Bill Buford: GRAFFITI
I am privileged to be among the first to address a concern that has been neglected for too long: toenail fungus.
Later tonight, when you get home or as you get ready for bed, take a look at what you’ve got down there, discoloured, at the end of your toes.
A little white along the edges? Getting thick right at that juncture of nail and flesh? Flaky? Worse, has it started to turn brown?
Americans have discovered something that, even a year ago, they knew nothing about: in that gap between toenail and flesh, there is a rapacious, flesh- devouring, nail-annihilating fungus.
This vile, pusillanimous pedal parasite – and a fungus is a parasite of sorts; after all, it’s there, crowded in with the toe jam, feeding on you – does all kinds of damage.
It can cause pain. It can be ugly to look at. But worse, when it’s really bad, when it’s yellow or yellow-brown or in those serious final fungi stages, it can stink. And no one wants to stink.
Having learned what has seeped underneath their toe-nails, Americans will spend $3-billion this year to get rid of it.
How have Americans come to be so educated? I will illustrate with a late- summer Saturday evening.
A long weekend, a visit to the family: homey scene, my mother, my sister, kids running amok, the family patriarch in place, everyone around the television, watching a baseball game. What could be more American?
Between innings, there are advertisements, and, after a while, it’s difficult to avoid detecting a theme.
There’s Tagament for heartburn. Evidently, if I take Tagament both before and after I go out to eat a pizza, I can eat all the pizza I want and there won’t be a rumble in the jungle when I go to bed that night. That’s comforting.
Then I’m told to buy Gas-X, for those unhappy moments when the body retains just a bit too much of its bodily gases. That’s the actual phrase they use: “Those unhappy moments.”
In a commercial for Nature’s Remedy, the television asks: “What laxative do you use to relieve constipation?” Silly me. I never thought to ask.
“What laxative do you use?” I ask my mother, who is startled by my question.
I feel that I’ve done something terrible – that I’ve had an unhappy moment in public.
The advertisements during the 1996 Olympic Games were even more graphic – it seems that the bigger the audience, the more clinical the message: the gunk in your gums, the gaping sores on your genitals, the failure of your genitals – “The real future,” one advertising executive told me, “is erections” – and your bowels on the rampage – although, the same executive told me, “bowels are very 1992”.
Advertising often plays on elementary feelings: hope (“To be richer, sexier, slimmer and better in bed, you need to buy a brand new …”) or fear.
Fear is usually of the pocket book – the prospect of having nothing – or of the heart – the prospect of having no one – and, in an ideal world, it is both – the prospect of blowing out your brains.
In America, the new fear is in our biology: it’s bacteria.
“Bacteria is boomtime,” according to the media buyer educating Americans in toenail fungus, although technically, she admits, a fungus is not a bacterium – it’s the more educated cousin. The treatment of it, however, falls into the category of anti-bacterial products, and America, I’m told, “just can’t get enough of them”.
There are anti-bacterial soaps, lotions, powders and sprays. There are whole shops given over to “anti- bacterials”. The one around the corner from me prides itself on having “the best anti-bacterials in New York”, according to its window display.
Bacteria, when you think about it, were just waiting to be discovered by an advertising agency. They are the ultimate messengers of fear. They’re everywhere – in animals, on our skins, in the open air – and utterly unstoppable.
Other fears seem so modest. You will make your fortune or you lose it. You have a loved one or you don’t.
But there will always be bacteria, the world’s oldest cells – older than history. Their mission is simply to eat – anything, everything, your flesh, your intestines, your toenails.
America has discovered bacteria. And the business is huge.