Wag the Dog.

I'm not (for once) actually thinking of dogs right now, but rather of this evocative expression. My friend Melanie recently told me a story about clover, which is yet another example of instances when the wealthy and powerful didn't have an ideal circumstance, so they created it. I realized that I now have something of a collection of these, which I share with you.

1. Clover. Prior to the 1950's, grass in one's yard was a rare thing. The most common ground covering was clover, and people liked it in their yards. It's a lovely deep green color, once it takes root it's extremely hardy, it tends to edge out other things so you have good coverage with it, it takes little water to be happy, it takes nitrogen from the air, not the soil, so it's not soil-depleting the way many grass varieties are, and it's a helpful plant for friendly, honey-producing bees.
But. Herbicides were in development in the 1950s, and try as they could, they couldn't come up with a chemical that would kill weeds, but not kill the innocuous, broad-leafed and therefore susceptible clover. The answer was to reclassify clover as a weed, and now the only hurdle to mass sales of herbicide to private home owners was to convince them that clover was, indeed, an enemy weed. A nationwide ad campaign was launched regarding the danger of allowing your babies to frolic in bee-harboring clover. Within ten years, no one's yard had clover, and almost every one's garage had gallons of herbicide.

2. Breast milk. Until the 1930s, every child born in the US was breastfed. In the rare event a mother couldn't or wouldn't breastfeed a new baby, a lactating relative would typically do the job, or a hired wet nurse. Some housekeeping books from the era included a recipe for "infant formula," the primary ingredient being usually Karo syrup, which worked okay in a short-term emergency. A company decided to market the Karo syrup formula, and sales were all right, but wouldn't sales be better if mothers could be convinced that the formula was actually better than breast milk? A nationwide ad campaign, which later became a worldwide ad campaign, ensued. Mothers were convinced. Breastfeeding was almost completely wiped out in my generation. When people realized that the formula companies claims were patently false, breastfeeding rates surged again, but to this day they are scandalously low, and dangerously low in developing nations.

3. The Chicago River. At the end of the last century, Chicagoans had a problem--their river was so polluted, sludgy, and disgusting that it smelled. Rather than reduce pollution, city leaders decided to reverse the flow of the river. And they did. In 1900, they completed a canal (which moved more earth than the more famous Panama canal project 10 years later), which ingeniously flushed the Chicago River in the opposite direction. Now they got their clean drinking water from Lake Michigan (billions of gallons a day), and their waste water moved on down the Mississippi. This was a great thing for Chicago. This was not such a great thing for St. Louis.

4. Street Cars. A few years later, horse-less carriages were invented. They were fun and fabulous for the very wealthy, but automobile makers could clearly see that they were not going to become the mode of transportation for the populous. This was because cars were very expensive to buy and operate, and, even more notably, the ordinary citizens of American cities had their transportation needs met: by street cars. Or called trolleys in some places. They were efficient and universally used. Need to go to another city? People took the train. Until a few automobile manufacturers, some of the wealthiest people in the country, purchased street car lines and train routes and purposefully and systematically tore them up. Need to buy a car now.

Question for today: what story are we buying right now, that makes perfect sense to us in this moment, is actually a crazy example of the tail wagging the dog to further some one's nefarious purposes?