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Tuesday, May 05, 1998 By Tony Norman
It's official: There's a pill for everything under the sun. With the advent of Viagra, the next stage in human evolution will begin with a split in Pfizer stock. Behold homo erectus prostrate before Pharmaceuticus, the great god of medicine cabinets and Saturday nights.
We knew this day, with all of its vulgarity and shallowness, would come. How fitting that a little blue pill so recently emerged from clinical trials would act as a catalyst for a social revolution that reads like a Jacqueline Susann novel.
But baby boomers have to get it on, no matter what. Any talk about the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak is pure blasphemy with Viagra around. Viagra unites spirit and flesh in a moment of pure bacchanalian ecstasy.
And if you're really lucky, your insurance plan or HMO will consider the pursuit of virility just another pre-existing condition and cough up the $10 a pill it costs to get your groove on and keep it there, dude.
Listen, I'm not about to dis something the pope has given his blessings to. The theological justifications for Viagra are right there for all to see in the early chapters of Genesis. Abraham, pushing a century but still frisky enough to conceive a child with 90-year old Sarah, obviously had his own supply of the stuff.
My reservation, eccentric as it may be, is nothing more than a deep-rooted discomfort with pills of any type. When I have a headache, I'm more likely to let it burn itself out than reach for a pill. I even cut my vitamins in half to make the erratic ritual of taking them more doable.
But who's to say I wouldn't take Viagra if I had some standing to use it, so to speak?
So far, I've been able to keep a respectful distance from all pills. Even though my hairline has been receding for years, my wife hasn't gotten around to asking me to take the baldness pill yet.
Thank goodness, since that's just a slippery slope that would eventually lead to a request that I take diet pills to get back into the size 32 pants I wore on my wedding day.
But let's say for the sake of argument that I was vain and silly enough to subscribe to current notions of beauty and "wellness." I'd have to become a walking depository of chemical enhancement just to face myself in the morning.
For my thoroughly undependable memory, I'd have to overdose on various ginkgo extracts and cod-liver oil. To bring my weight down as fast as my wife would like will mean risking the side effects of overdosing on diet pills until my ribs start showing again.
To deal with depression over the fact that my weight isn't coming off fast enough, I'd have to break out the Prozac. While running around preternaturally cheerful, I'd surely notice that the Afro I used to be so proud of no longer exists.
So on would go the Rogaine, rubbed into my scalp until it burned with righteous indignation.
And if the Rogaine didn't work in the first month or so, then I'd have to chomp down lots of Propecia, the baldness pill, not at all mindful of possible side effects like sexual dysfunction or impotence because (drum roll, please) Viagra will put some bounce back into a hopelessly screwed up sex life.
Sorry, but this all sounds like a racket to me. But I'm not knocking it for anyone else. I just don't have the guts or the money to be beautiful, that's all.
Two weeks ago, I saw a report on the evening news about a medical procedure that "reverses" the effects of death. Instead of keeping your body warm in the event of medical trauma as is current orthodoxy, the body's temperature is lowered to the point where brain and heart functions come to a standstill.
After an hour or so, the body is gradually warmed up and the person can expect to resume a normal life. With the possible exception of an urge to appear on the "Jerry Springer Show," there's no evidence of diminished brain activity as a result of the procedure.
Beyond vanity and fun, so much of our spiritual and mental resources are expended in a fruitless effort to evade death. The way science is going, I fully expect to hear one day that the very rich will be able to send clones to die in their place.
Now, isn't that progress? Send in the clones, and give them a whole lot of Viagra for the road.
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