Michael Pollan is a public menace | Locklin on science

Michael Pollan is a public menace

I used to live near Pollan; probably stole his parking spot a few times at Berkeley Bowl. I remember him as one of those mincing ninnies who went in transports over the 100 different varieties of pepper or apple available in this place. This sort of consumerist “foodie” affectation is a common sort of snobbery among atheistic Berkleyites. People with Berkeley style moral autism get their pre-religious purity rituals from consumerist virtue spirals, rather than attempting to be a good person in any recognizably human sense. People who fly all over the world on a whim are more likely to drive an electric car than a V-10 truck. People who stick miles of wart-laden ding-dongs up their own assholes end up being more persnickety about sticking, say, Oscar Meyer hot dogs in their gobs. This sort of poseurism overlooks the fact that humans are basically able to do pretty well on a diet of pure seal blubber, but ultimately I can forgive such tendencies as a mild mental illness resulting from poor parenting techniques or too much soy or whatever.

Pollan, though, has gone too far. I have already gone on record stating the man has blood on his hands for his advocacy of CIA mind control drugs. I know at least two victims of his idiocy who have had very serious mental health problems because they read a book or listened to a podcast involving this blockhead, and I have strong suspicions about a third. I’m not someone who suffers fools or psychedelic users gladly, so I’m sure my sample is biased away from people susceptible to hippy dippy BS there are tens or hundreds of thousands more out there.

Now Pollan wants us all to give up coffee. Oh yeah, and he also wants you to try opium and mescaline, which are available in common household plants he wants to tell you about.

As is usual with our, um “elites” this pile of dung will pay no price for the outright evil he has wrought. In fact, as usual, his PR weasels have made it seem like his, erm, “ideas” (mind you; quit coffee, do mescaline and opium, because we’re short crazy people and junkies and have too many productive people in America) are an important part of the “national conversation.”

Back in the dark ages before we had “enlighted”  dunghills like this yutz, people would actually consider whether or not the fashionable interests of the upper middle class might have a bad effect on the lesser orders. That was back before we had a “meritocracy”  -the old elite were big on common decency and looking after their social inferiors, if only because lower orders had to man their factories, the armies and industrial concerns. Modern upper middle class and upper class dorks think non-millionaires are moral defectives who didn’t study hard enough to go to Harvard, or were too stupid to have parents that sent them to summer in Europe. The idea of singing the praises of addictive and mind-altering chemicals wouldn’t have occurred to the regressive pre-meritocratic upper middle classes. Sure, De Quincy wrote a book about being a hop-head junkie in 1820; it wasn’t meant to tempt office workers into trying it out.

Modern upper middle class buffoons can usually survive an encounter with psychedelics, or becoming addicted to opiates or dealing with caffeine withdrawal headaches. Middle class through poor people mostly can’t. The complete lack of care for such people displayed by twee knuckleheads like Pollan really harshes on my mellow. At best it evinces an utter lack of thoughtfulness. At worst, a hostility bordering on genocidal.

Then there is the mawkish superannuated adolescence of it all.  What sort of degenerate zero in his 60s finds meaning in something as insipid as quitting coffee for a month or dropping peyote or …. opiates. These are trivial experiences, best avoided all together; only a twee urban narcissist could find them of any interest. Of course, twee NPR listening urban narcissists are to first approximation the Michael Pollan Reading Public in America these days. Unfortunately, the same people are administrators of many American institutions, which is probably why everything is so incredibly shitty current year.

Here’s a suggestion for 60 year old adolescents, whose subject appears to be sticking various substances in their meatsacks: become addicted to nicotine, and quit. Nicotine makes caffeine look like mid-afternoon naps for powers of concentration, and is a more intense experience to quit. There are delightful forms of it which wouldn’t even involve a risk of cancer or lung damage: I favor Freiborg and Treyer snuffs. It would actually be daring for a Michael Pollan to do this, as it violates the folkways of the twittering pustules in his social circles, who all probably think nicotine is some dangerous carcinogen (it’s not). While he’s doing this he can take up bodybuilding and steroids on a no-carb ketogenic diet; at the very least he’ll end up less of an annoying fucking nellie; at best, maybe he’ll have material for a further book. My suggestions are considerably less physiologically and psychologically dangerous than taking up opiates or cactus-mescaline, and are vastly more profound than quitting morning coffee. They also require considerably more grit and determination than Pollan’s lotus-eater habits. And if people imitated these hobbies, it might actually do people some good, quite unlike something like quitting morning coffee.

I could go into more details, but it’s mostly dull: his soliciting a Loompanix-famous nutty muslim junkie to help him conspire to violate drug laws by growing his own opium is both weedy and boring; this is literally the kind of antics I got up to when I was 15.  The coffee section had questionable history, even more dubious science, and … boring. The San Pedro cactus section is predictably florid and Bay Area retarded, featuring a hippy lady with fake-indian “ceremonies” and “traditions.”  You’ll find deeper insights and vastly more interesting experiences for free on bluelight or erowid.

I mean really, what’s next Michael Pollan? Are you going to take up smoking amphetamines while exploring ethical non-monogamy and Tantric pegging? Igobaine suppositories to quit the opium habit, with a side dish of traditional African bush meat while on photo  safari?  Perhaps Michael Pollan will smoke PCP at Burning Man, stick needles in his scrotum in an S&M ceremony and claim it helped him with his depression? I still think the nicotine to steroid bodybuilder to Janae pipeline would be more entertaining, but all of these are good options. How about the ancient Wall Street tradition of snorting blow off the ass of hookers? I could easily imagine him copying out some horse shit he read about Chimu indians making sex0rz pottery while hoovering lines off of women’s hineys, then with a slightly pretentious wikipedia tier digression on whores and coke used by the Arditi in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s anarchist Fiume. The book will culminate with him participating in the traditional ceremony; counting his loot after his last book sale, then delicately hoovering some blow off of Annie Sprinkle’s derriere, while she shoots ping pong balls out her hoo-ha, spooking his two cats, and causing some sort of cod-profundo realization about how he always wanted to be a DJ.

Honestly, Michael Pollan is the wine and cheese writer for the free local hippy “community” weekly newspaper. The one with the ads for strip clubs and pot stores in the back. Somehow he escaped from his rightful place in the world as obscure community paper foodie scribbler, and now he afflicts us all with his nonsense. I mean, if you actually take this ridiculous goober seriously, you do realize that people are laughing at you, right?