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Plastic
Crap PAGE
TWO: Most of us do not hunt, but manage to consume on the efforts of those who do the dirty work, and it's much the same with plastics. Live in this land long enough, and you find yourself, more and more, becoming a plastics connoisseur. There are low-grade plastics that you feel sorry for, and more sturdy varieties that confuse you -- they're too disposable to be utilitarian, but too utilitarian to be entirely disposable either. Santa's elves in the workshop are often depicted, in their fictional craft, fashioning little train cars out of wood. How terribly, terribly quaint. Today, it would be giant vats of polyethylene and elves shaping molds out of whatever flickered across TV screens: from American minds to Korean animation houses to whatever cable company had exclusive rights to the North Pole. My son excitedly comes to me, now that Christmas and its bounty of Star Wars toys has come and gone, and is asking for Power Rangers. They're all the rage in his preschool class. He holds up a Power Ranger action figure that he got God only knows where, and I inspect. It's plastic and paint, and a series of small metal screws positioned to make it somewhat limber, though, to be fair, it moves with all the grace of a 7-foot basketball player from Slovenia that more agile players find to be particularly enticing to dunk on. He has instructed me that he wants more just like this one. Lots more. Watching an episode of Power Rangers on TV is confounding. To me, it seems like a show explicitly engineered for the selling of toys. There are fights with stereotypical villains. The Power Rangers seem to change shapes and randomly shoot bolts of energy from their wrists. One day, when my wife picked up my son from an especially grubby day at preschool, one of his classmates told her, "What you should do is give him a bath and put him in his PJs and let him watch Power Rangers." My wife regarded him for a moment, and then said, "Well, thank you for the parenting advice." Alexander Parkes had no idea. The revolution that ended up not bearing his name was a revolution of comfort and innovation, and assembling a phalanx of things we probably don't need. It all starts as a goopy mess of chemicals in a factory pressed together and left to cool. What can be the housing for a hyper-efficient computer can be melted and reconfigured into the leering face of some comic book creature, or a cup, or any number of other items that we assign some arbitrary value to and seek out. Plastics are so pervasive that it's pointless to be pro-plastic or anti-plastic. It's sort of like being pro-air or anti-air -- hating it won't make it go away, and trying to do without it dooms you to a bleak, cabin-in-the-woods Unabomber existence. Even bleaker, probably. I'm guessing that even the Unabomber didn't whittle Tupperware and ball-point pens from wood. Toddlers
don't think about things like this. Most of us, most of the time,
don't think of things like this. And as much plastic crap as my
son seems to accumulate, at least they're more than just toys. At
some point, most of the items my son has assembled in his room have
been touchstones for the imagination. The cars have driven across
imaginary landscapes, the animals have walked forests and meadows
only he envisions, and though I'm still pretty unsettled about the
Homeland Security handcuffs, even those are figuring into a worldview
that, for the children of the 21st century, is getting more complicated
all the time: harder to fit into a mold and refashion than it maybe
ever was.
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At
the San Antonio Zoo, which is about a fifteen-minute walk from our
house, if your child happens to demand it, you can feed a dollar
into a giant black machine, which feels directly transported from
an early 1960s time machine, and you can make a plastic mold of
an elephant and a giraffe. Liquefied plastic comes out of the inner
workings of the machine and is poured into an animal-shaped mold.
The plastic animal comes out still warm, a burned chemical scent
clinging to it long after it has hardened in the air. It is at once
foreign and familiar. If plastic is akin to buying meat in the supermarket,
this is akin to hunting for plastic in the wild.
