All indications are that tomorrow, the city of Portland will join this list of “Communities which have rejected Fluoride since 1990“, thus pushing out a new wave of the headlines ala the new “insert the name of geographical unit” unit of “What’s the Matter with — “?

For this list, a top 40 city would be quite a coup — somewhat thumping all these (and let’s toss out Australia and Canada for the moment) largely small towns.  Albuquerque being about the best comprarble unit for comparisons sake, and that figures.

Apparently a whole swarth of Nebraska had a big Fluoride overthrow party on Election day 2008.  And Utah in 2002.

I take it as a theory of a tribal sense of politics that if we could just transplant a bunch of those Nebraskans and Utahans and have them running around the city actively opposing Water Fluoridation, as well as calling for — for instance — Obama’s Impeachment over Benghazi and waxing poetic about never ever having their guns taken away from them– Portland would end up voting for Fluoridation.

As it were… we get this:

While there are surely conspiracy theorists and anti-government militants among the ranks of today’s Clean Water Portland, the organization’s spokespeople and supporters generally do not express the conservative rhetoric (such as invoking “socialized medicine”) that defines fluoride opposition elsewhere. Such tactics would never work in this liberal city. Instead, opponents rely on attachment to the environment and natural health care, as well as the current mistrust of pretty much all institutions.

“We have many better alternatives that people aren’t speaking about, including Obamacare’s federal dollars to support the state for low-income oral health,” says Barnes, of Clean Water Portland. “What is alarming to me … is that [fluoride includes] known contaminants … I don’t think it makes any sense to add more contaminants to our kids’ water.”

And then you can count on the Wall Street Journal to dip about for “local color”.  Because we need the opinion of The Decemberists to balance the opinion of the Dandy Warhols.

Pro-fluoriders have their own rock-band supporters. Among them, apparently, is Colin Meloy, member of Portland’s revered alternative band, The Decemberists. “How can you hate on the GOP for being creationist science deniers and then go on about how vaccines and fluoridation are poison,” reads a January post on his Twitter account, which is linked from the website colinmeloy.com. In April, the account tweeted disdain for the anti-fluoride documentary, “An Inconvenient Tooth.”
Decemberists Manager Jason Colton declined to comment on the tweets and said no member of the band wishes to discuss fluoridation. Mr. Meloy couldn’t be reached for comment.

In a few days we’ll get that mass of responses about the public and what they wanted and I’ll be reminded that everyone is a situational populist and and a situational elitist.  I’ll muse about a connection between this vote and the fact that the Church of Scientology claims they want to turn the city into the “First Scientology City”, because I do believe in connecting the dots.

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