My American friends LOOK OUT! Watch where you are going, be careful where you put your feet. A hole in the U.S. Economy is putting you in danger every time you set foot on the sidewalk thing you have over there.
While the financial community was cheered by news that U.S. exports to China have increased by 7.5% in the financial year 2004/2005 this has to be viewed in relation to the fact that Chinese exports to the U.S. have increased by fifteen percent. As China traditionally exported more to the U.S. because Chinese punters cannot afford anything made in America (if anything is still made in America that is. We Brits do not like to dirty our hands on manufacturing now,) the news is in fact not good on two counts. First a lot of money is disappearing into China and second, what America is exporting across the bamboo curtain is not reassuring.
A vast nation with a huge population and few natural resources the Chinese have had to learn to make what they have go a long way. For a couple of generations they had to employ great ingenuity in order to meet their basic needs without bankrupting the economy. China is decades ahead of the west in recycling. Our junk is their raw material.
When you get those rather condescending leaflets through your door from the municipal authority urging us all to recycle for the good of the environment, do you ever stop to think "but where are the local recycling factories? Where does all that bog roll that disintegrates when it gets within ten yards of a toilet come from, and those tissues that would take the skin off a rhinoceros. You may be reassured to learn that such industries are not operating in your back yard.
Six empty cola bottles will make a fleece jacket you are told. No brand snobbery here, Rola Cola will do just as well as the brand leaders. 200 empty bean cans will make a Daewoo… and the by - product of eating 200 cans of beans could power a Daewoo for a month if somebody could just work out a way of collecting the highly volatile gas.
Recycling is a worthy thing to do although there is always something of the raffia mafia about washing out your empty food containers. Is it really helping the environment to ship all the shit round the world to China though? And are we not storing up trouble for the future because although adults in caring professions might be happy to embrace a lifestyle that involves fair trade Jesus Sandals, hand knitted sweaters and home brewed beer, can you imagine the reaction from the adolescents when they learn that their Tommy Hilfiger copy fleece hoodie was a bunch of empty Cola bottles in the neighbour's domestic waste a few months ago. Adults who have made their own lifestyle choice to convert the Citroen 2CV into a hen house really have no right to embarrass their offspring by stripping them of every last shred of cred.
So good are the Chinese at recycling that it can only be a matter of time before they develop an economically viable method of breaking down defunct humans into useful raw materials. Carbon, Iron, Copper, Magnesium, loads of trace elements. It is reckoned that a human body contains enough iron to make a six inch nail. Half a million of us die in Britain each year. That’s a lot of nails for the Chinese economic boom. It can only be a matter of time before we are shipping out container loads of stiffs alongside our domestic waste because given rising funeral costs and penal levels of inheritance tax I'm sure those left behind would welcome the opportunity to weigh in the dear departed for scrap. I wonder how Buddhists feel about the prospect of being reincarnated as consumer durables.
Western exports to China would be virtually non-existent but for the fact that we are selling them rubbish so they can tart it up and sell it back to us. It is not just household waste, scrap cars, TVs, Computers and old newspapers, such is the Chinese hunger for raw materials that it is now common in America for "street hardware" (manhole covers and rainwater grates to you and me) to be stolen for export to China. Which means organised crime is involved. And so I repeat my warning, American Friends watch where you are putting your feet, you could be about to step into a hole in the economy.
Thirteen Sick Tasteless Classics, Part V
Thirteen Sick Tasteless Classics, Part V is humorous adult literature featuring adult content and language. The work satirizes and spoofs thirteen classic tales from U.S. and British literature, a
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