The famed fictional advertising wizard Don Draper said it in Mad Men: “You know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car.” But that TV series was a long time ago and the time it depicts even farther from ours. Now we live in a sadder, more fragile age, in which even the smallest pleasures are to be denied us. The new car smell is no longer the smell of happiness; it is the stench of cancer, decay, and death. Welcome, Don Draper, to the enlightened twenty-first century.
The UK’s Daily Mail reported Friday that a new study has made a grim discovery: “The much-loved smell of a new car is caused by cancer-causing chemicals.” Well, of course! What pleasure, large or small, hasn’t been touched by the Left’s obsession with doom? Take weather reports. On warm, sunny days even just a few years ago, TV weather maps were green and pleasant, studded with images of smiling suns and blooming flowers. Now, for exactly the same temperatures, they are full of oranges and reds and images of extreme heat, working hard to sell climate change hysteria.
Major sports have not only been thoroughly politicized, but they have also become the vehicles for the same buzz-killing hysteria. Were you excited about the beginning of a new baseball season? Not so fast: AccuWeather wanted you to know that “MLB season is here: Experts warn lightning is a danger at games.” Now, maybe it really was true that “upwards of 90% of the lightning that happens in the United States, specifically the lower 48, occurs during baseball season,” but life is fraught with risks. Do the guardians of acceptable opinion want us to live in fear, cowering in terror at the prospect of a sunny day and forgoing a happy outing to a baseball game for fear of being struck by lightning? Why, yes. Yes, they do.
In line with the overall atmosphere of fear and gloom, the Daily Mail explains that “a cocktail of leather and plastics creates a gasoline-like odor which becomes more intense in the heat — due to an increase in energy available to odor-causing molecules.” And so if you’re enjoying your brand new car, pull over, stop, and get out of the vehicle. Quickly: “Sitting for just 30 minutes every day in a car exposes you to dangerous levels of carcinogens formaldehyde and acetaldehyde. These chemicals are linked to myeloid leukemia and rare cancers such as in the nose.” And so one day soon, when you step into your new electric car, you may find that the fabled new car smell has been relegated to the odiferous dustbin of history.
“Leading U.S. car manufacturer Ford,” says the Daily Mail, “even started the process of trying to remove the smell, following complaints from Chinese customers who disliked the odor.” Chinese customers disliked the odor, so Ford is working to remove it. Many American customers like the odor, and we’re told that the formaldehyde in it “can cause myeloid leukemia and rare cancers such as in the paranasal sinuses, nasal cavity, and nasopharynx.” And acetaldehyde “is categorized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a probable human carcinogen, with research showing increased incidence of nasal tumors in rats following inhalation of the substance.” So you see where we stand. No nasal tumors in our rats, by golly.
Related: Here’s How We Know That This Summer’s Heatwaves Are Weather Events, Not Proof of Climate Change
Ford even went so far as to file “a patent application for an odor-removal process. Ford’s solution was to bake the smell out by parking the car in the sun, rolling down the windows, and firing up the engine, heater, and fan until the smell is gone.” Gee, drivers for years have known that you get rid of odors in a car by parking in the sun and rolling down the windows. Now, apparently, you can get a patent for that.
Anyway, maybe the new car smell really does cause cancer, but nothing in life is without a downside, and all lives ultimately end in death. Our present-day obsession with the risks inherent in everything is steadily sucking all the joy out of life. It’s almost as if a gang of sullen and joyless Leftists decided to inflict their unhappiness with the world and dissatisfaction with literally everything on the rest of us.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member