Untruth In Advertising

In looking for a name to call this article, I thought of the word "disinformation", which by itself is indecipherable. Examples are the best way to illustrate these advertising tricks.  Whatever is being sold, whether it is cars, snacks, sunglasses, or kids' vitamins, might start with a line like,  "Next time you take the family out on a road trip...." which assumes many things that may not necessarily be true.  The marketer targets his statistics-proven audience by assuming that they are married, have children, live in the suburbs, and have disposable income.  Often, it is difficult to understand at the beginning of these ads what the item being sold is going to be, but it doesn't matter because the same marketing techniques work for everything.  The "take the family on a drive" slogan leaves out single people, inner city dwellers, bus riders, the unemployed and the poor.  It insinuates that a person is not 'normal' if he doesn't want the latest car, massive television, or display of holiday selfies. This exclusion creates masses of unsatisfied people, who are chasing after a dream that has been created by a company looking for profit.  It is an open secret that advertising works best when it creates its own market.  The billion-dollar perfume industry has prospered by using this concept. The consumer is not being sold the actual bottle of scent, but the image of someone who is a Hugo Boss man or a Chanel wearer.  What chance does an ugly duckling from Cincinnati have?  She buys the perfume and deludes herself with Instagram duck-face filtered photos that she has the glamorous life of a Parisian model.  It all starts with the first lie about who people are and what they want.  Like the claim that we in the West live in democracies that are approved by the majority of the people, the narrative being sold is a lie.  If voting is only done by 60% of the population and those votes are split into parties, governing rights can be claimed by those who have the majority of the voters, but are not the majority of the population.  Democracy ends up being governance by a minority. 

Watching a commercial for Volkswagen, I saw a type of bullying advertising that made my blood boil.  We see a man in front of his house retrieving the morning paper, and as he does so, he sees "your" new Volkswagen in the driveway next door.  The newspaper is already a clue that is meant to undermine the man's credibility.  Having a newspaper delivered to his door every morning is a signal that says 'old school'.  Newspapers are a waste of paper.  An up-to-date man would check the news on his phone.  Clearly, this man is not in sync with the times.   A female voice that is sure of itself, even a little righteous, says, "Your neighbour (meaning the man with the paper) thinks Volkswagens are expensive to maintain."   Next, we see him in his kitchen pouring lumpy milk into his coffee.  We wonder why he would do this, and we are meant to think he is too stupid to tell the difference between good and bad.  The man appears to be single.  Why hasn't his wife checked the milk, as he seems to be inept at doing so?   The false reality of a single, incapable, unshaven man in a slightly messy house is designed to undermine whatever the man's opinion is.  Volkswagen is a progressive company, so they'll accept single men as customers, even though they are clearly flawed.  Maybe he is married, but he is an early riser, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.  The female sales voice says, "He also thinks the milk is perfectly fine, so maybe don't listen to him." This implies that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive is a dolt who doesn't care if he poisons himself with sour milk.  It is a type of groupthink that was used by the Nazis to make people believe that if they didn't think like the rest of the group, who had already been brainwashed and conditioned by the state, they were crazy and misguided dissenters.  The Nazis put them in concentration camps, the Russians in insane asylums.  

It is a fact that some cars are more expensive than others.  Nobody would dispute that a Ferrari is costly to buy and maintain.  A Volkswagen is not a Ferrari, but it is not a bottom-of-the-range vehicle.  The company is not denying the car is expensive and lets itself off the hook by having 'your neighbour' as just one stupid person, but it skates close to the edge of semantic hair-splitting, which in this case could be construed as lying. Compared to some cars, Volkswagens are expensive.  They are good cars, but they cost more than many other brands, and rightly so because they are well-made.  But to imply that anyone who thinks a Volkswagen is expensive overall must be ignorant, misguided, or insane is a technique that is as old as propaganda. Unfortunately, there is a world of weak-minded, easy-answer, gullible, and brainwashed consumers out there who will be intimidated by the company's insinuation that they, too, could be sour milk drinkers.  It is impossible and undemocratic to outlaw double-speak since diplomacy is based on it, but the psychological games used in marketing should be taught in grade school. A degree of critical thinking can save a lot of heartbreak and disillusionment later in life, but the companies trying to sell products would prefer that the underpinnings of their seamless lies are not visible.

In a more crass and equally dangerous arena, politicians are often straightforward liars.  They will say things like "Under this leader, the country is on the road to ruin," when the opposite is true. Some people believe what politicians say, since they must be upstanding enough to get elected and sworn into office, but telling the truth is not something politicians promise to do. Either side is capable of the one-note propaganda which tells lies not only by omission but as bald-faced untruths.  Being caught in an outright lie should be grounds for shame and censure, but in the political world, the ability to lie without blinking is considered an asset rather than an impediment.  We have become so used to untruths being told by advertisers and our governments that pundits consider we are living in an age of 'post-truth', which I can only take to mean an age of invented, altered reality.  This disconnect with objective facts has the effect of isolating people in their own magic bubbles where everything they choose to believe is true, while what they choose not to believe is a lie. A society that drifts too far into the distortion of provable facts creates a disunited, bickering population that is easy to control.  That is the objective. 

Chasing The High

America's inner cities are dying from a drug overdose. City centers that were once the backbone of commerce were abandoned as the suburbs expanded and industry moved away.  These urban wastelands have become home to legions of modern-day zombies.  Some of these neglected downtown areas were already known as hangouts for the drunk, addicted, and homeless, but since fentanyl hit the streets in 2005, the population of vacant humans has spread like an uncontrolled infection.  This is the American dream come home to roost.  

Unique in the world, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence included not only the right to life and liberty, but the right to the pursuit of happiness.  It also stated that all men are created equal, but this was in an age when "all men" didn't include women, blacks, or men without property.  The phrase about the pursuit of happiness was meant as a right that the chosen class of men should have to enjoy their property in safety, security, and happiness.  It was never intended as a guarantee of happiness for the entire population, which is how many in the last century have wrongly interpreted it. When people believe their government owes them happiness, they are disappointed when this doesn't turn out to be true and believe that their government has betrayed them. How often have we heard Americans protesting that something is their right as citizens, as if the accident of their birthplace has given them special status among humans?  The Bill of Rights says in so many words that Americans have been endowed with these rights by the Creator.  Dragging the name of God into the rights of man obscures the fact that man is only allowed rights that are conceded to him by his master, whether that be his government, his employer, or his peers.   It is apparently not a human right to kill his fellow man unless his government declares the opposite and sends him to war.

The expectation of certain things by a population inevitably leads to disappointment.  To lessen the disillusionment when things don't go as planned, Americans have come to expect that there will be immediate, easy remedies, and if there are not, it must be someone's fault.  In the early, rampant capitalism of infant America, snake oil salesmen promised a cure for every ailment, and so the pharmaceutical industry was born.  Feeling unhappy?  Drink this.   Feeling depressed? Take a pill.  Feeling hopeless?  We will show you God.  America has never stopped chasing the high of a promised land that never was. When politicians shout about Making America Great Again, they are selling a dream that was never a reality.   There have always been holes in the dream.  The dream is only conceded to those with money, property, and the willingness to exploit others. 

Schizophrenic America can have a presidential campaign that thunders on about Saying No To Drugs, while the main street of every small town has a neon arrow pointing to a glossy storefront pharmacy and that spells out in huge letters, the word Drugs.  Schizophrenia is the policy.  Take drugs, don't take drugs.  Maybe just take the socially acceptable ones, like alcohol or others that the doctor prescribes, but don't take the ones that mother says are bad.  

Those who are disappointed with their lives are encouraged to seek remedies outside themselves because they can't find answers elsewhere.  Some turn to religion, some to all-consuming phobias, from obsessive cleaning to hoarding, hoping to block the emptiness of their existence. Many of these lost souls have reason to be untethered.  Their religion and state have let them down, and the drugs aren't a permanent fix.  Unfortunately, many are not brave or intelligent enough to understand the origins and objectives of their governments or religions, and mistakenly believe that these institutions should be responsible for their well-being.  

There is another problem with the slide into drug consumption, with which the users hope to keep the disappointment and unhappiness at bay.  Once a person is prescribed certain medicines, there is a fear on the part of the drug taker that if they give them up, they will relapse and might be unhappy, something they believe is unacceptable in Thomas Jefferson's Bill of Rights.  If a doctor prescribes medicine for high blood pressure, it is understood that this medication needs to be taken for life.  There is not a doctor alive who will advise a patient to stop their hypertension medication.   Patients are led to assume that if they stop their meds, they will die, and doctors don't contradict this notion.  "Of course you can stop," they say, "but it's your funeral."  Antidepressant medications are much the same.  A doctor might go so far as to suggest that a patient could taper off antidepressants, but the reluctance this time lies with the patient.  Will I go crazy again if I stop?  Many are unwilling to take that chance.  Drug companies would prefer that once we are on medication, we are on it for life.  That way, their profits are certain.

America is chasing its own tail.  Drugs are needed to survive the emptiness of existence, but the drugs and the attempt to use them to find nirvana are an empty solution.  Not all turn to drugs, as some go overboard with fitness, religion, games, and a thousand other distractions, rarely getting at the root of the problem. A man can be a shining example of health and fitness and have a spiritual and emotional life that is as desolate as a burned-out inner city.  Adrenaline can temporarily satisfy us, but like many drugs, it requires more to get the same effect.  

It has been said that the constant search for a high is a hedge against boredom, or maybe proof that we are alive in a restricted society.   The solution, the way off of this treadmill of chasing a high that never was, is to tear down the structures that keep every citizen in a mortal struggle for survival.  There are enough resources in America to pay everyone a generous living wage, but that does not suit the higher powers.  The billionaire class are afraid it will rob them of their control over the desperate masses who will kill each other to get the best place in the machinery. Churches are not as focused on a man's spiritual health as they are on swelling the numbers in their congregation.  More members bring more money.   With so much emptiness in their lives and with no vision of how to make things better, the perpetual search for a quick fix to make things better is as American as apple pie and just as unhealthy.  It will not be a surprise when future nations without the same poisonous baggage come along to supersede mythical but flawed America. 

Two Heads Are Better Than One

There is no doubt that Albert Einstein had a wife and a secretary to remind him to take his heart medication. He had enough going on with the Theory of Relativity and studying Gravitational Waves to tend to the necessities that kept him alive long enough to accomplish what his remarkable brain was capable of producing. All of us, at some point, could use a helpmate, a partner, a waiter, a cleaner, a social secretary, a bureaucracy cutter, an extra pair of hands, and an extra mind.  If one mind is overwhelmed by the pressures of the world, it is beneficial to have another mind to pick up the slack, as backup, power in reserve.  A second mind can keep us on track, call for reason or calm, but can also incite us to action.  Those who ignore the input of others are destined to become isolated dictators who rule over silenced populations, kings of the wasteland.  The collective knowledge of our fellow men can keep us from making catastrophic mistakes.  It is worth our while to listen.  

Folk wisdom suggests that men are bad listeners, and that may be true.  They tend to be single-minded about things and don't always consider all sides.  Maybe that is why many women are not fast shoppers.  There is a time for consideration and a time to act.  Prolonged deliberation promotes frustration, and in that state, people often make rash and harmful choices.  In our decision-making, all voices, whether they are individuals, companies, or governments, are not equal.  We tend to pay more attention to what has helped us in the past, but this can lead to stagnation, with the helpers wishing to perpetuate the status quo so they can maintain their position as valued advisors.

Every individual has the potential to bring an unknown universe to another's doorstep. We learn from each other, and if we don't, we are doomed.  We learn that we can teach one another, defend and protect one another, and if we listen, we will understand that we have basic human desires in common.  There are differences in the way each goes about fulfilling his needs. Individual cultures permit certain things that are forbidden in others, but if we can see beyond these and not go to war over the details, we can all benefit from the relationship.  

If a scientist has a brilliant idea and shares it with his colleagues, the idea can take wing, but if it goes no farther than him, it risks dying in his own mind. Collaboration and cooperation are the best ways to complete many tasks.  None of the great civilizations would have been built without these pillars, but as high-flying as these pillars seem, they are constructed through the act of one man communicating with another.   The state apparatus of these influential civilizations may have been questionable, based as it still is on versions of slavery, but with reluctant cooperation, advances were and can be made.   Many lives were sacrificed to pull the majority of the world population out of starvation.  There is backsliding, and there are leaps forward, but as MLK said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."  With goodwill and correct action, we can steer ourselves in the right direction, but we need to listen to each other to understand the varied colours of the arc and to accept them as being as valid as our own. In silence, ignorance, and rigidity lies misery.

Like minds can inspire each other to step up to new heights.  Van Gogh and Gauguin entangled their universes and bounced off each other, both coming away altered by the experience.  Each had his own style and palette. They weren't trying to compete with one another, but to show each other what they could do.  Their collaboration wasn't a sport that pushes a man beyond what he believes are his physical limits, requiring a winner and a loser, but a game of comparative virtuosity.  The goal was not to win, but to strive to be better, to run faster than before, jump longer and higher, to try for a personal best. 

We don't understand all there is to know about the chemistry of human encounters.   When we see other humans from a distance, we exchange non-verbal signals as they get closer to us, hoping for a non-violent outcome of our impending meeting. When we are a short distance from each other, we try to read body language, faces, and intent.  Even closer, we might exchange words and odours.  If we don't know the person, there may be eye contact, and there may be a greeting as we pass. If we do know the person or are intentionally meeting them, there is often some form of physical connection, a handshake, a hug, or even a kiss.  It's in this physical contact, like animals touching noses, or circling nose to tail, that we exchange molecules, perhaps bacteria or viruses, but a physical exchange happens. If we pick up a virus from the other person, something that might not require contact but simply closeness, our well-being can change.  We can bring death to one another.  In every human interaction, there is the possibility of gain or pain.  Van Gogh experienced the anguished side of the equation when he cut off his ear after Gauguin abandoned his idea of a community of artists.  Two can be stronger than one.  They can stand back to back against the slings and arrows, but they can also destroy each other. Yet someone who opts to be solitary risks floating off into the clouds like a hallucinating saint with no church to anchor him. 

The common wisdom is that it takes a village to raise a child, but I believe it takes a different type of village to teach an adult.  We never stop learning, and are always touched by the lives we encounter, whether we want to be or not. John Donne understood this when he wrote that "No man is an island entire of itself."  Since we are connected by our common humanity, we must learn to give more space to the ideas of others, to listen to considered advice, to remember our history, to embrace our divinity, and to act for good when action is necessary.   Separation, isolation, and entrenchment lead to wars, but communication, tolerance, and understanding can bring peace.  If we are able to put aside our egos and listen to others, we can arrive at solutions neither of us would have come to alone.  This is not a stand-off compromise, agreeing that one plus one will always equal one plus one, but that one plus one can equal two, lifting both parties to a better and stronger state.  The unity of two heads, two minds, and two hearts is always better than one head alone in the wilderness.

The message here is a love letter; a thanks and appreciation for all of the souls who touched me, who shared their lives with me, who gave me their sparks of genius and their diseases.  Many are lost but not forgotten, and I treasure all of those communicators who tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Pay attention to me." 

Russia's Nightmare

"At least we have a roof over our heads."  In rural Russia, where the ceilings of temporary housing disintegrate, and the earth reabsorbs the inadequate building foundations, it is a small but misguided comfort.  There is no money to fix things, and the collective apparatus has broken down, so everyone struggles to get by.  It's the best that can be hoped under the circumstances.  Anyone with aspirations has gone to the city.  The people of the land who have scratched out a living for generations, first as serfs to landowners, then on collective farms, are now cut adrift in the middle of nowhere.  The infrastructure that supplies them is rotting, and the government hopes these last outposts will disappear when the inhabitants die, and the roof really does fall in.   

When the communists took power in Russia, small landholders were forced into the collective farming system, but when that collapsed, it left individuals to whom private property was prohibited with nothing.  These people were initially robbed of their land, made into slaves of the collective, then thrown out the door when the state collapsed on its imperfect foundations.  There is a generational sadness in the eyes of men and women whose dreams have been reduced to ashes.  Like the rest of the world, they were wrenched from the age of God-sanctioned monarchs by the Godless carnage of the war.   While the West retired to lick its wounds and rebuild, Lenin decided to experiment on Russia by translating Marx's thoughts into single-party communism that had nothing to do with democracy.  Lincoln's definition of democracy was "by the people, for the people", but the Russians were only allowed half the cake.  Their government relieved them of the "by the people" burden by telling them that people didn't know what was best for them.  Until they are re-educated, they can't be trusted with the responsibility of self-governance.  Under another guise, small landholders again became serfs working under a master's whip.  If they didn't carry their weight in the collective, they were punished, not with the Tsar's riding crop, but by peer pressure and accusations about sabotaging the motherland.  Unless everyone stayed in line, the world would never know the glory of collectivism.  If a citizen stumbled, they were traitors to the noble cause. 

Rather than give an opinion on why the communist experiment went wrong, perhaps the best idea is to illustrate one of the many mistakes made by the planners of this new society.  The Russian government wanted to change the way people lived.  Workers shouldn't be at the mercy of capitalist bosses, have their wages reduced or be fired from their jobs by greedy corporate barons.  In a communist brave new world, they would be provided with essentials to live a dignified life, including an all-important roof over their heads.  In cities like St. Petersburg, where there had been a massive influx of the poor in search of work, the government of the day confiscated noble houses and partitioned them into accommodation for families.  When the communists took over, they declared that a person only required 9 square meters to live comfortably.  A few years later, this was reduced to 5 square meters, which allowed people to rent a corner of a room.  When there was no more space in converted palatial residences, the government constructed blocks of communal apartments.  They were late in doing so and were desperate to prevent a catastrophic housing crisis, so the buildings were thrown up quickly and as cheaply as possible. Usually, these communal blocks were built in newly created satellite villages on the outskirts of cities, but they were poorly served by public transit.  Nobody except a bureaucrat had a car.  

On Lenin's orders, the accommodations were to be organized on collective principles.  Each family had its own room, or two if the family was large enough, but the hallway, kitchen, and bathroom belonged to nobody.   Although these common areas should have technically been everyone's responsibility, they were considered nobody's, so if one resident made a mess, nobody cleaned up after them.  Notes were posted to remind the delinquent residents that keeping their space clean was their duty to the state, and if they failed to do so, they would be reprimanded at the next compulsory tenants meeting.  There were schedules and rules, but these were for kitchen or bathroom use, so everyone wasn't underfoot at the same time, but queues still formed.  Though each family had its own cooker, or as little as a burner on a cooker, there were not enough sinks to go round, so dishwashing times had to be staggered.  In the few bathrooms of no-man's land, everyone brought their own toilet paper and their own toilet seat.   The shotgun central hallways in these residences were lined with wardrobes, suitcases, bicycles, and crumbling boxes.  Electricity cables looped across the ceiling. Locks were not allowed on doors.  After all, everyone was part of one happy communist family.  Why would anyone steal from a comrade who was just as badly off as he was?  Lenin's objective was to "unite different social groups in one physical space," but he seriously underestimated human self-interest.  A doctor who works long hours, with life and death responsibilities, is not going to live comfortably with a drunk who is determined not to work and disrupts the entire group with his brawling and fighting.  Neither one nor the other is better off for the experience.   Communism only works for the committed, and there have always been and always will be those who do not agree with the government of the day.

I was a child in the 1950's who grew up in a small frontier town in Canada.  We didn't lack anything, had parents who worked full-time, and had a mortgage on our large, comfortable house.  There was never any expectation of paying it off. That would only happen years later when all the children had grown up and moved away.  Having two working parents allowed us to have a car and the borrowing power to replace the wood-fired heating in the house with a gas furnace that would run as long as we could afford the fuel.  Our childhood friends lived in the same circumstances, and we presumed everyone did.  Very few children lived in apartments.  There were sprawling suburbs for those who didn't want to live in the inner city.  If a family's budget didn't stretch to a house purchase, there were always houses to rent. 

If I compare this to a child growing up in Russia in the 1950's, who lived at the same latitude as me, our lives were very different.  We had neighbours, but we did not live together. Everyone had their own free-standing house on at least a fifty-foot private lot, with a front and back garden. If we didn't like our neighbourhood, we could move to another one, or to another city.  The government hardly kept track of us except to keep our address current, and we were permitted to live anywhere in the country we wished.  In a wide-open and new country like Canada, this gave its citizens a sense of limitless possibilities.  I presumed my Russian brothers lived the same way, but at that age, I had little knowledge of how hemmed in and controlled they were.  Russia had the same open spaces and possibilities, but its citizens were not encouraged to be individuals, to rebel, or to explore the country or the world for themselves.  They had a duty to the motherland that was more important than our supposedly frivolous voyages of self-discovery.

I recently heard an interview with a young woman who had grown up in Yugoslavia.  The Russian ally Tito had been in charge of keeping the country united, but by the 1960's the cracks were showing.  The young woman's parents had grown up in a society that wholeheartedly subscribed to the Russian version of communism.  Up to that time, the national factions in Yugoslavia had been at each other's throats in centuries-old tribal bickering.  The newly unified country was happy to wear its identical young socialist uniforms and do its part for the glorious nation that would show the world what miracles a communist society could perform.  Things didn't go as planned, and Yugoslavia was marginalized on the world stage.  Years of rote propaganda couldn't hold up an economy that was based more on hope than reality.  When Tito died and Yugoslavia returned to its original tribal units, the parents of the young woman were devastated.  The more European their country became, the more they realized they had been made to live and believe in an experiment that was based on a faulty interpretation of Marx, and that they had suffered and sacrificed their individuality for nothing.

Although political and economic movements like communism profess to serve the common good, scratch a human being and they will be shown to have at least some self-interest.  Everything can't be for the state.  Although it is admirable for a man to contribute to the community that supports him, he is more than that. He is an individual, and to take that essential state of being away from him is to do violence to his psyche.  

In the 1950's, European countries and large cities in America also threw up faceless housing for the post war population boom, and most of these buildings were quickly and cheaply constructed, but outside the Soviet Union, families weren't expected to live all together by a set of strict rules and believe the propaganda about sacrifices for the motherland.  Outside Russia, many of these housing projects became slums because they were not owned by the residents but by the government, so they were not maintained.  These attempts at social housing using the Russian model failed spectacularly.  In capitalist America, the government had better luck subsidizing the construction of individual residences because that's how people preferred to live.

 Half of my family origins are English / Scottish, so because of their immigration, I knew from a very young age that travelling was as easy as buying a ticket and getting on a boat or a plane.  It never entered my mind that this was unusual and that citizens of some countries, those designated as communist, were not allowed the same privileges.  Why would a country lock its citizens behind a wall?   

When I was a young man, I drove and hitchhiked through much of Europe, often meeting like-minded souls from other countries, mostly European ones, but also American and Australian.  We had little money and weren't allowed to work in foreign countries, but we had saved money from jobs we had quit when we left home.  We were free spirits who were able and allowed to go wherever we wanted.  I never met a Russian doing the same thing, but then neither did I meet anyone Chinese, unless they were American Chinese.  China was in the middle of a revolution.  I never met a black person from Africa hitchhiking around Europe, though I did meet Arabs from North Africa who had the same urge to explore as I did.  American men were scarce in those days because of the Vietnam War, but Russians were nowhere to be seen. I met a professor from Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 who had found his way out for a few days and was on a culture-absorbing rampage through as much of Europe, drinking in as much as possible before the Iron Curtain came down again.

Russians of my postwar generation had already grown up with parents who accepted communism as an everyday fact.  Spiritual life was not allowed unless it was underground, because religion was the opiate of the masses, and those who believed in God were victims of a cult of superstition.  Atheism was the official doctrine of the party.  If there ever was a country that needed to provide an opiate for its long-suffering and disillusioned workers, something to allow them to escape the monotony of their predestined future, it was Russia.   Instead, many Russians tried to forget their grey lives by drowning themselves in cheap vodka.  Besides hockey, drinking was the national sport.  Western society offered every kind of decadent temptation, although Westerners knew that the best of these things were available only to the rich.  But they also knew that with good judgment, luck, and hard work, they could become wealthy and have the stuff of their dreams as well, not something that was an option in Russia except by illegal means.  

In poor countries, often the only way to get ahead is by trickery, by cheating, and not playing by the rules.  If a man lets another steal something that is not bolted down before he does, then he is a fool.  The wise man is not the one who listens to his scruples and conscience.  He will go hungry, but the successful man is the one who got there first to claim the illicit prize.  This moral stance erodes all trust.  When people see the agents of government indulging in corruption, they understand that there are no rules and that dishonesty wins the day.  It's worrying to think about several generations of Russian people growing up like this, people who are not straightforward, who will lie and cheat to get what they want because they have been brutalized and used like lab rats by their governments until they have lost all hope or aspirations for the future.  Having a roof over their head is as much as they can expect.  Instead of dreaming about being a head comrade in some state-supported disintegrating factory, they would probably rather be cruising the Mediterranean on a luxury yacht with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a prostitute in the other, doing every decadent thing their government has denied them.  If they or their fathers had been allowed to flirt with these impossible dreams all along, they would have learned how shallow such aspirations are, but it's hard for a man to think deeply about his actions, to question his morals, when every trace of the higher human spirit has been erased from his soul by a failed experiment.

In my view, there is still time for Russia to rise from its ashes, learn from its mistakes, and build a truly socialist state that does not strip away personal initiative and allows free movement of its people.  The country has the resources to reinvent itself, but in this century, it has done nothing but resist the dubious charms of the West and try to resurrect its long-lost empire, without offering its people workable solutions for modern life. There is no reason except pigheadedness why Russia doesn't look at its Scandinavian neighbours, who have high levels of social satisfaction, and try to save the crumbling motherland from another bloody revolution, though perhaps things have gone too far by now for reason to prevail.

Phone Paradigm

The digital revolution has decimated print media and network television and changed the way we receive information. These days, a wise man would be foolish to limit his input to one editor's opinion, to squeeze his information-gathering and entertainment into a time slot dictated by a television executive. The ten o'clock news has fallen by the side of the road along with tree-gobbling newspapers and the dial telephone.  Citizens can record the day's events on mobile phones and post them on the Internet faster than traditional media empires can move their monstrous behinds. Though the legacy media have deep archives for context and experts to offer sophisticated analysis, they don't broadcast the news itself, but an ongoing aftermath of opinion, a sort of journalistic masturbation.  Meanwhile, the tom-tom drum of worldwide events is available on the screen of a small device, which a Saharan camel herder or a Tajikistani nomad has access to.   An African migrant on a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean has a cellphone.

Visual entertainment media is a sector that has grown steadily since the invention of moving pictures.  In a sense, it has been around since men painted on the walls of caves to tell hunting stories.  And thanks to our hunting and survival skills, the moving image has a visceral effect on our attention.  It draws us in like an undulating cobra.  There is a place to contemplate the image of a man on a cross, but big media tempts us with a compelling and lazier way to get the message by telling the story with heroic characters blazing across a screen.  Media conglomerates have the resources to raise production values far beyond the capabilities of an individual with a mobile phone, so it is more satisfying to watch the big boys.  Unfortunately, the nuances of the lessons are scrubbed away in the process.  Entertainment spectacles encourage us to sit back and take it in, no effort required.  All the work has been done.  Watch, don't think. While we're watching, we're offered a special deal on reclining chairs that will allow us to lose the excess weight caused by our sugar addiction and inactivity. Moving visual media fascinates us, whether it is the latest streaming blockbuster, a collection of funny videos, black and white wartime footage, a classic movie, or shaky mobile clips from the streets when revolutions take place.  

More information is available to more people than ever before, which has caused a leap forward in our understanding of each other. We can see a person in the Siberian countryside preparing vegetable stew, or another in Tokyo making rice cakes.  This low-level information exchange helps us realize that we are not so different from each other, no matter what our governments and their media would like us to believe.  

These days, if an alien landed in Africa, the event would be on social media within minutes. When the traditional news outlets pick up the story, they will speculate about what it means, but the news of aliens without the analysis would be enough to turn many of our neat scientific theories on their heads.  We know things within minutes of them taking place, and everyone can know them.  Governments may block websites, but that is as futile as trying to stop the tides.  Information and images leak through barriers in spite of efforts to destroy the evidence.  People have eyes and memories. 

Although the technological revolution has changed the way we see the world, there is also a risk of being plunged back into a new dark age. We hope that this doomsday scenario never happens, and we thank digital mobility and the role it has in helping us learn about each other. Travel broadens the mind, but when we are not allowed or able to move, we can instantly connect to see how others live and die in our simple, profound universes.  We still need businesses to provide the infrastructure for communication, the smartphone manufacturers and satellite launchers, but the platform providers who host content should have no political axes to grind.  Currying favour has always been the lifeblood of traditional news peddlers. The freedom of information that the World Wide Web offers has ripped the shabby cloak away from the man who would be king and shown him to be a money-grubbing petty dictator who will sell out to the highest bidder. Give me a phone and a walk through a favourite city, or sit down in a Greek mountain taverna, listen to an interview with a rebel from a previous generation, see a cartoon to make me laugh and remind me how human I am, or watch a refresher on how to fix a bicycle tire, and I can dial the roar of media hysteria back to its proper level. 

Apart from the phone's original function as a connective device, it has also wormed its way into so many aspects of our lives that it has become another appendage. Phone books don't exist anymore.  There was once an industry of data collection, printing, delivering, and recycling that has come to a halt.  I no longer have an address book; everything is on a phone and backed up online. I don't need a timer to know when the laundry is finished or an alarm to wake me up.  If I want to make a note of anything, my phone is always at hand.  I don't need reference books like encyclopedias or any books for that matter.  I read my news from a variety of sources without consuming a single tree.   I don't need a bus schedule, plane, or train times, as I can follow transport on a digital tracker.  I can take photos and show them to my friends or to the whole world. I can monitor my heartbeat or the intake and burning of calories.  I do my banking online and purchase goods that are delivered to my door. I can translate from Korean to French, check medical results, identify pieces of music, and so much more. The magic in a pocket that digital media offers is a science-fiction dream, but for those who cling to the traditional, the beeps, alarms, and ringtones of personal devices are an electronic death knell. The old guard can't accept what history teaches: that once the genie is out of the lamp, he can't be stuffed back in.

The bad news is that we didn't know when we let the genie free that he would have a flea in his ear.  Now that the flea has grown a million-fold and become an infestation of individual users who believe that their ignorance has the same value as knowledge.  The algorithms that are programmed into hosting sites cater to individual users by suggesting content that is similar to the user's viewing choices, will show only that to the viewer and leave aside the larger picture.  This has created a society of individual insects without the sophisticated organizational skills of a honeybee, who are more like wasps that will attack and dismember each other. These individuals have no group-massage instinct toward the greater good, only their individual survival.  The Internet brings a unique and beneficial connectivity to our hive, but we must be on guard against the deadly wasps that are always ready to attack communal hives.

The Unreconstructed Man

Sex is something everyone should have, but finding the right person to do it with is as easy as solving a Rubik's Cube.  Of course, there are rare Casanovas who can solve the thing in four seconds, but what fun is that? Sex should be easier than a twisting plastic cube, but it seems the further along we get in time, the more complicated the puzzle gets.  Sex used to have only two sides, but now there are at least as many as there are in a cube.  Until LGBTQ+ came along, there was only MF, and I don't mean motherf***er.

In the middle of the 20th century, feminists were loud in their insistence that women should have a voice, and I think you'd agree that this is correct. As the women's movement gained traction, men stopped asking "What's a woman doing at the head of a successful company?" If a man had a brain cell that wasn't dominated by testosterone, he might see that it would be as stupid as asking why a redheaded man could climb to the top of a ladder.  As women gained status and power, role models popped up, women as heads of state, as astronauts, university chancellors, referees, jockeys, soccer and hockey players, and soldiers.  We're still waiting on the lady General who will lock up the boy's war toys until he learns how to use them responsibly. 

Women have found their feet. With their emotional intelligence, multi-tasking skills, and sense of continuity and community, they can keep things in perspective, to see the bigger picture, unless someone has stolen their parking space, and then the verbal guns come out.

In the 20th century, while the role of women changed from wife and homemaker to tax-paying member of society, a reconstruction of the male took place.  There was the Manchurian Candidate, a film about brainwashing, and a decade after that, The Six Million Dollar Man, with its "We can rebuild him" tagline.  Women and men were both going through changes, but women seemed to know where they were going, and men only heard that they should be 'bigger, stronger, and faster' as well as modifying their social behaviour to respect the opposite sex. For a lot of men, this was like stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time.  Some men went shooting forward, others crept slowly forward, making a lot of noise and smoke, but many men stayed where they were, spinning their wheels until their motors internally hemorrhaged. Those are the unreconstructed types.

"Enlightened women have taught their brothers, sons, and lovers to walk side by side with them or even a step behind, never in front. When a woman wants something, she expects her partner to be there to provide it, to protect her, to back her up when she needs support, and to carry at least half the weight of the household.  Men have been taught that they should hold doors open for women, that it is alright to push baby carriages, buy tampons, and tell women sweet lies about their bodies.  A man should also put the toilet seat back down when he has finished pissing all around the bowl.  Reconstructed men accept this role because if they want a balanced rapport with a woman in the 21st century, they have no choice.  Women have let men rule for millennia, so it is high time men know how it feels to be on the receiving end.  You men out there, have you ever thought about how it feels to be asked if the reason you are cranky is that you are on your period?  You would probably snap back a hard NO, and marvel that anyone could ask you such a question. How would you feel if someone asked you if you were behaving like a bitch because you hadn't shot your load in too long?  Reconstructed men have been taught not to even think it.  

These recent changes in male behaviour have highlighted an existential dilemma for men. The modern man, the reconstructed man, with his "happy wife, happy life" submissiveness, has a counterpart who doesn't wish to be tamed.  This is the unreconstructed man.  This man has no restrictions on toilet seats, shopping trips, what he eats or drinks,  the people he hangs out with, or that he picks his nose.  Laugh.  I've seen you do it.

The unreconstructed man has not been hemmed in or feminized, and if he finds a partner, the relationship is adversarial.  This man is number one in his world.  He doesn't take his shoes off in the house and doesn't iron clothes.  He doesn't change the toilet paper, clean the sink, or put the cap back on the toothpaste.  He pretends he hasn't heard of recycling and throws his beer cans in the trash along with pizza scraps and coffee grounds.  He whistles at women from the window of his truck, and sings out dulcet phrases to them like “Hey baby, I want to f*** the lips off you.”  There are many ways for this man to send the message to women that they are there for his pleasure.  This man likes his women bountiful, not skinny, unless they have big tits, and then he will forgive the rest of the body.  He sees his women as sex cushions, then baby makers, then mothers who will look after his every need.  He engages in slut shaming, not seeing that his own behaviour is worse than that of those he criticizes.  Hands up, you men who have been guilty of this.  Nobody?  Well then, you're all remarkable specimens, gentlemen.  If only we could believe you.

Unreconstructed men are xenophobic and racist because they don’t trust anyone who isn't like them. They exhibit a tribal instinct that prevents them from trusting strangers, even if they are from the next village, no matter the colour of their skin. The stranger is different, unknown, and potentially dangerous.  They're like dogs circling each other, baring their teeth. It's not a coincidence that most unreconstructed men are straight white males who had submissive mothers.  Any of you out there who had mothers who said "No damn way" to being put in her place are the lucky ones and will probably find a chair at the table in the next century.  The throwbacks will be left peering through the bars, fighting over scraps, too stuck in the gumboots of their forefathers to understand what they are doing wrong.  They will put on the guilty and sorry look of a dog caught shredding rubbish all over the kitchen floor.  "Did you do that?"  "Yes, mum."  "Why?"  "Something just came over me." "Bad dog!"

Unreconstructed men make inappropriate jokes, while reconstructed men don't tell jokes because all humour is at the expense of someone.  Unreconstructed men use swearing as their first choice of self-expression, while reconstructed men swear only in private and try not to use religious or sexist epithets.  Unreconstructed men don't know the difference between their inside voice and their outside voice, while reconstructed men often have to be told to speak up. An unreconstructed man doesn’t read instructions or ask for help, not even when his Ikea table is upside down. He uses climate-destroying aerosol in the bathroom and doesn't close the door when he is on the toilet. He prefers his women barefoot, pregnant, and indoors, carrying out their gender assigned duties.

An unreconstructed man wants sex when and how he wants it, usually at 5 am when every male gets a dream boner.  His preferred position is anything dominant.  He refuses to give up his addictions but prefers that women in his orbit don't have any.  When he is ill, he thinks he is dying and never takes a basin to bed because he is not the one who will clean up afterwards. He prefers to get into a made bed, but he never makes it himself.  

The unreconstructed man is a hunter by instinct.  If he has nowhere to indulge this urge, he will play video games, often ones where he is the first-person shooter.  Pow, pow, pow. The unreconstructed man laughs at his own jokes.  He has learned the basics of computers and smartphones, and feels compelled to make comments, but he is intimidated by critics who make fun of his spelling, so when he has something to say, he expresses it in phonetic form, like "aaiiyyaaah!" or "oooffaahh!"

Some are threatened by this refashioning of social norms because they believe that gender roles are fixed.  Anthropologists, those professional people watchers, tell us that these apparently inborn traits are not permanent and have constantly evolved to help us survive in varying climates and societies.   But even with the advances women have made in the 20th century, we still live in a patriarchal society.  If an unreconstructed man denies this fact, he should turn the tables and ask himself what a matriarchal society would look like and what his place would be in it.  In short, he will not be at the top of the totem pole or at the bottom.  Matriarchies have existed in the past and may exist again, and their resurgence would send a host of unreconstructed patriarchal Neanderthals running for cover like vampires fleeing from sunlight. There will be holdouts in the new order, throwbacks who will be recorded in history as maladapted dinosaurs.  So men, get your nurturing papers in order, because when women realize they have to take up arms to root out the last obstacles to progress, to beat the patriarchs at their own game, there will be some serious homemaking skills to be learned.  But women should also be wary because, as a threatened species, unreconstructed men may go to ground and claim they are fighting for their survival, which, though true, is a lost cause.  Unreconstructed men will be consigned to that crowded place, the wrong side of history, in the illustrious company of Mussolini, Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Gaddafi, and Donald Trump.

So, to any men out there who have a strong strain of the caveman in them, it's time to reconstruct yourselves so we can create a more balanced society for the next generation to inherit.  Put down the PlayStation and be a man, a real man, a he-man, a man who holds up his share of the sky.

What the Hell is Gay?

Don’t get me wrong. I am a man who is proud to be gay, but I am sometimes confused about what exactly that is. Gays are a minority as they make up only about ten percent of the population.  If being gay didn't bring with it serious consequences, it would be no different from having green eyes or being left-handed.  People have an instinctive fear of the unknown, so ethnic minorities suffer racial slurs because it is impossible to hide what they are, nor would they want to. The mothers or fathers of racial minorities might give them tips on how to survive in an alien culture, but gays and lesbians often hide from their parents and are unable to articulate the reasons why they struggle to fit in.   
 
It’s entirely appropriate that the rainbow flag has become a rallying symbol for LGBTQ people because there are so many hues of sexual orientation, that only a rainbow having a psychedelic dream could represent them. There isn't enough space here to unravel all of the colours, so I will stick to what I know and explore the gay male part of the spectrum.

There has been a sea change in gay male behaviour in the 21st century.   When the sexual liberation of the 1960s bloomed, many men understood that, along with women, they had the right to love whoever they wanted, and that society's backlash against this was outdated and prejudicial. Through the last decades of the 20th century, being gay went from something secret and scandalous to showing itself off in gay pride marches.  As unabashed gay life opened up, men were surprised to discover how many others there were like them.  In the gay community, they found that their preferences were not a sin or something to be ashamed of.  The more men who came out of the closet, the more they were accepted by the straight population.  Everybody knew somebody, or had a relative or a friend who was gay. 

This acceptance caused a sexual shift in the next generation.  Children grew up with the knowledge that it was okay to be gay.  If men wanted to colour their hair, wear nail polish, leather jackets, or call their friends bitches, it was nobody's business but theirs.  Along with this openness, the cultural arbiters and opinion makers honed in on certain aspects of gay culture they found worth exploiting.  What could be funnier than watching a man in a wig tottering around on unaccustomed high heels?  The problem with this stereotype is that people come to believe that the comic character with a feather boa and wig is what being gay is all about. They assume every gay man wishes to be a woman, so they make them into figures of fun since everyone assumes the clown in high heels will come to a bad end.  This misinformation has led many young men who suspected they were gay to commit suicide.  They didn't behave like the mincing stereotype and had no desire to wear women's clothes.  Their sexual preference for men would make marriage to a woman dishonest and harmful.  There would be no children.  What they imagined their future would be had been extinguished.  Some found no way out of this impossible situation except death. 

Rather than cry about tragic statistics, I believe that those who peddle ideas to media conglomerates should get off the gravy train of humorous tropes and portray gay men and women as they really are. There have been attempts, but television still desperately milks the comic vein.  The connected world we inhabit today is made up of many people who don't fit the family model of two parents of the opposite sex, with two children, living in a home in the suburbs. Fewer people than ever fit the example of what is considered the default. It is possible that if all the non-traditional family units, including single people, were counted, they might outnumber the traditional ones. Roles have changed. People's lives have changed.  They no longer feel stigmatized for living by their own lights, for finding a way to survive and thrive that works for them in today's world.  As the expression goes, "I'll do me."

Gay couples are a part of the landscape because humans have an instinct to be partnered, though many gays prefer to stay single, given the stereotypical strictures of traditional fidelity.  People who are not gay don't realize that for a gay man to work in an office of only men is like a straight man working in an office of only women. The sexual tension and temptation are difficult to deny.  Although it is not the same for all gay men, some of their interest in other men is sexual, some of which involves penetration.  This is not something straight couples ever have to consider.  Because of this, there are categories gay men have organized themselves into that a straight man would never think about.  There is a minefield of sexual preferences to sort out at first contact.   If either party in this complex mating ritual draws a line and says, "I won't do that," the connection can fail completely, or the two might settle into being just friends, and in some cases, friends with benefits.  

There are tops. There are bottoms.  Some men are 100% tops, and some are 100% bottoms.  There are tops who sometimes bottom and bottoms who sometimes top.  There are power bottoms who take control of penetration and power tops who are sexually aggressive and long-lasting. There are transvestites, drag queens, and transgender individuals. There are men who behave like drag queens but don’t dress up in women’s clothes.  There are men who are gay but prefer an ultra-masculine look with facial hair instead of a smooth face, but who give themselves away as soon as they speak.  There are men who are gay but show no evidence of it in either speech, dress, or manners. There are men who will only have sex with another man if there is an emotional connection, and there are men who will have sex with anyone and anything.  There are daddies and sons, bears and cubs, masters and slaves, leather men and sissies. Although the gay community has always celebrated diversity, the general trend seems to be toward the asexual, neutral, and celibate.  It could be that this trend was the result of AIDS and other STDs, causing some young men to judge it too risky to engage physically.  It was safer to connect online.  Apart from a strong eeewww factor in a snowflake generation that has never known the blood and guts of life, there is also an economic consideration for young people.  Setting up on their own when they have no experience cooking a meal or paying a bill is daunting for them, and having children would be unthinkable when they are still children themselves.  A few generations of this cultural shift away from breeding might get the world's spiralling population under control.   

Most scientists accept that homosexuality is caused by a combination of genetics, hormones, and some post-natal influences.  The genetic element is passed through the mother's side, and the hormonal influences take place in the womb.  Although the cake is baked by the time the child is born, there are some postnatal factors, such as parental and societal permissiveness, which can determine whether children grow into or away from their natural tendencies. 

The public isn't generally aware of all the conditions a child can be born with.  There are birth defects like a cleft palate or a clubfoot that can be fixed with surgery, but there are others that involve organs not being fully connected, partially missing, or in the wrong place.  I once wrote a novel that had a hermaphrodite as the main character, and learned in my research that although the majority of people are born with the standard X and Y chromosomes in combination, XX for female and XY for male, some are born with XXY chromosomes, or XXXY.  Some of these combinations cause conditions that result in babies being misgendered by doctors, and some are said to cause psychological problems. 

Although medical science continues to study the causes of homosexuality, there is reason to worry about how the knowledge could be used.  Once a condition is fully understood, there are questions about whether its course should be altered.  Treatments might be developed to prevent serious diseases by tampering with an embryo's genetics, and before long, the techniques might be applied to eye colour or other physical traits. At that point, how long would it take before there are similar alterations to eliminate homosexuality? It would be unethical to do this, but the worst among us have been known to behave in unethical ways.  Given the uptick in singles and childless gay couples, scientific fixes for homosexuality are unethical and counterproductive.  Whatever it means to be gay, which is different for every man and woman, it would be a crime to rob humanity of the kaleidoscopic manifestations of a third sex. 

Book Burning

I admit to the cultural sin of burning books.  It was a long time ago, and I did it to free myself from others' opinions.  At the time, my Marxist wife and I, always on the hunt for a better house with cheaper rent, had just moved for the 4th time in 2 years.  We had enlisted my family to help us move, but after carrying box after box of books into our new place, they suggested that the next time around, they would pool their resources and hire a moving company for us.  As we settled in for winter, we started using the fireplace in the big living room to reduce our heating bills.  One night, we found ourselves in a discussion about excess baggage in our lives, both emotional and physical.  In my head, I heard the words of her ex-boyfriend, a golden-haired hippie who often repeated Occam’s Razor like a mantra, that we shouldn't “complicate entities beyond necessity”.  Since my own mother was a person who hated clutter and would casually discard things she didn't use, my preference for travelling light came with my genes.  My wife was a banker's daughter who was used to moving as her father climbed the corporate ladder.  Unlike her parents, she didn’t want to be saddled with the accoutrements of a bourgeois life.  She had saved no furniture from her turbulent life before we met, but in the ten years since she had earned her University degree, she had hung onto her boxes of textbooks like they made her education legitimate.  She had paid good money for them.  

There was no second-hand bookstore that would accept the superseded textbooks except to be recycled for pulping, so they were the first to be consigned to the flames.  To be clear, it is difficult to start a fire with only books. One page at a time will burn, but tearing and scrunching up every page of a Bible-like tome would take an eternity, and we had boxes of the stuff to get rid of.  A crackling fire of Douglas fir split-logs was set roaring in the fireplace before the books went in, but the books could only be fed in one at a time, like spooning out food to a fussy baby.  Dumping a boxload of them onto the flames would have smothered the conflagration like a fire-blanket.  

The books we decided to burn were mostly works of criticism.  There was literary criticism, criticism of economic theories, social deconstructions, and cultural misreadings. We agreed that critiques of critiques added nothing new to the world and did nothing to solve real problems. The red line on what had merit was tested when it came to Ruskin’s writing on Venetian architecture or Sartre’s Saint Genet.  What was derivative and what was original?  Tears would not be shed by anyone if the second-hand opinions were consigned to the flames.  It was just as well we weren’t burning the texts to heat the house because books don’t burn easily.  To stay alight, they had to be poked open and flipped over like steaks on a grill.  Sometimes, more firewood had to be piled on top to consume the resistant spines as if they were the heaviest bones of a cremated animal.  The book burning was a liberating experience for both of us, because as educated people, we had been taught it was an offence to civilization. The next day, all that remained in the fireplace were a few fragments in the ash, puzzle-pieces of crumbling papyrus.  In practical terms, we lightened our load for the next time we moved.

Since they were first published, books have always been under threat because they are vessels for ideas.  Every book contains its share of genies trying to emerge, but physical copies of books can be heavy and take up space.  These days, continents of ideas and images are accessible on the screens of mobile phones.  Who needs printed books?  Aficionados appreciate the feel and scent of a book, the handy shape of it, and the possible journey that it made to land in their hands.  To them, books are treasures worth keeping.  

Bookworms aside, bookstores have had a difficult time in the digital age.  Some are still breathing, but they risk following video rental stores down the road of comedians’ jokes and closed-up shopfronts.  LP vinyl records have made a small comeback to satisfy devoted fans, but vinyl will never return to the universality it once had as a vehicle for affordable musical experiences. Physical copies of books may soon follow the same path, and what we once thought was commonplace will exist no more.  Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and CDs, with their history of decline and disuse, will puzzle those who see them in technology museums.  Our ancestors probably predicted the demise of the book when paperbacks came along, but the opposite happened.  Because they were cheap and accessible, paperbacks experienced a publishing boom, but in this technological age, the contents of many books can be stored on something the size of a fingernail. Traditional publishers are in trouble and have become nothing more than advertising agencies. Giant publishers swallow the small players, and now market a four-format model, with hardcovers, paperbacks, audiobooks, and digital editions.  Digital books will make hard-copy volumes into curiosities for the type of collector who also likes the needle in the groove.

Assuming our way into the future, we could see all works of art being visible digitally and not available in any other form.  There may be a physical object somewhere, like the neatly illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland in the British Library, but physical copies of it will not be extant. Libraries will not have a reason to exist except as digital hubs.  Global warming may incinerate most of the trees, and there will be a paper shortage. The bundles of newspaper and cardboard boxes we threw away in our lifetimes will come back to haunt us.  Examples of the visual arts, like Van Gogh, will be hidden in bomb-proof bunkers in Amsterdam, though images of the paintings will be widely viewable.  

Into this digital paradise may come a massive solar storm or a virus that consumes content as fast as it is uploaded.  If this happens, there will be little evidence of what came before, no YouTube videos to explain how to change a bicycle tire or to examine the causes and context of the last great war.   

Mankind is notoriously bad at learning from history.   People don’t like to dwell on the past because the present is enough of a struggle.  When a war finishes, it doesn’t last long as a topic of conversation. However, if our eggs of knowledge are all contained in one digital basket, there will be nothing left if some unknown force blows a hole in said basket.  

It could be argued that keeping original works of art or literature on such unstable materials as paper or canvas also puts them at risk of being burned in an old-fashioned fire. But if the New York Public Library goes up in smoke and Marx’s original notes for Das Kapital are destroyed, there are printed copies all over the globe that can pass on revolutionary ideas to any future generation who is interested.  If digital storage goes blank, and we have disposed of all books as inconvenient encumbrances, there will be no works of long-dead philosophers or artists to inspire future generations.  They will have to reinvent the wheel. 

 In the late 1990s, the term "burning" was used for the technique of transferring information onto a CD.  Whether it was a CD or a cassette tape, all of the methods used for storing information were unstable.  When floppy discs first came out, they were touted as the digital storage solution for all time.  Fifty years later, I still hold onto a few floppy disks because my computer can’t read the information on them.  In the meantime, we have gone through cassette tapes, CDs, iPods, USB sticks, and cloud storage. The methods change as quickly as engineers can invent them, but they are all at risk from major magnetic events.

 There have been times in history when books have been burned to stamp out what the state considered dangerous knowledge.  Arts and sciences may have been set back by these events because when such autocratic ceremonies were carried out, the items burned may have been one of a kind. The library of Alexandria went up in smoke.  By the time the Nazis got to book burning, they could empty the libraries and bookshops in Germany, but there were already enough printed copies in other countries that it was a foolish idea to think they could stamp out ideas they didn’t agree with. But book burning has a wider objective than just the destruction of paper.  It is carried out to cause fear in anyone who is familiar with the content of the banned and burned books.   Those who have this knowledge are unwilling to come forward because revealing information that is awkward for a strong-arm regime can have catastrophic health outcomes for the person with forbidden information.       

Another sort of book burning is still taking place in an ideologically divided America.  While nobody would dare to burn books publicly, books are being removed from schools and libraries if they are deemed contrary to Christian values, which, for the conservative bodies that decide, include mention of gay and transgender people.  We had finally arrived at a place where kids were comfortable admitting they had two moms or two dads, but the holier-than-thou fascists have snatched that acceptance away from them.   Schools and libraries are not burning books in the street because there are more discreet ways of making them disappear. No actual flames are involved, but the effect is the same.  It becomes taboo again to stray outside fixed gender stereotypes, a moral stance that does enormous harm to young people.  Many teens who commit suicide do so because they suspect they are gay and don’t want to be.  When truthful information about being gay, trans, or gender fluid is not available to them, they lack the knowledge to make rational decisions.  Tragedy is often the result.  

Before the technology of our new millennium came along, there was a British royal scandal that the press agreed not to publish, but fax machines had become ubiquitous in offices, so copies of the French press were easily faxed to offices across the channel.  It became all but impossible to suppress news. Various dictators have tried to limit access to the Internet, but there are always ways for information to leak through. These days, everyone has a camera phone, and there are worldwide social media platforms, so it’s difficult to keep information secret.   Images can find their way onto whatever platforms remain in a restricted country, and even if they are taken down within hours, they are seen and passed on by sympathetic viewers. 

There is danger in today's widespread broadcasting of the banal details of unremarkable lives.  We drown in a sea of irrelevant information about what the influencer had for breakfast, what they wore that day, and what streets they walked down.  It is like watching a work colleague's holiday photos, which have minimal entertainment value and shoulder aside perspective and context.  “This is me on vacation” doesn’t have much to do with the location travelled to, except for how the weather treated the content creator.  The average social media influencer probably doesn’t know who Karl Marx was or the effect of his writings. They probably don’t know what dial telephones were or how music came out of a cassette tape.  If we pull the plug on the digital generation, not only do we take away their daily addiction to candy, but we also leave them with no framework to anchor their feet to the ground.  The maps that could tell them which way to go will have evaporated in the solar storm, and paper maps will be out of print.  

Forced to be ever more mobile for work, citizens will have discarded their heavy loads of books and other weighty knowledge containers, so if the digital world is erased, records of what existed before will be wiped clean. Those who still have memories will tell their children tales of transcendent paintings, inspiring sculptures, and magic books that opened portals in the human brain.  Luckily, a grandmother or two will still remember what foods to harvest and how to make bread, but the few minds that remember there was a theory of relativity or a theory of surplus value based on labour will have to wrack their old brains to remember what it was about.   Those who have become media dependent will be inconsolable.  Their lives will hardly be worth living.  

Nature abhors a vacuum, so after the deluge, a figure may come along to fill the blank minds with twisted ideological claptrap, and the empty-headed sheep will be happy to follow.  This time, there will be no books left to burn, but like Hitler’s Germany or Ray Bradbury’s dystopia, the hunted will be the passers-on of ideas that are contrary to the new regime’s plans.  Orwell warned us that when nobody remembers history, the propaganda machine can make wrong out of right and vice versa.  Like dogs, humans can be trained to hate and kill each other.  It has happened before, and given the spiral form of the galaxy that rules everything, it will come round again, though in a different form. 

The Tangled Threads Of Colonialism

Public sculpture is one way a society says, “This is our past, and this is who we are now.”   Statues of faded heroes are out in the open for anyone to take potshots at, and the shots are often deserved.  It is a relief to learn that sometimes a statue’s day of reckoning can come in anticipation of its exhibition. The city of Edmonton, Alberta, recently decided not to place two sculptures they had commissioned for each end of the Walterdale bridge because, when they were finished and ready to be mounted, someone had second thoughts and cancelled the project.  One half of the work was a simple buffalo standing on a rock, an expressionless lump that could have been laser-printed using a child’s toy as a model. The other half of the work was a fur trader sitting atop a heap of buffalo hides.  What was surprising was not the cancellation, but that the design was approved in the first place.  Beyond the banality of the work itself, the artist who made the sculpture was a Chinese Canadian American, an individual with roots in three nationalities that Indigenous tribes considered unwelcome interlopers, people who had claimed everything except the air for themselves, and pushed the buffalo to extinction, a disaster for those who relied on the animal for survival.  The sculptor was aware he was recreating an image from a time when the buffalo were on the verge of extinction, but how he concluded that viewers would be enlightened by a representation of a massacre is beyond belief.  He must have believed that by putting the buffalo on one side of the river and the hunter on the other, it would illustrate the gulf between the two sides. Though the fur trader is sitting on a lump that raises him to the same height as the buffalo, that almost featureless hillock should have been rendered in colour so we see it for what it is, a heap of fur, blood, and gore. Apparently, the artist wanted to demonstrate that man-made disasters like the near-extinction of the buffalo and other acts of colonial vandalism are not confined to the past.   That may be, but these sculptures were made for a bridge and not a museum of shame, which compounds the planner’s deafness.  People don’t wish to be reminded of past tragedies on their way to work every day.  If they wish to have their hearts broken, they can visit a military cemetery.  The artist’s original theory that colonialism is alive and well was substantiated when, at the same time the buffalo sculpture was cancelled, the mayor of Calgary approved a statue of Winston Churchill, another questionable hero, thanks to his violent colonial policies, racist rhetoric, and his belief in the superiority of Anglo-Saxons.  

Perhaps these figurative sculptors imagine that their work will go down in history as a new Michelangelo.  Michelangelo lived 500 years ago, and though his work is sublime, public art has moved on from the literal to the abstract, though for the initiated, even the most detailed figurative work can be loaded with symbols and ideas.  It's a direct line from Michelangelo to Anish Kapoor, whose public works can be appreciated at face value without having to work for their meaning, but what message, either subliminal or literal, does a man sitting on a pile of dead animal skins convey?  If the sculptor wanted to express the tragedy better, he could have stood a European entrepreneur holding hands with the Prime Minister of the day, standing on a pile of Aboriginal skulls.   The artist’s intention was admirable, but the expression of it is unworthy and offensive.  It’s just as well the project was cancelled because it would have been rapidly defaced, and the trader pulled down from atop his stinking prize. 

Sculpture is not only a European habit.   There are carved stone reliefs from Mayan Central America to Angkor Wat.  Like Northwest totem poles, they have been created to commemorate ancestry, history, people, or events.  A spirit of a bird by a Haida sculptor is still recognizable as a bird to a Nigerian, though it wouldn’t be one with which he is familiar.  A piece of sculpture is relevant to the place it was meant to be exhibited, but in its specificity, it should also have an element of universality.  In Western societies, we erect statues of those we think are deserving of honour, but as everyone knows, things change.  Individuals who were once celebrated by certain segments of a population are found later to have no right to be on a pedestal.  Whether this is for past crimes or because the culture has moved on and has deemed certain deeds once thought to be in the natural order to be criminal.  Regimes come and go. Whenever statues have been accessible to the public, they have had their noses broken or their eyes gouged out.  The damage is done by warring elements in a society or by invaders who wish not only to occupy the lands of the losing side, but to obliterate the old culture by breaking its icons and planting their flags on the new territory.  Christians knew what they were doing when they built churches on the sites of ancient temples. Whether it is zealots like the Taliban blowing up statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, or Christians chiselling crosses into the marble foreheads of Greek statues, there is a long tradition of cultural vandalism.   

The colonization of Africa, North and South America, as well as the Near and Far East, began when man learned how to navigate the oceans.  There had already been similar invasions and assimilations, biblical conflicts, the expansion of the Roman Empire, the Norman invasion of England, countless religious wars,  and royal wars of succession.   In many of the conquered territories, the local people were no more than slaves in their own land, oppressed not only by having their freedom of movement restricted, but by the psychological trauma of having their cultural touchstones smashed to pieces. These pre-colonial patterns of conquest were the blueprint for the occupation of worlds that were once unknown to Europeans.  To Aboriginal societies, the strange men who showed up on beaches would have been like visitors from another planet, but it wouldn’t take long for natives to understand how little power they had against the invaders’ weapons and diseases.

There is a mural near my home that shows Queen Victoria on a bicycle with a Canada goose riding in her basket.  The artwork resisted graffiti for a while, but when it crept in, it was all directed at the face of Queen Victoria.  The artist has now repaired it by painting an octopus stuck to the queen’s face so she can’t see where she is going.  So far, a few years after the mural was retouched, the mural is unblemished by graffiti.

Statues erected by conquerors are always at risk of being overthrown.  Shelly’s Ozymandias must have secretly known that his mighty image would eventually be toppled and swallowed by sand.  Statues are transitory things, loved by one faction, hated by another, and because they are exhibited in public places, they are the easiest targets. 

People are more gentle with some public art, perhaps because fewer phallic towers are emerging from the pavement, replaced by a proliferation of gigantic hands, ears, or noses, which are less political and less likely to be vandalized.  A clever trick of some of Anish Kapoor’s popular sculptures is that they are reflective, so doing damage to them is like doing damage to oneself.  Since the observer sees a reflection of his society with him in it, the message is less polarizing, as if to say, “Here you are.”  It is an idea that doesn’t take a political position one way or the other.

Public art may be the visible face of a culture, but there are more insidious ways of colonization, like the devastating practice of rape as a weapon.  This is not a new phenomenon, and though it is a reprehensible thing, it only affects a portion of the population, but for the victims, it is a lifetime of inner torment.  Another effective way to wound a culture's heart is through its language.  Besides physical repression, it has always been in a conqueror's interest to suppress the defeated side’s dialect and promote his own.  When I spent time on the Greek island of Rhodes, I learned that when the Italians took the island from the Turks in the 1930’s, schools were required to conduct lessons only in Italian.  Priests and parents had to teach Greek to children in secret.  This happened less than a century ago, when Germans, Italians, French, and Dutch were expanding their empires in an attempt to replicate the centuries-old British and Spanish occupations that had stretched around the globe.  

No matter what century they occurred in, none of these invasions was justified.  They were planned and financed for economic gain, with the invaders expecting to put their foot on new territories with exploitable resources, and declare them the property of their king or queen.   Any indigenous societies that existed at the time of the invasion were nuisances to be overcome, like swamps or blackflies. 

Although we think of colonialism as a thing of the past, there are still powerful nations like Russia and China, which believe that putting a soldier’s foot on a people’s neck and occupying their land is a valid way to conquer.  This way of gaining control began to fade when the United States came into existence.  Their foreign policy was to play the anti-communist policeman in many international conflicts and to topple figures they saw as dictators, but they never occupied anyone’s land beyond their borders.  They did not try to seize Canada or Mexico.  Alaska was acquired as a business purchase.  Hawaii voted to become a state.  What the Americans have done, in an effort to expand their influence worldwide, is to gain access to other cultures through television, computers, and mobile phones.  That way, they can promote the American way of life as the apex of existence.  Any nation’s attempts to limit internet access and content are as unsuccessful as trying to catch lightning with bare hands.  These days, mobile phone footage documenting wars and invasions is available to anyone with the technology to watch it. 

I have noticed in news reports of immigrants arriving in Italy from North and Central Africa that many of the young men who arrive have mobile phones.  Their phones may be all they possess except for the clothes on their backs, but phones are not just phones.  A refugee can send a message to his relatives to say he arrived alive, and he can watch his own rescue from a sinking rubber boat on a television news report.  He can listen to whatever music he likes from anywhere in the world.  He can see how much things cost in Italy and what time the trains leave for Stuttgart.  This small hand-held device, with its access to dissident voices in Russia, right wing politician’s threats to close borders, immigration rules, and job opportunities, is a powerful invention, with marketing ploys that encourage cultural colonialism.  This instant access to all information is changing the rules of conflict and showing that there is no need for physical invasion since the enemy has already conquered their country by more insidious means, like marketing strategies.    

It is said that man’s time on earth started its countdown to extinction when agriculture was first practiced.  Until then, nomads had survived by moving with the seasons, but when men planted seeds near their doorsteps, and they grew into food, they realized there was no longer a need to battle the beasts and other tribes to survive.  However, as families grew and flourished, they needed a greater food supply.  Outgrowing their traditional territories, they expanded onto other land, which was often occupied by others.  Wars ensued, tribes conquered other tribes, and soon they became nations.  We have now arrived at a tipping point on the planet where there are so many people that we struggle to feed them all. 

Nomads were not without troubles and had battles with each other over hunting grounds, but overall, they were stable societies that didn’t need to take over their neighbours' lands to feed themselves.  Each had his area, his customs, habits, and diet, and anyone who suggested stealing from another tribe was voted down by wiser minds. The land was not owned by anyone, and to think it could be was as strange a concept as ownership of the air and water.  Indigenous people must have been puzzled when they saw new arrivals put fences around their homesteads and say, “This belongs to me.”  It was like saying, “Don’t breathe my air.”

Colonizing other people is not a practice of nomadic tribes, but it is one in which agricultural societies require ever-expanding resources to meet their needs.  I would argue that with the demise of manufacturing and lifetime jobs, we have become a new kind of nomadic people, moving to wherever the work is, becoming proprietors of ourselves, without an ancestral attachment to any one place.  We are learning that when we encounter another culture, we should let it be, appreciate it for what it is, and not impose our own suppositions and prejudices onto it.  We travel more lightly these days, in pressurized cabins with our ubiquitous cellphones.  I would hope this wide overview of the world, the sight of the earth from the moon, leaves us less inclined to leave public statues and images of ourselves, even ephemeral digital ones, and expect an occupied people to worship them. They have their own icons that are more suited to them than ours are.

Pushing over statues doesn’t erase the damage done by colonization because its nerve-threads run deeper than bad seasons, but in a healthy organism, in the absence of further aggravation, wounds heal. My hope is that we learn, like Asian cultures, to bow our heads as a sign of respect for the spiritual divinity in the other.  

Life As A Bug

A young woman stopped by my house just as the cat brought home a live mouse to entertain itself by playing with it in front of us.  My visitor commanded the cat to let the mouse go, but the cat paid no attention. She grabbed a broom and chased the cat, but it ran to the far side of the courtyard with its prey. Flailing at the cat with the broom, she ran after it until it slipped out of a gap in the courtyard wall, the mouse still squeaking in its mouth.  Half an hour later, as my visitor was leaving, she stopped to admire a cactus flower.  As her nose homed in on the scent, she suddenly jerked her head back as if a spine had poked her.  She pointed mutely to the flower, her shaking finger zeroing in on a black ant crawling into the blossom.  Backing away from the poet with the cactus, she began brushing down the front of her blouse and stamping her feet because she had noticed a few ants around the base of the pot.  
“Eeew eeew, get rid of them,” she shrieked.  
I turned over a stone, which she perhaps thought I would use to smash the scattering ants, but under the cactus pot was a swarm of the panicked creatures running everywhere.  
She began screaming, hyperventilating, and when she could, shouting,  “Kill them! Kill them!”
I washed away the ants with the garden hose, but she was still shocked and jumpy, and had backed far away from the outbreak.  Her world had been invaded by horrible beasts.  As she was leaving, I asked her, “Can you tell me the difference between an ant and a mouse?”  
“No. What?” she asked, like I had set her a child’s riddle. 
“To some people, cats are a pest,” I said.  “To some cats, the big ones,  humans are a pest. We all have a place on the food chain.”
“I don’t get it,” she said, backing out the door like I was about to ask her for a donation to the Flat Earth Society.
“Maybe you will one day,” I answered.  “When you grow up.”
She tossed her strawberry blonde hair, and I never saw her again.

Recently, there has been a cluster of reports on the news about random killings in various cities, street murders of unrelated individuals at the hands of men who are angry and fed up with life and everyone in it.  Parents of these unhinged young men are often the first ones in the line of fire because family members are easy to demonize.  If a man can kill those known to him, it is a short step to killing strangers.  The innocent victims are annoyances to them, worth no more than rats.  

By nature, men don’t lash out and kill other men, but if they feel threatened, they may turn their fears and prejudices into demons that inhabit other humans. A Ukrainian general recently said about Russian invaders, “We are at war with non-humans.  They are orcs.”  Soldiers understand the technique of dehumanization, but they learn to use this mind-trick only in appropriate circumstances.  When a civilian with a mental imbalance begins to see other humans as less than him, he lashes out.  He might target property at first, but it is more satisfying to squash the life out of a living, breathing pest as if it were an insect. Humans become bugs. If we are threatened by a tiger that sees us as prey, we can overlook its feline beauty, its value as a species, and kill it before we are killed.  Humans have survived by sorting their threat responses into compartments, but sometimes these systems go awry.

We presume that bugs aren’t sentient, but we are selective in our beliefs.  Looked at objectively, shrimp and lobster are no more than large insects of the ocean, yet we see them as culinary delicacies.  There is a growing call against lobsters being boiled alive because we are not sure if they feel pain or not, but it is sure that crayfish don’t fiddle happy tunes when they are plopped into boiling water.  If lobsters feel pain, the same must be true for ants.  If I wash away a nest of ants, I have not only destroyed their physical structure, but created chaos of the ant’s primal need, which is to keep eggs safe so the clan survives.  There is no time for anguish in an anthill.  Catastrophes happen.  They all have jobs to do and will deal with the casualties later.  

The chicken eggs we eat are a sideline of that survival imperative, but the desire to protect the nest has been bred out of domestic hens.  Humans are fine with eating the eggs of various birds and fish if they are collected at the right time, but ants’ eggs have never become a delicacy.  The Aztecs built their floating gardens in the shallow waters of a Mexican lake and cultivated worms and grubs for food, which are full of protein and readily available in the environment.  There are 500 species of insects in Mexico that are consumed as food.  In other parts of the world, people eat raw oysters but gag if given a worm.  They crunch on the crispy legs of a baby shrimp but turn their noses up at a pan-fried beetle.

 Creepy-crawlies surely bring bad things to humans, but the view that they should all be eliminated is willfully ignorant.  Billion-dollar industries have been created around killing bacteria, but as the anti-antibiotic lobby slogan says, ‘Not All Bugs Are Bad.’  The war on bacteria has created superbugs.  If we see an electron microscope image of the skin on our faces, we are confronted with the horrifying truth that there are insects and worms going about their business of clearing and consuming debris, while we talk, smile, and scratch ourselves. We don’t want to believe it, and try to erase the memory. If all bugs and bacteria are bad, then what will turn milk into cheese, or replace yeast fungus to make bread rise?  If we could see the viruses and bacteria around us, we might never leave their beds - oh wait, beds aren’t safe either.

Our blue planet is mostly salty seas, wind-scoured deserts, uninhabitable polar regions, and green fuzz where the prevailing winds drop precipitation.  The moss that grows on the wet and warm rocks of our planet is vegetable matter that becomes grasslands, jungles, and forests.  It is populated by fauna that scamper under its green canopy and range in size from elephants to insects. We humans are somewhere in the middle, closer to the smaller animals when we are born.  The earth has no plan, direction, or nature, except to remain suspended between its centrifugal pull and the sun’s gravity.  Humans, elephants, and ants don’t figure in this titanic standoff, but are only slithering creatures just below the blotchy green skin. Perhaps a pitiless killer has the same sense that neither he nor his victims will ever rise above the slime, so whether he takes his own life or the lives of others hardly matters to him.  Like the rest of us bugs, he’ll return to the organic ooze, and it won’t make any difference to the turning of the earth, only to the innocent’s grieving family.

Greenwashing

There is a recycling crisis that our governments have not found a way to manage.  Plastic production has grown from almost zero in the 1950s to 350 million tons in 2018. Since China banned imports of plastic recycling in 2018, there is nowhere for the 100 million tons of waste to go. 

When the recycling boom first started, there were drop boxes everywhere encouraging citizens to recycle newspapers, bottles, and plastic.  It was our duty to help save the planet.  After a few years, when more newsprint was collected than could be processed profitably, the boxes disappeared. Every household once had a thick telephone book that could be recycled, but when the local charity organizations, who did the footwork of collecting the books, learned they had earned nothing, they stopped doing it. Luckily, a few years later, the internet made phone books obsolete.  When too much glass recycling was contaminated, the glass bins disappeared as well.  There were innumerable government programs and PSA’s about recycling, because “That’s what we do.”  After a few years, news came back from China and the far east that they didn’t want our trash anymore.  There were red faces, and containers were sent back to North America, but waste companies that are willing to risk getting caught continue to export waste to whoever will accept it. As long as there are profits to be made and the troublesome stuff disappears, nobody wants to dig too deep.  

The recycling sham continues with government encouragement and very little to back up the fact that any significant volume of recycling is taking place. The government says that 97% of Canadian households use at least one recycling program, which makes it sound like 97% of rubbish is recycled.  Statistics suggest that less than 10% of discarded plastic is recycled. A recent consumer test asked three companies to recycle identical bales of plastic.  One incinerated the plastic, one took it to the landfill, and one recycled it into pellets.  The waste from incinerating any plastics has to be buried in landfills because it is toxic.  Most plastic can only be recycled once.

We rely on package delivery more than ever.  For reasons of health and safety, many more people stay home in their cocoons. Digital media has killed the daily newspaper delivery to the door; people rarely send letters in the post; bills are sent and paid electronically, so the only person who comes knocking is the deliveryman.  He is not the one who takes away the packaging or the old item that is being replaced.  Running alongside this boom in online purchases is a supply chain that keeps the ubiquitous digital hardware operational.  Computer hard drives, monitors, keyboards, POS systems, and communication equipment all need replacing when they wear out or become outdated.  Most businesses have a minimum of a printer and/or a photocopier.  An industry of logistical games has sprung up around deliveries and returns.  To atone for polluting the environment with used electronics and plastic toner cartridges, a system of return waybills has been created to send the replacement parts back to their distributors.  When these materials are returned, they are sorted, re-used if possible, and the rest find their way to landfills. The delivery companies appear to be toeing the line to cover their backs, but in truth, there is a profitable side business in tracking these returned items.  This uses both human and mechanical resources, the cost of which is borne by the shipper, as an environmental tax.  Given that most of these items are smaller than a loaf of bread, all of the packing, shipping, pickup, and delivery is a losing financial proposition.  But the companies involved pat themselves on the back and tell us that they are helping save the planet, when really their clever plan is to squeeze more money out of the consumer, while waving a blue flag.  This only compounds the problem.  It is probably better to send a toner cartridge to a local landfill than to send it halfway across the world, only to have it end up in a foreign landfill.

Big businesses like soft drink companies imply that their bottles will be transformed and reshaped into useful things.  It is a romantic idea, but that is not what happens.  A recent study by Environment Canada suggested that more than 90% of plastics end up in landfills.  Recycling companies will not recycle anything unless there is a profit to be made.  Canadians throw away 3 metric tons of plastic waste a year, and 2.8 metric tons end up in landfills.  I live in a city which has had a single-use plastic ban for several years.  There are no plastic bags available in supermarkets, only paper ones, which are awkward and don’t stand up to the weather.  I used to recycle my grocery bags as rubbish bags, but now I have to buy rubbish bags that also end up in the landfill.  This is illogical, unless the companies that manufacture rubbish bags have cleverly lobbied the green faction into a policy that helps their profits.  

The supermarket where I shop makes extravagant use of plastic clamshell packaging for pastries and vegetables.  Where fruit and vegetables are not prepackaged, there are rolls of free plastic bags to contain them, but at the checkout, plastic bags are forbidden.  There is an option at the checkout to buy a heavy-duty, reusable plastic shopping bag with the supermarket logo on for a high price. We are free to consume that particular plastic if we pay.  This is deceitful, like the current practice of selling products at the same price as before, but reducing the size or amount of the product.  

Although landfills have been used extensively in North America since it was settled, it has never been an ideal way to dispose of trash.  Out of sight, out of mind, does not mean the danger has gone away.  For many years, people dumped things, including rubbish, into the sea, believing that it would magically disappear into nature’s great washing machine, but as time goes on, we have discovered that dumping nuclear waste into an ocean doesn’t make it inert.  

Landfills can leach into waterways if they are not properly situated, and some elements end up in the water table no matter where they are buried.  There is a supermarket in my hometown built over a landfill that for 30 years was the city dump. Anything and everything went in there until the gulley filled up, and the city opened a more massive fill on the clay banks above the river.  None of the shoppers or employees in the supermarket knows they are working over a brew of toxins, and nobody publicizes the fact because it would be bad for business.  Most regular shoppers know that the underground parking garage stinks, but they don’t know why.

There are organizations set up under the umbrella of NGOs that deem themselves the ones to bestow eco-friendly ratings on businesses that want to crow to their clients about how green they are.  The application to participate can run to several pages with detailed questions about heating, cooling, power use, and waste management.  It is easy to exaggerate the truth to nudge statistics to the positive side.  Does the business have a geo-exchange system?  Most managers don’t know if they have or not, but imagine if they say yes, if it will earn them a better rating.  Three green keys instead of two.  The ratings company rarely does inspections, but if a business does get caught out in its lies and the green organization rescinds its rating, another eco-talking greenwasher would be happy to put his sticker of approval on a window.  The general public doesn’t know the difference; the business owner will be happy as he appears to be doing his part, and the government boasts about statistics they have had no hand in measuring. And so, the pleasant illusion of environmental righteousness continues. 
 
A third of our waste comes from households, while two-thirds comes from industrial, commercial, and institutional sources.  Regulations, like single-use plastics in shops, concentrate on private citizens because individuals are easier to convince than corporations. Our mountains of garbage have only been around for a short while.  My grandparents retired to live in the country in the 1950’s, and made only a weekly trip to the dump to deposit the few small items of real rubbish they could not use.  Much of this was tins that had been flattened so animals wouldn’t get stuck in them, but all excess paper was used at home to start fires to cook meals, glass bottles and jars were re-used, and organic scraps went onto a compost pile.  Plastic barely existed, so we had nothing to throw away.  Yet plastic, which we are so bad at recycling, and which has a shelf life of usefulness in our environment, comes from petroleum, which is in limited supply.  We generate so much rubbish that our grandparents would be astounded at the waste.  Along with the arrival of plastics came its marketing tag word of ‘disposable’, which sounds convenient but is a lie.  Before Einstein’s words on energy, Lavoisier in 1789 discovered that matter cannot be created or destroyed, only change its state and form.  Ignoring that, we are busy extracting minerals from the earth and spreading them in microbeads all over our planet.   The age of plastics might go down in history like the age of dinosaurs, which did not end well, but that was not caused by man's folly.

From the beginning, humans recognized there were environmental problems to be solved.  It didn’t take long to learn that throwing scraps outside the family cave would attract the wrong kind of attention. In the 20th century, the penicillin century, when more people lived longer, so many new materials, including nuclear options, were developed with little regard to their afterlife.  In the early 1960s, when Rachel Carson wrote "Silent Spring", she was standing on the shoulders of others, but even with this foreknowledge, the speed with which the earth continues to be buried under garbage and toxic waste is astounding.   The best response our society can come up with is greenwashing, which encourages lip service and pouring money into policies that demonstrably don’t work.  We fiddle with regulations while Rome burns.  

The solutions to these problems don’t rest with individuals or governments, as they are onlookers to the multinational business engines that drive the world’s economies.  These global companies have the skills and intelligence not only to fix the recycling crisis, but to take innovative steps toward getting us back to the uncontaminated garden we humans once enjoyed as our home. Instead, they choose to exploit everyone and everything as they have always done, and to parrot the greenwashing lies because real solutions generate less profit.