The sheik look
The march of human progress had been for the most part a steady, if not stately, thing up to this point. Though the earth had been groaning ever more plaintively under its burden of people, and local wars and Eco-disasters came and went with each season, we seemed poised to enter a possibly glorious, albeit tumultuous, twenty-first century.
There was one recent problem of larger dimensions. But it touched our daily existence only in the incidental color of things. There were two prongs to our attack on it, which created this change. The one sprang out of the other and they were constantly grouped together in the news and came to be called, half-jokingly, the "white plight."
The slow but steady deterioration of the atmosphere finally demanded the concerted attention of scientists and world leaders in one great conference, but not before it was far gone. Already large numbers of animals near the poles had gone blind, while skin cancers and miscarriages were on the increase. But worst of all, the world's food production was hurt, blighted by radiation, and now unable to support our ever-growing numbers.
We knew that the ozone layer was irreversibly damaged for a time. If we stopped the pollution it would still take nature generations to restore it. So scientists came up with defences, not cures to the problem. They would fortify us and our crops against the radiation, through chemistry and genetic engineering.
Amazing breakthroughs had been occurring in all fields recently. A hardier replacement for chlorophyll, called "glaucophyll" was developed for plants, and introduced with surprising efficiency. But its effects were marginal. For humans an eye drop was created that glazed the eye a glassy white, not impairing vision yet protecting it from damage, and at the same time sunscreens were developed that shielded our skins. But all these schemes were still too awkward and incomplete to satisfy us.
So another congress of scientists came up with the plan of seeding the skies with a permanent layer of high-altitude clouds, designed in part out of molecules related to plastics that would last decades. Our air forces were deployed and the plan put into effect. Though it worked to thin out the radiation reaching us, turning our skies a universal white, they found that it couldn’t completely protect the fragile plant world.
And so huge glasshouses were built, at an even greater cost than all the previous measures combined. But our food supply was ensured. The only change was actually a healthy one. Meat became a luxury. We could no longer support an inefficient cattle industry, as a large portion of our herds had already succumbed to blindness and sterility. We ate meat substitutes and used dyes to color our white vegetables their former hues. Our dished-up meals still looked the same as they had in simpler times and still tasted the same, and we told ourselves with confidence that nothing had changed.
And nothing really had changed yet in the basic order of things. Science and industry still progressed and seemed to be keeping pace in solving the problems they themselves created. The third world was still in a dismal state, with starvation and wars and waste and disease. But somehow we seemed to be making progress even here. A new, world consciousness was surfacing with our global media. People around the world watched the very same broadcasts, simultaneously translated by computers into twenty languages. Old racial and cultural prejudices were breaking down. A close-knit global family was being formed.
With the advent of the new sunscreens, which turned the skin white for weeks on end, a sort of white craze developed. Race and color were declared a thing of the past. We spent long hours outdoors again, and a strong sense of liberation and brotherhood was felt. It became a fad at this time, which everyone could afford, to go about completely dressed in white. The young all sported Arabian-style robes and headgear, which they called the "sheik" look.
Because half the world had been necessarily turned white, I suppose it was one of those human quirks to mimic this and turn the rest of it white. All-white furniture and houses and cars became the fashion. It was a sort of non-religious precursor to the "fad" that followed, like an innocent, smiling babe we fondled and nurtured, soon to grow up into another Hitler or Stalin, a monster, with the same dire results for mankind, only this time victorious.
As could be expected the paint manufacturers were quick to promote such a lucrative rage, and it was at this time that one of the largest in the industry came up with the “millennium” formula. This was the cutting edge in paint technology, a paint that flowed and covered far more smoothly than any other, lasting eternities, and of such a radically new chemistry, that it could claim to be environmentally safe, and completely non-toxic.
I well remember seeing the billboards that went up everywhere, with the lovely, naked, jewelry-decked figure of a popular singer of the day, her slender, white body almost blending in with the plush, white couch on which she lay, holding to her lips a glass of this miraculous liquid, as if it were milk, and with the caption: "So safe, you can drink it."
Unfortunately, hundreds of millions of gallons of this paint were produced and stored away at the crucial moment. If was as if an unlucky conspiracy of circumstances were forming to point our way down the path that led to our present, perfect sterility.
