Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY


Photo by Angela Natividad, sourced from here

By Darryl Mason

Look, for more than two hundred million people or more, it’s not going to be a lot of fun being an American in the next few years. Life is likely to get pretty grim, financially for starters. Basically, the party is over. But how far can Americans be pushed on what luxuries they will have to give up, what they will have to learn to live without?

Won’t there come a point, a trigger moment if you will, when the demands for cutting back and making even greater personal sacrifices all go just a bit too far?

When the constant ‘Change Your Lifestyle Now’ badgering becomes an event horizon? When someone tries to take away that one extra little luxury that will make the average American just fucking snap?

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

“This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

The outrage is mostly about the fact that Americans favourite luxury toilet paper comes from virgin forests, and that they haven’t taken to the light rectal sandpapering provided by recycled toilet paper Europeans have gotten used to.

The softest of poo blankets is manufactured from virgin forests. Why?

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue.

And this will make your grandchildren will hate you.

“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age.”

Maybe. But it will be a long way down a very long list of ‘greatest excesses’. Certainly well after multi-trillion dollar bailouts for Americans’ most wealthy and privileged, and blowing more than two trillion on the War On Iraq.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

I think Greenpeace is going for ‘Shit Guilt’ here. As comedian Sam Kinison once screamed, when he couldn’t take any more TV campaigns demanding people like him quit drugs, smoking, porn, and generally all round having fun, “Get Off Our Backs!”

Or in this case, get out from between our legs.

But the makers of the products that Greenpeace is targeting are fighting back :

“For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides….It’s the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect.”

See how effective they are at selling their product, even in a quote from a news story? Makes you want to run out right now and buy the softest, most heavily quilted bum tissues you can find, while muttering “Fuck Greenpeace.”

From the anti-soft toilet paper side comes this money quote :

“People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”

Your ecologically responsible future then must be all things rough, and scratchy.

Visit 1800blogger to see all of our industry leading blogs.

Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]