ON THE AVENUES: Rant, anyone?
A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Out of every 20 objects of litter deposited in my front yard and atop the area immediately between it and the street, typically 15 of them are fast food wrappers and beverage containers.
The other five? Mostly bloody wads of gauze from the denizens of the dentist’s office next door.
But there are very few aluminum cans, probably because there is an elderly collector waiting in the bushes to catch them as they’re tossed from passing cars. Sadly, in the relatively recent history of recycling in America, the pensioner has played an oversized role.
Speaking of oversized, New York City recently made headlines with new rules aimed at preventing the sale of bathtub-sized servings of soda pop. Nannies blushed, health fascists cheered, libertarians cringed and I walked outside and scooped up a couple of discarded Big Gulps from the sidewalk, depositing them in my trash can, and recalling my conviction that all fast food packaging should be taxed, even if it raises the price of a Doritos-encrusted taco a whole nickel.
Let the cookie-cutter chains help pay the price of keeping the streets clean.
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It is impossible maintain, at least with a straight face, that Americans are not innately filthy creatures, although it must be remembered that the diabetes-riddled consumers of fast food who litter my yard only do so after devouring the contents, suggesting that they’re far too preoccupied contending with the aftermath of toxic shock syndrome to care much where the trash lands.
Americans have an eternally peculiar attitude toward health. We venerate the free market, worship profits and oppose living wages, driving low-income people into the waiting arms of unhealthy, dollar menu fast food parlors – all the while tolerating KFC’s saturation advertising on the tube because anything that causes our Yum! Brands stock to increase in value is fair game, and when the predictable epidemic of poor health ensues, we flatly reject comprehensive health insurance and angrily blame the victim, taking solace in the “fact” that it was the fault of the addicted eater in the first place.
Ah, the glories of capitalism. Education is chronically devalued and underfunded – how much does one really have to think to be an unthinking consumer, anyway? – and generations of young people now enter the workforce at 15 years of age, all the better to buy loads of unneeded plastic trinkets made in China, or preferably, an automobile from Japan; after all, we’re more susceptible to mass marketing at an early age.
By 18, they’re married with children, and up to their tattoos in credit card debt. The obvious answer is service in the military, and there, against all prevailing odds, they do a damned fine job helping clean up the petro-messes created by wars started by wealthy, born-again politicians. After tours in Afghanistan, these soldiers return home and cannot legally celebrate their good fortune at still being alive by drinking a beer, owing to an inexplicable drinking age of 21.
Of course, prior to reaching legal age, they might have cast a ballot against the same politicians denying them the right to drink. Few do, even though they can … and so it goes.
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The most prevalent condition of bad heath in L’America is neither obesity nor drug abuse, but irony blindness, as in the inability of the general populace to deduce the identity of who and what their soldiers are fighting for … or against. As an example, take the corporate maker of Bud Light Lime, the brewery formerly known as Anheuser-Busch.
(Actually, it’s already been taken, and my attempted vaudeville joke arrives stillborn.)
For several years, Anheuser-Busch merely has been one of three infuriating acronyms in AB-InBev, reflecting its absorption by an engorged multinational conglomerate. There’s nothing particularly American about an entity controlled by universally insured overseas shareholders who speak vernacular European (where the phrase for unfathomable fermented dishwater is pronounced “Stella Artois”) and routinely torture doomed geese for their fattened livers.
And yet the devastating scourge of irony blindness, with inevitable complications leading to chronic cognitive dissonance, prevents flag-waving, chest-thumping, God-fearing patriots from grasping that the Budweiser longneck in their hands, one ritualistically banged on the bar-top during profanity-laden denunciations of their country’s economic enslavement to foreign interests, no longer emanates from an American-owned brewery.
That’s right: Yuengling and Samuel Adams are the largest remaining American-owned breweries, and incontestable facts have a curious effect on those unaccustomed to examining their moribund guiding premises.
Bud Light drinkers will look up into an unresponsive cloudy sky, and then down at their Asian-made sports shoes. They fidget, avert their eyes, and sometimes have strange out-of-body experiences, imagining themselves entirely unmoored, with vertigo-induced feelings of hurtling through deep black space, separated from the umbilical tether of brand-loyal predictability.
Soon, as a desperate antidote to reality, they’re hurriedly pouring gallons of insipid yellow liquid down their throats, evidently intending the act of repetitive swallowing as a mantra, as though sheer speed of consumption might somehow conjure the avenging ghost of Auggie Busch atop a Clydesdale – or at the very least, a computer-generated hologram of the beloved Goebbelsian propagandist and carnivorous robber baron – to coddle them with gentle reassurance that it’s all okay: Eisenhower remains ensconced in the Oval Office, plywood and Formica reign supreme, and intrinsic American goodness, from cheeseburgers to suburban cul de sacs to cinematic car chases, as yet dominates a planet eager for dumbing, numbing uniformity.
Whenever I look into the garbage bag carried by that persistent elderly man, who catches those airborne cans the way a Venus flytrap snags distracted bugs, it’s always filled with empties manufactured by foreign-owned breweries: Bud, Miller, Coors.
I guess the domestic stuff just isn’t good enough for our Rally’s eaters.
