ENVIROPORN

What is characteristic of all these crusades is what makes them "liberal:" the scantily disguised craving for coercion. It is gratifying to see that Brodeur's crusade against microwaves has proved a total failure: the microwave oven has become part of the American kitchen (including the Manhattan penthouses where the new proletariat reads the New Yorker), and the explosive use of microwaves in communications is almost unbelievable. l must again stress the coercive aspect of Baron Brodeur's latest crusade: if there is any danger (which remains to be shown), it is in the home, not in the transmission lines. But as in food irradiation, the de-industrializers in environmentalist masks do not want freedom of choice: they are not after any health hazards, but after the utilities.

The anecdotal garbage of his third installment is directed against computer terminals. I cannot say what they mean for eye strain and fatigue, and I do not doubt that if Baron Brodeur sug-gested that they lead to pain in the left big toe, many an unfor-tunate reader of such revelations will begin to hop on her right foot shrieking in agony. But as for ionizing radiation, it is subject to physical laws that the Baron does not control. It was insignificant in terminals manufactured before 1970, and has been completely absent in later designs.

AtE subscriber Carl Blum has lived in this house in Boulder Canyon, Colorado, for the past 22 years. As you can see, the house is in unusual proximity of a 3.6 kV distribution line. Mr Blum is now in his 89^th year. If I had Paul Brodeur's insolence of using anecdotal "evidence", I would say that he would never have made it to that age had he not been living under the line.

I lack both space and patience to refute Brodeur's individual halftruths, three-quarter lies and artful innuendos; the far bigger value of domestic magnetic fields demolishes them all. (At one point, Brodeur acknowledges the stronger magnetic field from ap-pliances, but claims that it falls off more rapidly than from electri-cal lines. This is a convenient falsehood. The rapid decrease is due to partial cancellation of the fields of currents that are not in phase, which is the case for all power transmission line, but not for all appliances.) But there is another interesting aspect of the Baron's writings, and that is their close relation to pornography.

Pornography aims to titillate sexual excitement by artificially contrived pictures; Brodeur's writings aim to titillate the fear of technology and hatred of corporations by artificially concocted fables. Pornography caters to those who have no access to the real thing; Brodeur's enviroporn caters mainly to those who are unable to make a living by voluntary exchange and want The State and Society to coerce everybody into the way things "should" be. Both types of reader slobber over what is denied to them.

But there are also important differences. The pornographers have no hidden agenda; they do not scare their customers out of their wits; they do not pretend that the whores in their pictures are loving women; they do not aim to outlaw non-pornography; if they affect mental health, the damage is self-inflicted, for their cus-tomers were not conned into trusting false conclusions masque-rading as concern for health; they do not damage physical health by spreading false information on benign, life-saving technology, and they do not strut around as crusaders for safety and the environment.