“So I’m concerned about all the waste I see around me. And it’s not like I’m doing anything to stop the deluge. In fact I’m contributing. Why, I don’t know. I guess it’s a momentum thing. It’s hard to change and I’ve got lots of other things to worry about.”
“Got something on your mind, do you?”
“Well look at… I don’t know…. Look at games. I think of it because my son just got a Hungry Hungry Hippos game from a well-intentioned relative.”
“What about it?”
“Well, it’s a complete piece of crap game. Just total garbage. It has no merit of any kind. If you’re not familiar with it, basically four kids sit around this plastic arena wherein balls are placed, and each kid operates a plastic hippo that opens its maw and captures marbles each time a lever is pressed. The balls bounce around in the arena until they are all eaten. Then each person counts how many balls they’ve captured. Voila. Game in a nutshell.”
“Sounds lame.”
“It is! What happens is that every kid just hammers the crap out of their lever until the game is over, which takes about 30 seconds. There’s no skill at all and no educational value at all. The play value is so bad that the kids drop it after five minutes in favour of something else and it sits in a box until mom or dad finally decides to throw it out or into a yard sale. It sucked when I was a kid and it still sucks. Anyway, my point is, imagine how many of these things have been manufactured since the late seventies when I believe it was introduced. Imagine. Imagine how much plastic that represents and how much crap into the atmosphere, earth, and water all for this truly horrendously stupid and pointless game.
“And that’s just one teeny weeny example. McDonald’s Happy Meal toys are another one. Imagine how many of those goddamn things have been pumped into our popular culture in the name of promoting some movie or other for the sake of making an extra buck and sucking kids into the habit of coming back for more.
“And how about — oh, here’s a good one — how about all of those DVD’s they put out that have a cardboard sleeve on them when you buy them. They’ve got some kind of art on them that grabs your attention and tries to persuade you to buy the package. Then you take the sleeve off and inside you’ve got the DVD case shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, and on the cover of the case — are you with me? — the cover of the case has exactly the same art as the carboard you just pulled off. Even the back of the cardboard sleeve is exactly the same as the back of the DVD case. Can you explain that one to me? Can you tell me what benefit that provides to the whole package? What on Earth is the value of doing something like that? Seriously, explain that to me. Can you sense how angry I am about this? It just blows my mind that we allow this kind of thing to happen.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.”
“Uh-huh. But nobody will stand up and stop it. Nobody can. I think there needs to be some kind of governing body with the authority to evaluate mass produced products based on merit and give the thumbs up or thumbs down to them. No thumbs up, no manufacture. It would reduce waste and, as an added bonus, it would reduce the number of ways we can be marketed at.”
“Yeah. That’ll happen. Sure. Hey here’s a novel thought: Why not instead educate consumers about the choices they’re making? The corporations will follow the demands of the consumer.”
“That’s a nice idea, but there are two problems with that that I can see. One, the reality is that people don’t want to know. They don’t want to have to consider any of that. They just want what they want and — goddammit — they deserve it, so they’re going to take it, however short-sighted it may be. Two, the corporations that are doing this are experts at creating need where there is none. How do you think we got into this predicament in the first place? Any grass-roots, low-budget attempt to go up against those guys is nearly certain to meet in defeat. Money talks, and corporations have lots of it. They would begin a campaign quickly that would neutralize any sort of sentiment that may impinge on their profits. I think law is the only way to do this. I really do. People don’t have any sense when it comes to stuff like this. People en masse are self-interested and short-term thinkers. The only way to make this stop is to make laws that forbid corporations from manufacturing things that are actual garbage. I know. I can hear the libertarians and capitalists shouting epithets at me and calling me a dictator, but I think you have to stop the manufacture of all of this crap in its tracks by making it illegal. The soft approach just isn’t going to work — certainly not as quickly as we need it to. You have to remove the ability of people to buy this crap.”
“You’re talking about prohibition. Word is that didn’t work real well. In fact it created a very profitable black-market and the likes of Al Capone.”
“I’m having difficulty imagining someone wanting Hungry Hungry Hippos so badly that they would risk jail time to get it.”
“Touché.”