Hula Hoop Hoopla

The first time I heard Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance” was at a classical music appreciation workshop at Rutgers. The instructor, a Music Professor, played a clip from the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” that featured a creative interpretation of the history of the hula hoop, one of the simplest toys ever sold and marketed—a hollow ring that can be twirled around the waist while performing a motion similar to that of a Hawaiian Hula dancer.

Although varieties of the hula hoop had been known to Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the modern multi-coloured plastic version was born in 1958 and demonstrated to befuddled children in California playgrounds. This salesmanship resulted in a fad beyond imagination, with over 100 million hoops sold in the first year itself. The film version predictably employs a more artistic license, and offers a humorous lesson in the vagaries of demand and supply.

By a series of backroom machinations in “The Hudsucker Proxy”, the fate of the new chairman of a fictional toy company is closely intertwined with the success of hula hoop sales. As the toy fails to take off despite steep discounts, a store owner throws out his entire stock into a back alley. Miraculously one of the hoops takes a life of its own—escaping out into the sunlight and rolling through streets and sidewalks of an anonymous small town until it stops at the feet of a young boy playing truant from school. As the boy takes his first tentative step into the circle and discovers his natural talent, other students returning from school are awed by this spectacle and rush to the toy store as sales (and retail prices) begin to soar.

 

While the incredible voyage of the lone hoop is evocative of a vintage Dunlop tyre advertisement that stops before an unmindful child, scenes of hoop trundling are still commonplace in rural towns, where a child may be seen rolling a hoop (typically a bicycle tyre) along the ground  with the aid of a stick. This game had acquired notoriety in Victorian London because of injuries caused to horses and pedestrians’ shins, and a high-profile campaign to eradicate the practice was initiated by Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer.

 

The question is how much longer will today’s children be satisfied by the likes of hula hoops and flying discs (also known as Frisbee, which was invented by the same company that popularised the hula hoop). In an age where touchscreens have become ubiquitous, virtual versions of yesterday’s toys are available on mobile phones and one can foresee a future where the simplicity of these games would no longer be experienced in reality.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Hula hoop, hula hoop,
Everyone is playing
With the hula hoop.
Look at them spin
Trying to win
Anyone can play from three
To a hundred and ten.
Oh, what fun to see them rock
And to see them sway
Trying to keep the hula hoop
From slipping away.
If you rock when you should sway
It would fall to the ground
Then again, once again,
Spin it round and round.

Georgia Gibbs, The Hula Hoop Song

Heavy Metal Banned

Freakonomics, a work of non-fiction jointly written by a University of Chicago economist and a New York Times journalist became the surprise worldwide bestseller of 2005, having sold over 4 million copies to date in 35 different languages. Its unique selling proposition was the interpretation of  cultural issues through the lens of economics and statistics.

One of the more provocative ideas expounded in the book is that the drop in crime rate in the United States in the nineteen-nineties was the result of the legalisation of abortion in 1973. The theory was that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals in later life, and the Supreme Court’s controversial Roe vs. Wade ruling made the termination of unwanted pregnancies accessible and affordable, reducing the number of criminals in the crucial 18 to 25 age-group two decades later.

The theory was unpopular with urban police forces who had hitherto been basking in the glory of having cut down crime, and were quick to clutch at the straw that this may have been a coincidence since correlation did not establish causality. The authors addressed the morality of equating crime with poor family planning by pointing to Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime in Romania, where the reverse act had been played out. The Stalinist dictator had banned abortion in 1966, doubling the birth-rate within a year, which soon resulted in a surplus of under-educated youth who were unsuitable for the job market. Ironically, this same generation ended up as Ceausescu’s judge, jury and executioner after the fall of communism in 1989.

Recent research has introduced one more contender for the title of crime-fighter in the United States. The new hypothesis claims that exposure to tetraethyl-lead (TEL), an additive used in petrol until the nineteen-seventies, results in juvenile delinquencies. Neurological studies have shown that the exposure to lead and other heavy metals have a permanent effect on intelligence and behaviour— impairing judgement and inhibiting control. Violent crime rates between the 1960s and 1990s followed the same pattern as the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, except being offset by about twenty-three years.

Early in the twentieth-century, General Motors (GM) was on the hunt for  a chemical that could prevent knocking or pinging in internal combustion engines. Although their research laboratory, headed by Charles Kettering, had discovered that ethyl alcohol or ethanol possessed these properties, this was intentionally overlooked as its commercial potential was limited. Instead in 1922, Kettering  approached Alfred Sloan, who was to become the company president the following year, with the discovery of TEL which was patentable and could bring them profit with every litre of petrol sold by any gas station in the country.

Despite knowledge of the deadliness of TEL, GM’s management decided to market it under the benign sounding name of “Ethyl”, a red-coloured fluid that would need to be added to petrol in a ratio of 1:1000. Over the years, the Ethyl cartel would repeatedly cover-up the deaths of workers in their plants from lead exposure, and even stage public relations meetings to hide the truth.

By the time the federal government’s Environmental Protection Agency outlawed lead as an additive, millions of tonnes of TEL had already been burned in gasoline, much of which remains in the soil, air and water around us.

Ultimately this essay is not just about lead pollution, since time alone will prove if the theory linking TEL and crime can withstand the targeted arrows of criticism and cross-examination. Hidden beneath the surface is a darker tale of corporate greed and unbridled capitalism, a misadventure that has profitably polluted the world and forced a tragedy on generations to come. Two of the key perpetrators of this crime, Sloan and Kettering, went on to offer their patronage to a cancer research hospital in New York City (which bears their name today), perhaps to atone for their complicity in the poisoning of the planet.

AFTERTHOUGHT

Take another deeper breath,
Inhale invisible death.
Pollution fills the land and sky,
Forever you justify.
Take a deeper look and see,
Nothing's left to future seeds.
Icicles melt in the blood,
Ashes where there once was wood.

Machine Head, Elegy