Chemical Man

As pre-man scrabbled for a living in parts of Africa and the Near Orient he learned to cook, which made more types of food easier to digest. The creature became Cooking Man a million and a half years ago and evolved past his fellows, leaving the monkeys to the forest. As Cooking Man wandered around and finally hopped off the glacier some 15,000 years ago, he started cultivating plants and animals, and City Man - the agriculturalist - was born. Again, modernizing man broadened his culinary world through the taming of foods. City Man prevailed against the hunter-gatherer Cooking Man, but kept his culinary skills. Several hundred years ago man harnessed the power of the machine, and Industrial Man with his milled and processed foods took over the world leaving relatively primitive City Man to perform his services, and primitive Cooking Man to point at on his vacations.

We are now at the cusp of a new age, and Chemical Man is poised to supercede Industrial Man. Chemical Man makes the best use of modern medicines, scientifically formulated and processed foods such as the Twinkie, and will undoubtedly leave mere Industrial Man behind in the stink of diesel and coal smoke. Chemical Man eats whatever comes out of the modern lab and is plump and happy. Since the age of Italian city-state politics mankind has tended to suspect that heaviness evidences prosperity and good health. Chemical Man says and does what he wants, has sex when and with whomever he pleases, and eats until he's about to pop. It was only during the 19th century that the busybody Christers started associating body weight with the fabricated "sin" of "gluttony." People who oppose this so-called "hedonism" are selfish, narrow-minded folks who are unhappy unless they are in someone else's business. As Eric Hoffer noted, "people with business worth minding generally mind their own business."



Chemical Man's lifestyle makes him happy (just look at the faces of children as they eat cotton candy or enjoy an ice cream cone!), and unless we all participate and breed the next generation of happy, rotund, self-satisfied, chemically complex men, we will stagnate and die.