To: Ilaine who wrote (49789 ) 5/1/2000 9:03:00 AM From: Crocodile Read Replies (2) | Respond to
I refuse to allow insecticides and pesticides in the house. When I was a kid, my dad used to go from room to room at night, spraying mosquito killer everywhere, even in our bedrooms, late at night, because mosquito buzzing drove him nuts. We kill bugs the old fashioned way, one at a time.
I meant to mention something last night, but it was getting late and I was too tired to write more...
Your dad's dislike of mosquitoes could well have gone much deeper than hating the noise from them. A couple of weeks ago, I watched a documentary on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. Did you see it? It was quite fascinating... partly because of the interviews with people who knew Carson, but also for the old film footage that they showed. There were pesticide ads and also a lot of newsreel footage showing the amazing benefits which DDT had for man.
They showed it being sprayed on soldiers in WWII to kill body lice to prevent the spread of typhoid. They also showed a lot of small clips of people eating at picnic tables and swimming in pools as the "fogger trucks" drove through suburbs and campground areas. Everyone was shown smiling and laughing as they were enveloped in the thick, white fog.
As a kid living up along the Ottawa River, everyone was really into "mosquito eradication" in the 50s and early 60s before the effects of DDT were know. The township had a fogger truck which was driven up and down all of the roads along the river on 2 or 3 nights a week throughout summer. One of my uncles owned a large portable fogger unit that could be carried around by a shoulder strap. He would start that up once or twice a week and walk all around our houses and cottages and even into them... because everyone was told that was a safe thing to do back then.
The war against mosquitoes was pitched to the public as a matter of life and death... implying that mosquitoes were a dirty, nasty force.... The advertisements from the period are hilarious in their demonization of insects...
What I find of interest now is the way in which "weeds" are demonized in advertisements. I don't think this applies too much in the mainstream media, but I subscribe to a couple of farm newspapers and magazines and see this stuff all of the time... Giant weeds stomping Godzilla-like through cornfields, or creeping like giant vines in Day of the Triffids... And the herbicides are usually depicted as "predators"... perhaps a giant black panther with glowing eyes creeping over a cornfield with the slogan "There's a new predator in the county".... or better still... a field with a Battlestar Galactica-type ship coming over the horizon filling the whole sky with a slogan like "The War isn't over yet..."
It's odd how pesticides and herbicides aren't just depicted in some "realistic" or responsible way instead of through symbols that move the whole nature of their use into a super-hero vs. the enemy cartoon-land...
Anyhow, given the power of the media, it isn't at all surprising that people in the 50s and 60s were spraying stuff all over themselves and their houses... I just find it rather discouraging to find that the same thing is going on in agriculture today... Recent Canadian studies are indicating that the rates of certain cancers (kidney, liver, brain tumors) are unusually high in the farming population and the causative agents are "suspected" to be exposure to pesticides and/or diesel fuel/fumes...
croc
