I am pleased to present to you today the problems that will go down in history as the greatest intra-planetary persecution in the history of life on earth.
Several score years ago, great minds such as Eduard Simon, Alexander Parkes, John Wesley Hyatt and Eugen Baumann respectively stumbled upon the recipes for PS, Parkesine, Celluloid, and PVC, and it is their synthetic legacy that we stand on now and it is in their honor that we murder, garrote and poison life today. This momentous march toward the light at the end of the tunnel commenced in unison with the Industrial Revolution, and the extinction parade has been going strong ever since, seared in the flames of coal and petrochemicals. Death comes as a pitch plague to end terrestrial captivity, relieving souls of their biological burdens, turning breath into blood spill.
A century hence industrialization, we must face the tragic fact that all life has still not been freed of its corporeal duties. One hundred years later, the breadth of biodiversity is still sadly hanging on by a thread, only partially perturbed by the manacles of anthropogenic activities and the chains of allocated shelter. One hundred years later, flora and fauna still thrive on a malnourished, polluted planet in the midst of a vast ocean of material refuse. One hundred years later, life is still languishing in the hard to reach recesses of the ocean bed, forced into exile in its own primordial soup. So we have gathered here today to dramatize a shameful condition, and to finish an incomplete extermination.
In a sense we have come to this consumer capital, Litterin, to cash a costly check. When the architects of this systematic rape of the world wrote the magnificent marketing campaign for capitalism, they were signing a promissory death warrant to which every organism was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all life, yes, multicellular as well as unicellular, would play witness to the steady deterioration of their habitats, health and diet.
It is obvious today that we Homo-Sapien harbingers of death have defaulted on this promissory note insofar as the world’s flora and fauna are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation of ensuring an expedient 6th mass extinction, we the people of planet earth and citizens of Garbagea have given nature an extension; we have issued a check which has come marked with bonus rounds of survival. Protracting the process of putrefaction, delaying the extraction of non-renewable resources, we are cracking and popping when we should be going out with a bang! But we steadfast Garbageans refuse to believe that the bank of injustice is suddenly willing to pardon dues and consider bestowing fair life loans to biodiversity. We Garbageans refuse to believe that there is time to conserve, and that the world can afford to spare nature from helping human settlements realize all of the great vaults of opportunity its finite resources have to offer. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches promised by the laissez-faire capitalistic dream and the security assured by greed. We have also come to this hallowed Garbagean spot to remind the world of the fierce urgency of now, if we do not make all the money there is to make right now, we would actually have a shot at a collective future, and that, fellow Garbageans, is not what survival of the fittest advocates! We need to prove we are superior and we need to prove it now! This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism, we need to strike while our irons are hot. Now is the time to make real the promises of Leprechaun gold. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of debris and consume what little is left and turn that too into inanimate waste. Now is the time to lift our pro-petrochemicals nation from the quick sands of sustainability to the solid rock of an ecological genocide. Now is the time to make an inhospitable reality for all life.
It would be uncharacteristic of us mercenaries to overlook the urgency of the moment. This climate change induced sweltering summer is fast becoming earth’s tipping point and it will come to pass only when an invigorating wintery ice age of frozen fossils and arctic glaciers sweeps through. Twenty Twelve, if it should live up to its Hollywood premise is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that we Garbageans simply needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the world returns to business as usual. Be not mistaken, there will be neither rest nor tranquility in this world until Garbagea is granted global dominion. The whirlwinds of consumerism will continue to shake the foundations of this planet until the bright day of the apocalypse emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my fellow Garbageans who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the panic of peak oil. In the process of gaining our plastic paved place on this planet we must not be guilty of compassion. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for the dark ages by drinking from the cup of doubt and anti-ankh dissension.
We must forever conduct our dump struggle on the landfills of lost causes. We must not allow our annihilation oriented protest to degenerate into mere emotional threats. Again and again we must scale to more obsolescent material heights and meet soul force with purchase power parity. The marvelous new green militancy which has engulfed the organic community must not lead us to a distrust of all people dressed as opposition, for many of those who seem against us are merely decoys placed there by us for tax write offs, which is plenty evident by their presence here today. These sly myopic scroungers have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their ability to get rich quick is inextricably bound to our inherent disregard for the larger picture. We cannot walk alone.
As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march against collective progress. We must not talk of the future, but promote exhausting the present and always refer to the hay days of our past, for it is unfeasible to turn back the clock. This will simulate the illusion that what was okay in the past continues to be okay today, which will permit us to compound consequences to such a level of interconnected complexity as to render it impossible for anyone to take apart much less resolve the issues we breed today. There are those who are asking the devotees of consumer rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as there is money to be made out there and potential revenue sources to be tapped into, for we define ourselves by swiping plastic through machine to procure artifice. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with selfishness and punter passions, cannot attain the highest foothold on the ladder of luxury and transact successfully with the most intangible of securities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Garbagean’s mobility is curtailed by cooperative efforts and by philanthropic activism. We can never be satisfied as long as Garbageans are stripped of their inherent calling to cull by predetermined measures such as “quotas” and “moratoriums”. We cannot be satisfied as long as an NPO thinks it can make a difference and an individual believes he has a sustainable choice to vote for with his wallet. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until blood bubbles forth like the waters in Taiji and the Faroe Islands and pollution puffs out of every household like a NASA launch.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations, where you have been forced by scientists, lobbyists and visionaries to pay your debt against the environment. Some of you have been cornered into mandatory retirement albeit it is with the perks promised you and with inflated pensions. Some of you have come fresh from commodious prison cells where you were forced to spend a few days for reducing the count of an endangered species. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for pecuniary productivity left you battered by the storms of public demonstrations, trapped by boycotts and staggered by online signature campaigns, petitions and rallies. You have been the veterans of superficial suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.
Go back to the Covetous Consumerist Crater, go back to the Pond of Poisonous Provisions, go back to the Debris Bloom Colonies, go back to the Province of Floating Landfills, go back to Pointless Packaging Paradise, go back to the Land of Rising Refuse, go back to the Crap Craddles, the Jurisdiction of Jettison Junk, the Gyre of Genuine Fakes and go back to the West Chaos Wastes and the Southern Sewer Spit, knowing that somehow this bipolar situation can and will be changed in our favor forever more. Let us wallow in the valley of denudation and frolic in the wastelands of tomorrow.
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the oscillating support of uncertain global governments of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the capitalistic pipe dream of cornucopia.
I have a dream that one day this nation of resin and refuse will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We proudly hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created to expend.”
I have a dream that one day on the major and minor Gyres of Garbagea the sons of former Garbageans and the sons of eco-nuts will be able to sit down together at the table of extinction and accept the death of all things living as an inevitable truth.
I have a dream that one day even the most well protected forests and reserves will fall under the mounting pressures of an ever expanding want based society.
I have a dream that we humans, not just Garbageans, will be remembered for all time to come along the ranks of clathrates, asteroids, flood basalt events, anoxic volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, and supernovas.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day, when we have finished looting and raping nature of her beauty and bounty simply to line our own pockets at the cost of ourselves and all life around us that we finally rest in peace as a species.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that one day we will understand just how much we have taken and how little we have given back and revel in the imbalanced relationship we have shared with this blue planet and her gargantuan inventory of life forms. We managed to hoodwink a whole planet, and we could not have done it without the unfettered consumer habits of the apathetic, the affluent, and the arrogant.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I will skulk about the sullied soils of Garbagea with: that people will continue to use plastics without regarding whether it is a type 1 recyclable or a type 7 non-biodegradable. That people will not think twice about what leeches into their food from the packaging it is contained by, and that people will continue to use and discard in the rampant manner they have been doing these past few decades. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mound of debris a six pack ring to choke a turtle with. With this faith we will be able to profuse the few jangling chords intra-amniotically sustaining a new breed of toxic mutants with graver doses of dioxins and mercury which we hope will hemorrhage a symphony of mental disorders and cause the early onset of MODS. With this faith we will be able to kill together, scavenge together, struggle together, fall to ruin together, to stand up for cost blind choices together, knowing that we will be defunct and relieved of all earthly crimes one day.
This will be the day when all can sing the Garbagean People’s Pledge proudly across the plastic ponds of this planet.
And if Garbagea is to be a great nation this must become true. So let crap control the prodigal households of every gluttonous nation in this world. Let trash triumph from West Chaos Wastes to the eastern Gyre of Genuine Fakes. Let Garbage govern from the Pond of Poisonous Provisions!
Let material excess reign from the litter strewn span of the Asylum of Forgotten Wares!
Let industrial froth reign from the curvaceous coils of the Crap Craddles!
But not only that; let resin deposits reign from the sticky spumes of the Southern Sewer Spit!
Let plastics that offgass reign from the Land of Rising Refuse!
Let petrochemicals reign from every hill and molehill of the Covetous Consumerist Crater. From every mountainside, let refuse reign!
And when this happens, when we allow rubbish to reign, when we let acid rain over every village, suburb and city, over every state and every country, we will be able to speed up that day when all of life, unicellular and multicellular, selfish and altruistic, religious and atheistic, young and old, will be able to join hands and surrender to the larger picture, and sing in praise of our own short sightedness and self indulgent ways:
“We came we saw, we conquered, We lost sight of our vessel, we forgot where we’d anchored, we ravaged and looted till earth was cankered, soon all we had left to consume was a waste topped tankard. Hear! Hear!”