As champions of all that is good and right in the world these days, it seems the EU can do no wrong. From social welfare, to progressive environmental policy, to animal rights, time and again those Europeans make us North Americans look like the dirty, ignorant provincials that we are. In truth, this is only half sarcasm; but the new EU-wide ban on seal products carries with it the disgusting reek of hypocritical political pandering, just in time for June’s European parliamentary elections.

Animal cruelty is apparently the issue at hand. After all, what could be worse than clubbing an innocent, ivory-furred week-old baby seal, not yet old enough to even move? Never mind that hunting pups has been illegal in Canada since 1987. It must have lifted such a burden off the hearts of the EU’s politicians to finally rid their union of such (fictitious) malignity. I wonder, did the French celebrate with a satisfying spread of pate de foie gras? Perhaps the Italians indulged in some veal parmigiana? Or maybe the Spaniards, in such a mood of lusty self-satisfaction, reveled in a stirring round of bullfighting? Was a fox hunt in the cards for the good old boys in Britain? Maybe not - I’m sure that every single smug one of them is an ethical vegetarian, just like the animal-loving populations they represent.

The self-serving hypocrisy represented by condemning the Canadian seal hunt while casting a blind-eye to the disgusting depravity of industrial meat production is simply staggering. That the cute-factor plays such a paramount role in the ethical considerations of animal rights is similarly shameful. I wonder how many of the politicians who signed the bills have seen a seal that’s older than two weeks, once it’s shed its pristine white coat - would they still be so sympathetic after laying eyes on the bloated, parasite-pitted monstrosities they become after a few years? (Funny how we shudder at the prospect of Koreans or Vietnamese eating dog, but think nothing of digging into a pork chop, which comes from a demonstrably much more intelligent animal.) Then again, I guess impoverished Newfoundland fishermen aren’t the most attractive things around, either.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on the EU, though. Maybe they aren’t looking to capture the moral high ground in order to please their constituencies (which seem to love consuming seal-products, given that Europe is the world’s largest market). Maybe it’s just plain-old illegal protectionism, given that Sweden and Finland both hunt commercially, and the UK culls seals to preserve their fisheries.

(Since the issue at hand is strictly cruelty, of course, I won’t bother mentioning that the seal hunt has been a traditional, sustainable aspect of Canada’s maritime ecosystem for hundreds of years, and that the harp seal population has never been in any risk of collapse. More sustainable and humane, dare I say it, than the vast majority of farming practices in the Western world…)

I continue to hate politics.

So last night, for the first time in years, I went to a straight-up punk show at a Vancouver metal bar. Besides the predictable but entertaining power chords, the show was also the book launch for the latest from Gofuckyerself Press. Before the second act, the author went on stage and (once suitably bespectacled) read a brief excerpt.

In the dialogue, two characters were decrying the impact that the 2010 Olympics was having on the besieged poor in the Downtown Eastside, while drinking heavily at a rooftop hotel bar. It would be hard to accuse the author of literature, but that would also be missing the point. At the scene’s climax, the protagonist hurls a broken whiskey bottle from the roof onto a police car parked out front. “It was a glorious blow for the revolution,” the author read, laced with irony.

I’d been cringing a bit throughout the reading, but the self-deprecation in that line nearly redeemed it all. It made me think. While in recent years, I’ve largely stopped believing in the feasibility of ‘the revolution,’ or ultimately even in its desirability. I’d thought that was the product of a maturation in my political views (perhaps part of why I haven’t been to any punk shows in a while), but hearing the same sentiment coming from the mouth of a dyed-in-the-wool lifer punk threw me off a bit.

It made me realize that if even in the hearts of its staunchest supporters, ‘the revolution’ is just sort of an vague abstraction that will - and possibly can - never come to fruition, it still has its place. Things may get better, or they may not, but the punks want to remind us that this isn’t the best it can be. This is not the end of history.

When dire situations drive people to radical action, you have to ask why. White-collar office workers who commute from the suburbs in Honda Civics don’t throw Molotov cocktails. Violence is inexcusable, but then again, its rarely the resort of people who feel socially and politically enfranchised.

There was something Sisyphean in the author’s words. Being part of the angry detritus as society’s margins isn’t pretty, but maybe somebody’s got to do it. If only to pinch us awake every now and then.

This is not a music blag, but it occasionally pretends to be about social justice, so I’m posting this song from Propagandhi’s newest album on that pretext.

When the credits finally roll
for this, the worst story ever told,
don’t bother sifting through the names
for yours or anyone you know.
Unless they were by chance a shepherd king,
a virgin birth, a resurrection, a messianic prince
or some such childish thing.
You can storm the edit suite
or move to block its theatrical release,
but I think we can safely guarantee
that there will be no revisions to the script
made on behalf of a supporting cast(e).

But mostly, it’s just here because it rocks so fucking hard.

Saw this over at Inhabitat:

If you live in a city where plastic takeout containers are not recyclable, you may be feeling the same frustrations that we are. Those of us who can’t bear the thought of simply tossing the receptacles that hold our beloved chinese food, sushi, and wraps try to reuse them as many times as possible. But what could make people who don’t really care about the environment want to hold on to their food containers instead of trashing them? That is the question that designer Takeshi Miyakawa set out to answer. His solution? Shaping the containers to look like a childhood favorite that most adults find difficult to resist–legos!

This does not strike me as a positive development. Unless it uses a more benign material that can biodegrade (recycling/downcycling is better than nothing, but not by an awful lot), gimmicky design like this merely delays the inevitable. Instead of storing their garbage in a landfill, consumers will merely store it temporarily in their homes before they bore of it. I doubt even the designer holds any illusions that these won’t be the first thing to go when the users need to make some room in their apartments, move out, or simply tire of having a space filled with uncomfortable, ill-constructed, barely-usable furnishings. Yes, they may linger in the household for a little bit longer than otherwise, but we’re talking about at most a few years in the lifespan of a plastic container that will live on in the environment for hundreds. On top of that, the containers remain a useless oddity until you acquire a sufficiently large critical mass of them to actually do something with them (which will take either a very long time, or simply drive greater consumption of take-out…)

It seems to me that a great deal of new industrial design objets d’art have are earning their “green” credentials by feeding upon the trend of largely superficial reuse-o-philia. While there is always some limited potential to repurpose old waste and turn it into something new and valuable, more often than not the ‘waste’ was never really garbage to begin with. I’m reminded of a translucent lamp design I saw that was made up of hundreds of drinking straws (there have been lots of these - feel free to visualize whatever example comes most recently to mind). I’m sure the straws were all post-consumer, of course. Because the designer must have paid some poor sap to sort through cafeteria garbage cans for hours, and then to clean them all before they were repurposed, right? Making it so expensive that it will remain an object of transient amusement for some yuppie with eco guilt?

Making new, attractive things - and taking advantage of industrial processes that can make said things accessible to the masses rather than just the elite - is not inherently bad. It’s only bad so long as we work in open loops, and the energy and material put into that object cannot be reclaimed in some way or another (either by nature, in the form of biodegradation, or by us through reuse or recycling). While good design blends art and technology, I fear that the eco movement’s schizophrenic consumption has skewed the direction of contemporary design too far to the former. Maybe it takes more effort to think about efficient materials, processes, and technology than it is to handcraft an art-project bauble out of old junk and sell it to the rich. Given that the result will evidently be lapped up by an uncritical design press eager for new sustainafashions, I’m inclined to think so.

(As an afterword to this somewhat unintentionally raging post, my hope is that the large companies that actually have the power to influence consumption patterns in some meaningful way will take the high road and look towards macro-level solutions and innovative materials to close the loop. I suspect the ‘high’ design magazines, blogs, shows and fairs will continue to mostly fill their pages and halls with irrelevant frippery, but I suppose that’s always been the case.)