Large Fierce Mammal

There's always a fresh pile of steaming bullshit around the next corner.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, most of modern culture is built on a foundation of 100% pure bullshit. Entire industries make obscene amounts of money convincing people that they aren’t thin enough, young enough, pretty enough, investing wisely enough, would get more sex if they were driving a different car, don’t smell good enough, are too bald or too grey … you know what I’m saying. This is made possible because most people prefer not to think for themselves.

A commercial that should insult everyone who sees it is the one that Scotia Bank put up in the wake of the current economic downturn. It’s the one with the rattled boob telling a smug woman that his investments just tanked. She tells him he should be investing with her group because their portfolios “grow with the market”. Excuse me you cloth-eared bint, but the point here is that the market is SHRINKING. If your portfolio is “growing” with the market then it’s “growing” in reverse. What’s another word for “non-winner”? Starts with an “L”.

Back in 1973 we hit a speed bump we called “the OPEC oil crisis”. In case you weren’t there, or have since killed the brain cell you formerly used to store the memory, the predominantly Arab petroleum exporting countries tried starving us oil slugging western wastrels of crude to teach us a lesson. Ecology activists preached this as a perfect opportunity to position society for the inevitable day when non-renewable energy sources would be used up. People began driving 55 miles an hour claiming that they were consuming less fuel while continuing to drive their lazy asses everywhere and taking longer to do it. Honda introduced the Civic as the first car capable of going more than 40 miles on a gallon of gas. California passed more environmental laws and succeeded in becoming still more Californian.

So what happened? There was some military sabre rattling but, in the end, formerly dirt poor people who succeeded in becoming wealthy based on nothing more than the fact that they happen to live on a sand dune covering a shitload of the most desirable commodity in the world really can’t ignore how much money they aren’t making forever. Greed both started and ended this tempest in a teapot. Honda still builds the Civic but it’s a sporty car now and 40+ miles to the gallon is just a twinkle on its exhaust pipe. SUV’s and full size pick-up trucks abound, driven by people who were briefly upset by more recent fuel cost increases but forgot about that when prices dropped again, however temporarily. A few drive hybrid vehicles and feel morally superior. Some also buy carbon credits which I find to be pretty much the same as Catholics going to confession. A little penance and all the sin under your fingernails is like it was never there in the first place. Even better, it’s like having someone else wipe your ass for you. In the end, it’s not you left holding the shit.

Go to a school and ask a bunch of kids to draw a picture or write a description of what they imagine when they hear the word “environment”. Ask a group of adults where “the environment” is. Everybody pictures clear running streams, forests, and wildlife. Few picture “the environment” as being where they’re sitting. Commercials funded by governments and companies that make their living from wholesale exploitation of Nature use variations of the tag line that they are making sure wild places are there “to be enjoyed” by future generations. That’s future generations of humans of course. Other species don’t vote or buy deodorant.

“To be enjoyed” you say. Is that what this is about? Humans are so far out on top of the food chain that short of a few parasites, viruses, and the animals we’ve domesticated who can’t survive without human support, pretty much nothing else on the planet would miss us if we all disappeared tomorrow. All of this should make a thinking person more than a little unaccepting of any claims that each and every part of Nature exists purely “to be enjoyed” by humans, and I encourage you all to teach the Great Unwashed the true meaning of “environment” by getting into their personal space and emitting the most lethal fart you can muster.

Every morning it seems that I’m hearing the results of the latest “study”. The sad thing is that the results have less to do with science and more with the agenda of whoever paid for the study to be done in the first place.

In the March 2009 edition of Outdoor Canada I found a short piece by Aaron Kylie titled “Unnatural Selections” that I’ll reproduce here, particularly since it’s what got me riled in the first place:

So much for going green. The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary – aimed at children aged seven or older – has excised more than 100 flora and fauna related words, replacing them with terms such as blog, chatroom, and celebrity. Here’s a selection of the omissions ….

• Acorn
• Ash
• Beaver
• Beech
• Blackberry
• Boar
• Brook
• Chestnut
• Clover
• Doe
• Drake
• Fern
• Hazelnut
• Heron
• Herring
• Ivy
• Kingfisher
• Minnow
• Otter
• Porcupine
• Raven
• Thrush
• Walnut
• Wren

What the hell? As a Canadian, I find the omission of “beaver” to be more than a little offensive, and I really can’t understand how they dropped the ball on “blackberry” seeing as this age of self-indulgence and instant gratification has turned that word into a verb.

Bloody hell. Rant out.