THE WORST IS YET TO COME

A tongue-in-cheek catalogue of what to worry about in an age when Americans have objectively never been so safe.
By BROOKE ALLEN

Never in our history have Americans been so fearful; never, objectively speaking, have we been so safe. Except for the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the destruction of the World Trade Center, war has not touched our shores in a century and a half. Despite relative decline, we are still militarily No. 1. We have antibiotics, polio vaccines, airbags; our children need no longer suffer even measles or chicken pox. So what are we all so frightened of? (click below to read more)



In "Encyclopedia Paranoiaca," Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf—in association, supposedly, with the staff of something called the Cassandra Institute—try to answer that question in some detail. The result is an amusing and cruelly accurate cultural critique, offering a "comprehensive and authoritative inventory of the perils, menaces, threats, blights, banes, and other assorted pieces of Damoclean cutlery" that hover over our collective head.

There's the big stuff, of course: global warming and nuclear warfare, not to mention super-volcanoes and mega-tsunamis "capable of crossing entire oceans at jet-airplane speed and wreaking almost unimaginable damage." The authors don't even bother to list terror attacks or hurricanes, both high on the list of national obsessions after the events of recent years. But they do dwell on financial perils. "Investments, domestic" and "investments, overseas" are both listed as dangers, as are "gold, failure to invest in" and "gold, investing in." Damned if you do, damned if you don't—as with so many of life's decisions.

Our understandable fear of outsize disasters is matched, oddly enough, by an equally paralyzing terror of the microscopic. American germophobia has only intensified in recent years, as we can see from the sudden ubiquity of hand sanitizers. Messrs. Beard and Cerf gleefully fan the flames of our paranoia. Toilets, flushing of: You'd do well to keep the seat down when engaging in this hazardous activity, because toilet water and all its contents are vaporized by the flushing action and settle upon everything in your bathroom—including your toothbrush. A lovely hot bath turns out to be, according to a scientist at NYU Medical Center, a foul stew of pathogens, with up to 100,000 bacteria per square inch. But showers are not much better—they distribute the scary Mycobacterium avium. And your kitchen is even yuckier than your bathroom! Dishwashers carry fungi on the rubber band in the door. Kitchen sinks: According to one scientist consulted by the authors, "if an alien came from space and studied bacteria counts in the typical home, he would probably conclude he should wash his hands in the toilet, and pee in your sink." Sponges: Their "damp, porous environment serves as a perfect breeding ground in which the microbes can flourish and multiply until there are literally billions of them." Cutting boards—let's not even go there.

But don't pull out the cleaning products too fast. Through a clever system of cross-referencing, the authors demonstrate that the cure is likely to be as harmful as the malady. Room air purifiers: "The ozone spewed out by these machines is more hazardous than any substances they may remove." Antibacterial products: Their overuse is creating a new breed of "superbugs" resistant to the original agents and to antibiotics as well. Paper towels might be bad for the environment, but hand-drying machines are actually scary: In one study, "people who used a hot-air hand-drying machine to dry their hands had two to three times as many bacteria on their hands as they did before they washed them."

And what about toxins? Some of the book's entries might surprise you. You could probably guess that the popular Brazilian blowout hair-straightening treatment might contain stuff you wouldn't want to breathe in (it does—formaldehyde), but what about the natural-stone kitchen countertops so beloved by design-conscious Bobos? Their granite emits "a continuous stream of radioactive radon gas." And those compact fluorescent light bulbs touted by environmentalists? The average CFL bulb "contains enough mercury," the authors tell us, "to contaminate as many as six thousand gallons of water to a point beyond safe drinking levels. The bulbs are harmless enough unless they break, but if they do, you and your family face the immediate danger of mercury poisoning."

Information on foods, too, proves surprising. We hardly need to be told that Chicken McNuggets and Wendy's baconator triple are to be avoided, but there are problems with "healthy" alternatives, too: brown rice (arsenic), leafy green vegetables (food-borne illnesses), sprouts (salmonella) and soy (possibly carcinogenic). Even yoga and meditation are not unmixed blessings. The former activity can cause injuries and even debilitating strokes, while the latter has been known to produce a grisly array of symptoms including, according to one expert, "uncomfortable kinesthetic sensation, mild dissociation, feelings of guilt . . . and psychosis-like symptoms, grandiosity, elations, destructive behavior, and suicidal feelings."

We laugh, but Messrs Beard and Cerf get some serious messages into the mix, so painlessly that we hardly notice it. There is their section on bottled water, for instance, surely one of the silliest of modern follies. Bottled water costs the eager buyer up to 10,000 times as much as tap water, and one might therefore assume that it is purer, healthier and better tasting. "But is this assumption merited? Emphatically not." Furthermore, the environmental hazard created by this pointless exercise in consumerism is positively criminal, with 1.5 million barrels of oil per year going into manufacture of the plastic bottles, even as the empties clog our landfills. Characteristically, though, the authors point out that tap water can sometimes be polluted with dangerous chemicals, parasites and bacteria.

The message of "Encyclopedia Paranoiaca" is fatalistic but not entirely grim: We are all dying animals, so let's leave the hand sanitizer at home and enjoy what we can before it's all over. And the authors never lose their sense of humor. Under the rubric "reading on the toilet" (the prolonging of this experience, apparently, can cause hemorrhoids), they note: "It's hard for the editors of the Encyclopedia Paranoiaca—or our colleagues at the Cassandra Institute—to imagine that anyone might choose to read a serious and important work such as ours on the toilet." In fact, with its brief, pithy entries, this book might have been designed (and probably was) for exactly such a purpose. This is a fine and necessary genre, and Messrs. Beard and Cerf have made a worthy contribution to its noble tradition.

—Ms. Allen's latest book is "The Other Side of the Mirror: An American Travels Through Syria" (2011).