5.29.2004

Mark Morford wrote an excellent piece on the evils of all of the new disposable house cleaning products. As Satan Scrubbed My Toilet / It's a slew of new, disposable products that really scream "Screw the planet, I'm an American!" Life is good: It's on today's SFGate. I only wish that the people who buy these things would be forced to read it. He makes so many great points in hilarious paragraphs like...

"Brooms? Pshaw. Satan's whiskers. Brooms suck. Brooms are so totally Rubbermaid-O'Cedar-soap-opera-Valium-haze-Daddy's-away-on-business 1976. What we need now is a ridiculous plastic-handled thing with floppy little static-cling pads that you stick on the end and use once up and down the hardwood hallway and then throw away, never to be thought of again, because, well, we never do."

My brother once brought up this discussion years and years ago when we were watching some commercial for disposable madness. The commercial bragged on how you could "use it once and then throw it away!" He said, "Where is away?" Where is away indeed? It's not really away. It's just out of *your*selfish sight...

It is away so you don't have to think about it anymore, and your floors are so drenched in antibiotics that your kids aren't going to have any kind of natural immunity, and the second they hit preschool, and their fellow classmates with all of their hands and fingers and runny noses get near them, their lifetime of illness will start to add on top of the asthma and allergies that they already have from all of the de-oxy-penta-limo-paraben-toxicon that make your toilets sparkle.

But back to Morford's editorial. He adds,
"You might think by now that we'd be slightly more aware. You might think that after decades of impassioned environmental movements and organic evolution and reams of irrefutable evidence proving how we are aggressively mauling the planet on a daily basis, that we'd be just slightly more conscious and attuned by now regarding what we put in our mouths, in our homes, down our toilets.

You might even think, furthermore, we'd be just a bit more cautious regarding toxic household cleaners and electric chemical air fresheners and various solvents and detergents and coatings, and realize that dousing the home with 10,000 synthetic petroleum-based products that are known to cause cancer and skin irritation and tumors and impotence and painful emphysemic death, well, it might not always be the best way to go. You might think.

You would, of course, be wrong.

There is no such awareness. Not yet. Not on any significant scale. The rain forests can disappear and we'll still buy disposable toilet brushes and throwaway diapers by the truckload. Oil prices can hit 50 bucks a barrel and 1,000 sad disposable U.S. soldiers can die in oil-rich foreign nations and still Ford Expeditions will sell like hotcakes. We can create a mountain of dead useless slightly radioactive cell phones roughly the size of the planet Pluto. No one really cares. Can you hear me now? Um, no.

It is our global peril and our national trademark. Americans are notoriously, famously, massively blind to causality. We make zero connection between how we consume and the effects of that consumption on our bodies, our politics, the planet. It is staggering and sad and it is also nothing new."

He perfectly captures disposable America. Who cares as long as we don't have to look at it. Eat the big mac and throw the two pounds of packaging that it came in out the window of your Yukon XL because shit, you're barrelling down the road at 90 miles per hour. That trash is miles behind you before you can finish rolling up the power window and cranking up the air con.

This paragraph ends with quite possibly my favorite sentence I've heard in while...
"The good new is, we still have personal choice. Barely. Most of us still have the ability to discern between that which is truly helpful and beneficial in our lives and that which is simply not worth stomping over the planet like it's a fleeing butterfly and we are a screeching heavily Ritalined little boy wielding a stick."

Oh, but then again the favorite sentence may be this one.
"It's an increasingly precious commodity, this ability, this discernment, more endangered than the blue whale and the baby seal and the right to own a dildo in Texas, and it's diminishing fast, because BushCo hates it with a white-hot intensity normally reserved for nature or individuality or gay people in love."

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5.20.2004

Another victory for oppressed animals everywhere!! And this time from Detroit. What? Yes, Detroit.

The Detroit Zoo is freeing their elephants because they have realized that holding elephants in captivity, even in optimal conditions (the Detroit Zoo apparently has lots of land for their elephants to roam on in comparison with most zoos and all cruel and evil circuses) is horribly detrimental to the health of the great and noble beasts.


Detroit Zoo to Free Elephants on Ethical Grounds

Held in captivity, elephants begin developing arthritis from not being able to roam and neurotic behaviors such as rocking back and forth and aggressive behavior. They are much like humans in much of their societal relations and live their entire lives with their families and mourn their dead. Way to go Detroit. Their elephants will be releaseds to an animal sanctuary where they can roam free and hopefully develop some normal elephant relationships with other elephants.

My friend, Collette Evrard, once went and volunteered at an elephant sanctuary for a week. "Problem elephants" were placed there when they had grown too aggressive or too sick or old to perform the sadistic tricks of the circuses and when zoo life had literally driven them mad. One day a new elephant was brought to the sanctuary. The elephant had been in a circus for years. Immediately upon joining the rest of the elephants at the sanctuary the new elephant walked up to one of the elephants who had been there for a while. They intertwined their trunks and stood together and moved together through their days.

The new elephant had been in the same circus as the elephant with which it had intertwined its trunk years and years before.

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5.19.2004

I love California.

From my Veg-SF email list, which is usually pretty fascist in its animal-shunning ways and utter condemnation of anyone who eats or wears animals or even honey or wool and which I am only still subscribed to out of sheer laziness:

"California Senate Bill 1520, which would ban the cruel force feeding of ducks and geese for the production of foie gras, will be addressed on the Senate floor soon. The Senate Committee on Business and Professions approved SB 1520 on April 26 by a tight 4-3 vote.

SB 1520 now faces a vote before the full Senate, which could happen any day now. California residents are encouraged to contact their senator, and to urge him or her to vote YES on SB 1520."

Well, the senate did vote, and yesterday **IT PASSED!!*** The production and sale of foie gras in the state of Cali is now illegal. Oh, how I love this land perched precariously on the edge of the states taking a stand on firm ground against animal cruelty.

You know, foie gras production is so so barbaric and horror show. Exhibit A. I do not judge others for eating meat, but man, I can't help but question the deep dark recesses of the hearts of those who eat foie gras. Like maybe these people have secret basements in their houses with the neighbors' mysteriously disappearing cats and puppies in cages and they go down there every night when they can't sleep after they have been humiliated by their bosses, sat for four hours in commuter traffic with their tailpipes belching, picked their out-of-control-and-ignored teen up at the police station, and snuck a daily quota of vengeful barbs passive agressively at their spouses and then, oh yes, then these people, these horribly typical people they sneak down to those cages and they scream at the puppies and the kittens as they pour Albertson's beauty products into their tiny eyes.

I won't go to restaurants who even serve foie gras, and I was secretly thrilled when those animal rights activists tore up someone's restaurant who specialized in it. Really I think that anyone who eats it or sells it or God Forbid *makes it* should have a tube shoved down their gullets and secured with some stitches to the lips and then some geese can turn on the machine that will force feed grains down their throats until they die a miserable death grossly overweight and with their livers ballooned up to 10 times their normal size. Cruel, huh?

And also in a just world before they die they will have difficulty standing, walking, and even breathing, impaction of undigested food in the esophagus, lacerations in the throat, and a proliferation of bacterial and fungal growth in their upper digestive tracts. How could I be such a monster? This is exactly what the foie gras industry does to geese and ducks when they make their rich, "Fatty liver" products so that wealthy, spoiled, padded-up, willfully ignorant or just wholly unmerciful members of the upper crust of society can have something to smear on their crackers to help wash down their 1975 Bordeaux.

Shame.
Shame, and they better pray that the animals never get to extract their revenge.


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5.7.2004

Wow! As if I needed another reason to want to live in Mendocino County. They've got some of the most dramatic coastline in northern Cali, golden rolling hills and stunning weather inland, actual true live hippies, fertile soil, compassionate care, voluptuous red wines, Anderson Valley Brewery, and now they have *banned* GMO crops and animals!

Also, it's nickname is Mendo. Way to go Mendocino County. The first county in the country to ban these dangerous and harmful plant species from their soil. Despite a $700,000 negative advertising campaign from the biotech industry. Sweet. "We don't want your scary science experiment shit on our plates."

It's summer. Time for farmers' markets, biting into juicy ugly organic heirloom tomatoes with sliced fresh mozzarella from the happy cows who hang out and gaze at the ocean as they chew the same pieces of grass over and over for hours atop the hills of Point Reyes and fresh green basil that has never seen a chemical and fresh pressed extra virgin olive oil that you bought from the man who made it on his farm in Sonoma county. Real food. You know what it is and what's on it.

Thank you Mendo. Set an example. It's looking better all the time up there. I think that I could come up there and weather the storm if Bush gets reelected. Just go up there and check out of society. Buy nothing from any company other than the people that you looked in the face, your neighbors, grow your own food, make your own face cream. You know. Eat with the seasons and chop your own wood when you're not hiking with your four dogs or knitting sweaters from the wool that you lovingly trimmed from your own sheep, named Fuzzy and Gurl.

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