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Forget all the squawks about
AIG bonuses and the fact that the Feds are printing gazilluminous amounts of dollars
on their Monopoly money presses to hand over to Zeus-only-knows what
greed-ridden financial institutions or for stimulus packages. Or that Forget all that. No, what’s throbbing in the
pates of the good people of That’s right. Trash. For years now, Williamsburgers
have been living high off the trash collection hog. Thanks to city subsidies,
not only is their garbage collected twice a week, but these Wall Streeters of
the waste world have actually been mollycoddled to the point of having trash
collectors waddle around to the back of their well-coiffed homes to drag out
trash cans. Now, however, city financiers
have floated the unthinkable idea that they might save $200,000 if they reduce trash collection to
once a week and make their regally pampered residents haul their own garbage
out to the curb for pickup. In order to lessen the burden
on those who have never deigned to touch their cans, let alone truck their
detritus out to the curb, the city might be willing to provide cans fitted
with rollers to make their back-breaking, long day’s journey to the front of
the house more commodious. Well, not so fast. What about odors? Can we really abide the putrid percolates
from rancid eggplants and cat litter in garbage cans that are sitting around
for a week? In addition to roll-along
garbage trolleys, will the city provide us with odor-eating cans as
well? That would be peachy. As a resident of What on Earth are you consuming
that necessitates a twice-weekly garbage pickup? Are you eating five meals a day,
or what? Do you clean out your garages
or renovate your houses on a daily basis?
Where is all this trash coming from?
Of course, I must admit that
I’m a bit envious, since we in Essentially we in the county
have two choices. Either we hire a trash collection service to tote away our
garbage (from the curb), or we truck it ourselves to the dumpity dump, euphemistically
called a “transfer station.” The virtue of this is that we
out here in Toano usually eat only two meals a day and are very careful not
to buy things that come in boxes or are packed in plastic bags. We recycle
our cans, bottles and papers and throw our food waste onto a compost heap.
The result is that we can go two or three weeks without a trip to the dump. Furthermore, we are very
attuned to the ethics and psychology of trash. Did you know that there are
actually psychology and sociology PhDs who go through people’s trash to
determine what kind of lives they lead?
And the more trash you generate, the more they know about you? They call this the “logic of trash.” The point of this is not only
to make you defend what you toss out, but to impress upon you that you
actually are, not what you eat, but what you plunk into the garbage can. According to an MIT publication
called “Trash,” what these neo-garbologists want you to do is not throw your
trash away, but “rehabilitate” it.
Thus the example of one woman who created several tableaux from the
movie “Dr. Strangelove” with used peanut butter jars, cigarette butts, rusty
cutlery and duct tape. With this in mind, then, and
lest overly zesty college types decide to poke their noses into things that
are none of their business, we Toanoans generate very little trash. As for our Better that you do away with
trash collection entirely and, like your county neighbors, bus your garbage
bags to the transfer station and the sanctity of an impregnable dumpster.
Either that or get working on those “Dr. Strangelove” tableaux. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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