Bob

The Normals###
By Bob Sullivan###

I saw the Marlboro thermos on the shelf. It’s all out in the open now. Marlboro thermoses. Marlboro Gatorade and Marlboro Nikes. Philip Morris treadmills. They don’t need to hide anymore. They won. ###

When my grandfather was still alive—late in the twentieth century—nobody knew what was happening. People thought the United States would last. Everyone thought that the nation-states would just always be there. ###

Back then, if they worried about anything, it was Big Oil. It was global warming and obesity. China (remember China?) had its one-child rule, and people thought that was extreme.###

The first tiny scraps of the truth started to come out when my parents were in college. The governments, the doctors, the health nuts never saw it coming. They went on and on about diet and exercise. The hippies told everyone to eat organic. The vegans shook their fingers at hamburgers and belts and shoes. And they all kept getting fatter.###

By the time I was born, over half of all people were morbidly obese. Diabetes and Cancer were skyrocketing despite what everyone thought they were doing to get healthy. Projected life spans shrank. And that was all part of the plan.###

Slowly, over the course of a few decades, two things started to happen: Governments all over the world stopped working, and a tiny group of healthy people began to emerge from the crowd.###

It’s not that governments fell apart, at least not right away. They just lost their ability to do anything. They issued regulations that nobody followed. And in governments as well as major companies, positions of power were quietly filled by a select group of thin, healthy and very rich people who came to be known as “the Normals.”###

The Normals started planning late in the twentieth century when the government cracked down on the tobacco industry and then turned its sights on health care and pharmaceuticals. The first were a handful of the top executives from tobacco, health insurance and drug companies. They were visionaries who knew that profits were at risk from paternalistic governments all over the world, spurred on by holier-than-thou groups that wanted free health care and government hand-outs for masses of plant-eating drones.###

By the year 2000, Normals held at least eighty percent of the most powerful positions on earth. They were the CEO’s and board members of the world’s largest companies, across all industries. They held key positions in the world’s governments. They controlled the drug cartels in Mexico and South America and the war lords in Africa. They controlled al-qaeda.###

The Normals let people have their beliefs—that was their genius. Whatever the average person wanted to believe in would work. Want to fight world hunger? Civil rights your thing? Animal rights? Fan of the New York Yankees? Go right ahead. It all became one enormous funnel. All of it produced a profit, and in the end, all of the profits flowed to the Normals. ###

It really started with just one thing: Nicotine. When the Normals first infiltrated Big Agriculture, they started working to recreate the hold cigarettes once had on consumers. They let the tree-huggers attack genetic engineering for crop yield and pest resistance. That was the decoy. The real mission was getting nicotine into the corn, wheat and soy beans. And it wasn’t limited to plants. Almost no one knew it, but the scientist who perfected a non-detectable method of infusing beef and pork with nicotine became the world’s richest person.###

It made perfect sense. Let the crusaders worry about super-sizing and advertising. With nicotine, the world was helpless. Nicotine guaranteed overeating. Then came the obesity and the diabetes, which led to the medical treatment, the testing, the drugs and the exercise fads. Every last bit of it was a self-sustaining juggernaut of profit.###

By around 2020, the world’s governments were like so many termite-infested houses, held up by the paint on the walls and ready to crumble in the next stiff breeze.###

The Normals never issued a press release. They never came forward to proclaim their leadership. But they slowly let the governments fall apart. The companies made the world work anyway. And the Normals ran the companies.###

Little by little, just because they could, they brought the grand old cigarette brands back into the light. I looked at the Marlboro logo on the thermos and I smiled. Oh, to be a Normal.###