Analysis of the Taste Effect and Olfactory Sensations of Mint M&Ms

The company that produced M&Ms (pronounced Eminem) famously advertised that their product “melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” If there had been M&Ms in Weimar Germany would there have been a Third Reich? Many epigones and Herr Hitler himself would have been put out of business both because of their mouths being full and from the debilitating blast produced by the sugar high. The title of Francis Fukuyama’s book is The End of History and the Last Man and one would similarly wonder what effect mint flavored M&Ms would have had on both regime change and the prospect of millenarian ideologies. As anyone who has tried this relatively new addition to the M&M family will testify, the mint taste begins to assert itself at the event horizon of the M&M, ie that point where the hard shell melts and gives way to the soft center. M&Ms are guaranteed to melt in a dictator’s mouth, but the mint M&M which is hair's breath larger produces a set of taste and olfactory sensations whose net effect is to mollify and cool down even the most obdurate and headstrong sensibility. Would Uganda have had it’s bloody history if Idi Amin had been introduced to these delightfully medicated menthol pebbles? And what about Franco, Mussolini and even Pol Pot? Should the United States partner with its allies and bombard the North Korea with mint M&Ms in order to induce that countries famed film critic, Kim Jong-un, to cease cyber attacking companies who release movies he doesn’t like? What if mint M&Ms were put in Bill O’Reilly’s soup? Would he finally admit his misrepresentations? What if Brian Williams had taken a bag of mint M&M’s with him when he got on the chopper in Iraq? And let’s not forget Lance Armstrong. Will mint M&Ms someday change the course of history and eventually free us from terrorism, global warming and the endemic inequities of our economic system? Nay or yea? Hopefully posterity will answer in the affirmative.

The End of History

In an interview with Foreign Affairs (“The Polish Model," May/June 2013), Radek Sikorski, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, remarks, “The twentieth century was a roller coaster for Poland, regaining independence after World War I, then losing it and getting ethnically cleansed by Stalin and Hitler together and the 45 years of struggle for democracy. Hopefully, we’ll produce less history than in the past.” Back in the sixties the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote an influential tome called The End of Ideology and then in the 90’s Francis Fukuyama created a stir with his The End of History and the Last Man. Like Sikorski’s prediction about Poland, are the great powers at the threshold of a new Age of Aquarius? Despite the turbulence in the Mideast, is the modern world on the verge of a period of ideological calm, in which McCluhan’s Global Village will be a practical every day reality? Will terrorist ideologies go the way of colonialism, fascism and communism? Will connectivity become like the water that killed the Wicked Witch of the West? Sikorski’s locution is that of the modern European state united with contemporaries by common currencies and political objectives. Will the EU eventually become a world union or WU, with the Euro giving way to the Global? Will the information age and the internet create one union, without passports or borders, where publishers no longer produce histories, at least the kind which recount battles for  ethnic hegemony, economic domination and political control?