Word: toxicants
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This after Arthur D. Little (ADL), a nationally recognized Cambridge research laboratory, launched a public relations drive to counter what it perceives as misleading press coverage about the firm's research on toxic nerve agents...
White Noise features a cloud of toxic industrial waste, although the author's larger concern is with death as metaphor. As usual, DeLillo mixes black comedy with a ceremonious tone: "The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings." The whirly appendages belong to helicopters tracking the monster smudge over Iron City, a small industrial town and home of the College-on-the-Hill...
Unrelieved worry about self-preservation is one of life's more depressing preoccupations. DeLillo illustrates this sad fact and attempts to lift the dread with satire and comic invention. An expert explains the poison cloud that threatens Iron City: "This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art." There are lampoons (if that is possible) of occult tabloids: "From beyond the grave, dead living legend John Wayne will communicate telepathically with President Reagan to help frame U.S. foreign policy. Mellowed by death, the strapping actor will advocate a hopeful policy...
Guidotti, working with Schechter, suspects that eugenol--or some byproduct created when it is burned--immobilizes infection-fighting cells, allowing viruses and bacteria already present in the lungs to run amuck. The other possibilities, he says, are that eugenol or another ingredient has a direct toxic effect or that it triggers an acute allergic reaction. Last month the American Lung Association issued a preliminary warning about clove cigarettes, and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta plan to look for further evidence of kretek-induced illness...
Last week in a place most Americans never heard of, more than 2,500 residents of Bhopal, India, were killed by leaking toxic gas. How deeply did we really feel that news? Numbers are always tossed up first in such events, but almost as a diversion; there seems a false need to know exactly how many died, how many were hospitalized; reports supersede reports. When the count is finally declared accurate, it is as if one were mourning a quantity rather than people, since the counting exercise is a way of establishing objective significance in the world. Still, we wept...