huckster, eschewing outrageous lies and soothing intonations in the same breath. Trudeau is very good, but I’ve got one better. Great manipulators have come and gone, and they are no match for my bulls— gland, the only part of my body that gets regular exercise.
