Gotham City: Burn, Baby, Burn! • December 7, 2000

Gotham City
Telling Tales of Our Capital Region's Politics

Burn, Baby, Burn!
by Frank Pizzoli

This Harrisburg city incinerator thing is a regular disco inferno. Because some pseudo-scientist licked his finger and hiked it in the air and told his followers, "Yep, it’s blowing this way" — bringing to the forefront the issue that the incinerator should close — city dwellers are faced with a new issue. If the plant closes, there is the potential for a 20% tax hike and a trash collection fee increase.

We’ve had these "junk science" scares before with "Crack Babies" — probably among the worst example of bad science making worse public policy. A Chicago pediatrician, Ira Chasnoff, held sway over the debate on babies born to crack-addicted women. They were supposed to suffer from "severe, permanent emotional and mental disabilities." Chasnoff told People magazine that these babies "couldn’t focus on a human face or respond to a human voice." Time magazine told readers of their "pessimism" about these poor kids. But then Mother Jones, an alternative publication, debunked those myths and Claire Coles, a university researcher, was accused of fabricating her data, facts that disagreed with the politically correct conclusions about crack babies. The crack baby story wasn’t science, it was politics, like this incinerator situation. Maybe federal regulators can send one of their overpaid irritants to sit in front of the furnace’s computer. He could make sure no one burns a few extra pounds of stuff and thereby keep the city within the agreed-upon pollution standards.

There are other, more amusing, examples of junk science.

About 300 years ago, Franz Anton Mesmer thought that electricity explained "animal magnetism". He thought that a universal force, when obstructed, caused human illness and misery. Properly trained healers could "harness the vital force" and effect a cure. It took the appointment of Ben Franklin by French king Louis XVI to finally settle the controversy. Old Ben used magnets — with no apparent effect — on his subjects to debunk Mesmer’s nonsense.

It gets better.

Remember that goof Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich?

He claimed that the desire for wealth was "self-fulfilling" and the result of "vibrations" in our brains. Imagine telling a babe in a slinky black cocktail dress this holiday season "I sense your rich vibes baby. Wanna think and grow rich?"

In The Book of Angels, author Sophy Burnham advises us to "Imagine there is a giant radio station out in space" and that we should "beam our thoughts" to it. I can hear it now. "Relax sweetheart, be quiet. I’m trying to beam my thoughts to WestStar 5. Your nagging is interfering." Then we have a colorful character known as Madame Blavatsky. She tried to invent a machine that would communicate electronically with the dead. Ben Franklin got to close to it with his magnets and the whole darn thing shorted out.

Shirley MacLaine tells us that under reincarnation we always come back as a higher being — although no one ever asked her on a talk show how she knows that.

I say give the city more time to fix the problem. In the meantime, under the Republican rubric of government closer to home rules best, I suggest we not allow distant bureaucrats to make decisions that affect the wallets of city residents without at least one personal appearance, for the sake of accountability. Why not? If you can’t stand the heat, stay out, uh, of the incinerator.