Taken from some random MSN article..
Pity the poor beleaguered housewife, still struggling like a haggard dog through her array of thankless daily chores.
Just look at her, hair pulled tight and life a-shambles, saddled with all manner of horrible bristly toilet brushes and horrible sponges and horrible cloth towels to wipe down the horrible countertops and then topping it all off with being forced to use one of those horrible old-fashioned bristle brooms to sweep the floor. Horrible!
Thank God, then, for modern ultraconvenience. Thank God for the corporate household-product industry, so thoroughly glutted on excess merchandise and overinvention they can't possibly think of things we actually need anymore. And thank God for our concomitant complete lack of any real environmental conscience. Yay America!
See, now, the happily narcotized, entirely sexless, vaguely bulbous modern housewife in the recent TV commercial as she finally tosses away her angry, growling, animated (!) toilet brush (see how it snaps and snarls at her like a drunken deadbeat dad! See her toss it into the trash can and then plop her butt down on it in satisfied glee!) in favor of -- say it with me -- disposable toilet scrubbers you use once and throw away!
Like the ScotchBrite! Or the Clorox ToiletWand™! Or the Scrub N' Flush! Or the Scrubbing Bubbles™ Fresh Brush™ Toilet Cleaning System! Yes, Virginia, the world is certainly headed in the right direction.
Just watch that brush head break apart in a swirl of pulpy chemical fibers in the toilet. Look at the nifty cheap-ass landfill-plastic handle -- remember, it's not a brush, it's a "toilet-cleaning system." Look at the shiny plastic tub of refills you have to buy every month just to keep the goddamn thing stocked before the handle snaps in half and you have to buy a whole new one because it's actually worth about seven cents and is made by disposable factory workers in Malaysia who die of petroleum-related cancer even faster than BushCo can decimate the Clean Air Act. Neat!
See? Life is easier already. Who knew you needed a new toilet brush to replace that tough metal one you had that lasted years? No one, that's who! What was wrong with the old, sturdy kind? Nothing, that's what! Hail marketing!
Dear sweet Jesus in sterilized heaven, why have we all been washing dishes using those positively archaic reusable scrub pads? Won't someone please invent a single-use, pretreated disposable scrubber that looks like a large feminine sanitary pad and is made of some frightening paper/plastic compound and coated in thick gobs of foaming chemicals and mysterious toxins that you use once on your lasagna pan and then throw away so you have to buy a new box of the damnable things every week?
Thank God, someone has! It's the new Dawn Wash N' Toss! Or maybe it's the Brillo Scrub N' Toss! Or those disposable Palmolive DishWipes, which all come in big noxious tubs made from unrecycled plastics! Cool! Screw those loser trees. First one's free, Mom.
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.
All hail the Swiffer! And the Swiffer Max! And the Swiffer WetJet™, with that big plastic spray-attachment tub you have to refill with toxic chemical cleaner! And the Swiffer hand duster, which you detach and throw away and replace until your shopping list consists solely of 18 different Swiffer refill products and maybe a huge bottle of Tylenol to combat the savage migraines you get from inhaling all those chemicals that poison your blood and make your kidneys cry. Whee!
Now just watch as the Swiffer-endowed housewife runs around like a coked-up lunatic singing the Swiffer song to the tune of "Whip It," drunk on the joy of electromagnetic McDusterthingies. No more brooms! Swiffer the world! Lobotomies all around!
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.
But the scary news is, it seems to be getting worse. Still.
These silly new products, these sexist new ads, are merely a small but nasty sign, like a malignant lump, a festering murmur, in the karmic heart. Just more proof of how we are still being trained not to care, still trained since birth to believe the supply of paper and wood and plastic and petroleum is inexhaustible and that America is the land of abundance and it will all last forever and, besides, most of us will die well before there's any "serious" problems, right? So who the hell cares, and leave it to the next generation to figure out. Now pass the giant tub of foam packing peanuts. Mmm, landfill.
As it is with toilet brushes and brooms, so it is with our national agenda, our environmental policy, our war motives. In other words, there is a straight and unwavering line connecting the Scrub N' Toss with our environmental policy, our worldview, our motives for war and destruction. The world is our commodity. This is the message, the American standpoint. The world is our giant toxic overlit soul-sucking Wal-Mart. Restrain it at your peril.
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.
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. But it's still ours to make.
And if we don't exercise it today, right now, on the next shopping trip to buy scrub pads and detergents and toilet brushes, SUVs and tennis shoes and dildos, it will itself become just another wasted resource, another landfill commodity we once used and then used up and didn't give another damn about.
It is, as always, up to you. Use that dwindling ability to stay informed and conscious, or it quickly disappears, dissolving away like some sort of sad, disposable wad of perspective and conscience. Call it the Think N' Toss. Consider the consequences of your actions only once, for the briefest possible moment, then shrug it off and merely flush them away, never to be thought of again. How wonderfully convenient.
Just look at her, hair pulled tight and life a-shambles, saddled with all manner of horrible bristly toilet brushes and horrible sponges and horrible cloth towels to wipe down the horrible countertops and then topping it all off with being forced to use one of those horrible old-fashioned bristle brooms to sweep the floor. Horrible!
Thank God, then, for modern ultraconvenience. Thank God for the corporate household-product industry, so thoroughly glutted on excess merchandise and overinvention they can't possibly think of things we actually need anymore. And thank God for our concomitant complete lack of any real environmental conscience. Yay America!
See, now, the happily narcotized, entirely sexless, vaguely bulbous modern housewife in the recent TV commercial as she finally tosses away her angry, growling, animated (!) toilet brush (see how it snaps and snarls at her like a drunken deadbeat dad! See her toss it into the trash can and then plop her butt down on it in satisfied glee!) in favor of -- say it with me -- disposable toilet scrubbers you use once and throw away!
Like the ScotchBrite! Or the Clorox ToiletWand™! Or the Scrub N' Flush! Or the Scrubbing Bubbles™ Fresh Brush™ Toilet Cleaning System! Yes, Virginia, the world is certainly headed in the right direction.
Just watch that brush head break apart in a swirl of pulpy chemical fibers in the toilet. Look at the nifty cheap-ass landfill-plastic handle -- remember, it's not a brush, it's a "toilet-cleaning system." Look at the shiny plastic tub of refills you have to buy every month just to keep the goddamn thing stocked before the handle snaps in half and you have to buy a whole new one because it's actually worth about seven cents and is made by disposable factory workers in Malaysia who die of petroleum-related cancer even faster than BushCo can decimate the Clean Air Act. Neat!
See? Life is easier already. Who knew you needed a new toilet brush to replace that tough metal one you had that lasted years? No one, that's who! What was wrong with the old, sturdy kind? Nothing, that's what! Hail marketing!
Dear sweet Jesus in sterilized heaven, why have we all been washing dishes using those positively archaic reusable scrub pads? Won't someone please invent a single-use, pretreated disposable scrubber that looks like a large feminine sanitary pad and is made of some frightening paper/plastic compound and coated in thick gobs of foaming chemicals and mysterious toxins that you use once on your lasagna pan and then throw away so you have to buy a new box of the damnable things every week?
Thank God, someone has! It's the new Dawn Wash N' Toss! Or maybe it's the Brillo Scrub N' Toss! Or those disposable Palmolive DishWipes, which all come in big noxious tubs made from unrecycled plastics! Cool! Screw those loser trees. First one's free, Mom.
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.
All hail the Swiffer! And the Swiffer Max! And the Swiffer WetJet™, with that big plastic spray-attachment tub you have to refill with toxic chemical cleaner! And the Swiffer hand duster, which you detach and throw away and replace until your shopping list consists solely of 18 different Swiffer refill products and maybe a huge bottle of Tylenol to combat the savage migraines you get from inhaling all those chemicals that poison your blood and make your kidneys cry. Whee!
Now just watch as the Swiffer-endowed housewife runs around like a coked-up lunatic singing the Swiffer song to the tune of "Whip It," drunk on the joy of electromagnetic McDusterthingies. No more brooms! Swiffer the world! Lobotomies all around!
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.
But the scary news is, it seems to be getting worse. Still.
These silly new products, these sexist new ads, are merely a small but nasty sign, like a malignant lump, a festering murmur, in the karmic heart. Just more proof of how we are still being trained not to care, still trained since birth to believe the supply of paper and wood and plastic and petroleum is inexhaustible and that America is the land of abundance and it will all last forever and, besides, most of us will die well before there's any "serious" problems, right? So who the hell cares, and leave it to the next generation to figure out. Now pass the giant tub of foam packing peanuts. Mmm, landfill.
As it is with toilet brushes and brooms, so it is with our national agenda, our environmental policy, our war motives. In other words, there is a straight and unwavering line connecting the Scrub N' Toss with our environmental policy, our worldview, our motives for war and destruction. The world is our commodity. This is the message, the American standpoint. The world is our giant toxic overlit soul-sucking Wal-Mart. Restrain it at your peril.
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.
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. But it's still ours to make.
And if we don't exercise it today, right now, on the next shopping trip to buy scrub pads and detergents and toilet brushes, SUVs and tennis shoes and dildos, it will itself become just another wasted resource, another landfill commodity we once used and then used up and didn't give another damn about.
It is, as always, up to you. Use that dwindling ability to stay informed and conscious, or it quickly disappears, dissolving away like some sort of sad, disposable wad of perspective and conscience. Call it the Think N' Toss. Consider the consequences of your actions only once, for the briefest possible moment, then shrug it off and merely flush them away, never to be thought of again. How wonderfully convenient.