What's That Smell?
you know what it is...
A brief exchange in a comment thread opened onto a larger question for me: what kind of culture teaches people to enjoy the picnic and leave the trash for someone else? The issue is not only individual ignorance or bad character. It is also the way consumer culture, mediated distraction, and civic estrangement train us to ignore the larger costs of our comforts. I started to write a short response and realized it was really its own essay.
(link to original Substack at the end…The Bulwark, JVL “Against The People”…worth a look)
So this is the fuller version.
There is a scene from a Mad Men episode in which the Draper family goes to a park for a picnic. They experience a lovely bucolic afternoon; Their remains of the day left for someone else to deal with, apparently unnoticed by them. An artful example of how, despite cleverness (Draper is very clever, but ultimately motivated primarily by power and status and experiences his relational world in terms of strategy, rather than shape), the missing piece is cultural integration of the “new way of things,” without which, there is not yet a model foundation that signals, “pick that shit up.”
We, the modern viewer, can view the scene as a bit of a wink, dark humor, or the foreshadow of an emergent illness (Industrial Disease 1). We should resist the fantasy that we are now at the end of history, the final Crown of God’s creation and that we have grown beyond that mentality and behavior. By and large, as individuals we put our small trash in the garbage. Nice, but that becomes something of a permission structure to ignore (Ignoreland 2) that our Industrial Consumerist culture must produce vast amounts of shit for every shiny trinket produced. (Slavoy Zizek’s “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology” 3- is worth viewing).
I suspect that whatever solution is found, it will be at a Structural level. I’m not sure what that will look like. One thing will be disqualification of dark money from our politics, but that is only a beginning. We may be a bit like Gandalf here, smelling our way through the least malodorous path through Moria. And it will come with a cost I’m sure. A big cost for those of us who “speak Friend and enter” and do what we must. For my children, just now at the beginning of their first flights, for all of our children, who are coming to realize that their futures have been stolen 4. And for their children, or perhaps their children’s children…they will say (as we do, when we look backward), “yes, that is a thing that happened. That must have been rough. Let’s go pull weeds from the garden now.”
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The original Substack:
