COMMENTS & CURIOSITIES:

I can’t recommend it. There is very little to be said for getting old. I would avoid it if I were you. But if you insist on hanging around forever, as I have, a funny thing happens.

Eventually, everything old is new again, which is why a small item caught my eye this week, to wit, the Newport Beach City Council has asked the Metropolitan Water District to delay its plans to add fluoride to our water.

Why? Because some people are concerned that fluoride is somewhere between bad for you and poison, which is also bad for you. Talk about déjà vu all over again. At the height of the Red Scare, some folks became convinced that putting fluoride in water was a Communist plot.

It was all part of a master plan, they said, by which Communists were going to rule the world. The most angst about fluoride came from the farthest reaches of the far right, like the John Birch Society, which quoted all sorts of pseudo-science that fluoride caused everything from rotting teeth to bone loss to a zombie-like, heavily sedated state.

Docile, barely awake Americans would leave their cities without resisting while the Reds march down Pennsylvania Avenue and raise the Hammer and Sickle or the Red Star over the Capitol. You probably think I’m making this up. I’m not.

In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” Sterling Hayden is brilliant as Gen. Jack D. Ripper, who initiates an unauthorized nuclear strike against the Soviet Union because he’s convinced it’s the only way to stop the Communist plot to “ sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.” That line got a huge laugh from audiences because those words were lifted almost verbatim from John Birch Society pamphlets condemning fluoride in drinking water.

Forty-five years later, opposition to fluoride in drinking water is making a comeback — nowhere near the hysteria of the 1950s, but getting noisy nonetheless — despite more than four decades of evidence that the only thing fluoridated water and toothpaste have done is virtually eliminate cavities in young people, without a single case of zombie-like Americans deserting cities while the Communists move in and set up shop.

But here’s the fascinating twist: Whereas the fluoride-induced frenzy was a far- right-wing phenomenon way back when, today, it’s much more prevalent on the far left.

According to the updated conspiracy theory, it isn’t the Reds that are trying to poison us, but multinational businesses, which devised a diabolical plan 50 years ago to dispose of a toxic form of fluoride that is a by-product of making aluminum by dumping it in the water supply.

Both consumer advocate Ralph Nader and the Sierra Club have claimed that fluoridated water could cause bone cancer, thyroid problems, bone loss, discolored teeth and, my personal favorite — lowered IQ. Sound familiar? Gen. Jack may be gone, but he is not forgotten. I knew this would happen. They’re after our precious bodily fluids again.

Urban legends are always interesting, to me anyway, but the ones that stick around for years are downright fascinating.

There will always be people who believe that the scenes of American astronauts on the moon were shot in a studio somewhere, that cellphones cause brain cancer, Sasquatch is out there somewhere, mixing Pop Rocks and soda can kill you, people who party too hearty with strangers wake up in hotel rooms missing a vital part, and aliens are abducting more people than you can count, to say nothing of the old gal who tried to dry her little dog by putting it in a microwave and you can guess the rest.

No matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, you’re not going to talk them out of it. But when those legends last for decades, it is nothing if not entertaining.

I give you my personal promise that AOL or Microsoft is not going to pay you money no matter how many special e-mail messages you send, no one in Nigeria needs your help getting $130 million out of the country, and Nostradamus couldn’t predict who’s going to win the AFC-West let alone how the next World War will start.

Two-thirds of the United States, which is about 200 million people, have been drinking fluoridated water for decades. I’m sure there are some zombies out there who are not too bright and have bad teeth, but that’s caused by reality TV, not fluoride.

So there you have it. Fluoridated water, the impact on our precious bodily fluids and Armageddon. Did you ever miss someone so much it hurts and you can hardly think? I can’t tell you how much I miss Stanley Kubrick. Drink up. I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.