"I resist and resent the demands made on me by environmental imperatives. I don’t want to save the planet. I just want to inhabit it as comfortably as possible for as long as I have."Consider me amused!
Add this nerdy shot at Foucault (are people still swooning over Foucault?), and I'm giggling:
And, of course, there’s recycling. Recycling has been around for a long time now, and the irritation many people feel toward it has often been expressed. I would only add that the rules and requirements keep changing and becoming more severe. I had just gotten used to separating the mail from the magazines (which had already been separated from the newspapers, which had already been separated from the bottles and the garbage, a category that has survived the revolution) when I was informed that some of the mail had cellophane address windows and that those would have to be ripped out before proceeding to the next stage and the next bin.
Categorization being what it is, there is no end to the subcategories that can be devised, each of them bringing with it a new set of strictures and a new opportunity to be inadequate and delinquent. Michel Foucault made a career of observing that modern techniques of regulation are more far-reaching and consequential than the old way of keeping people in line with guns and clubs, especially when they are imposed for your own good and for the good of society. He would have had a field day with recycling and would no doubt have written a book (maybe he did and I missed it while sorting the garbage), entitled, perhaps, “The Archaeology of Waste.”
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