Do bears really use toilet paper?

Does anyone here watch television? OK, how about television commercial advertising? Really? That many? How completely surprising! (Not!)

We Americans are absolute captives of marketing and advertising, as if anyone isn’t at least intellectually aware of this deplorable fact of day-to-day life in the fantastic, materialistic, Disneyfied America we all exist in.

But really… Does anyone pay much attention to the commercial advertising that literally peppers most television shows, these days? How about the one for ‘Charmin’ Toilet Tissue’? You know, the one that features that family of cute, fluffy little pink bears that oh-so-delicately discuss the charms of wiping their furry little pink butts with Charmin. Of course, they don’t verbally extoll the physical necessity of wiping sh*t off their cute little pink assholes (aesthetic as it may be). Rather, they rapturously describe the texture of Charmin and how wonderfully soft it is to their nethermost derrieres.

Hmmm. Soft on the delicate skin of one’s nether evacuatory orifice. At that point anyone who has had the unhappy experience of having that oh-so-soft Charmin Toilet Tissue tear as it is dragged across their sphincter should have an ‘aHA!’ moment, as the soft, weak tissue being hawked by the bears rips momentarily at that critical moment, exposing their fingers to a certain brown stain we all become familiar with at regular unfortunate moments in our lives, while cleaning up after a bowel movement.

Now, prepare yourself for the truth about all that wonderfully soft ‘Charmin’ tissue we would be made to believe by cartoon bear proponents is solely to assure our tactile comfort to the utmost degree. WRONG. It isn’t soft for our benefit and it rips easily under the slightest strain because Charmin pays God-knows how much money to a team of highly skilled engineers to make it soft enough to disintegrate completely, once it has been flushed down the toilet. Whether into a septic tank, or into the mass excrement disposal system of an urban city, Charmin is soft because it has to be…otherwise it would completely clog up the works in those multi-million-dollar waste disposal systems our burgeoning cities all depend upon.

I present this here as a great example of deliberately misleading and false realities peddled at us that are intended to deceive us into thinking that ‘oh-so-soft’ toilet tissue is manufactured squeezably soft solely for our comfort, and thereby prompt us to use tissue that will benefit the city’s public works plants. Clever socio-economic engineering, eh?

That’s modern reality in America, home of the naïve and land of the grossly misled. Think about that, next time your fingers penetrate the Charmin tissue you’re wiping your butt with and you end up with a bad case of (yuk!) brown stinky-finger.

I’ve long advocated critical thinking as an asset to be cultivated assiduously and thereafter treasured, but sometimes I verge on despair, knowing that the simpler course of action is usually what will obtain in just about every instance where complex marketing forces meet the highly malleable masses. It is far less arduous to simply throw one’s virtual hands up, surrender to massive social ignorance and let the river of mediocrity (suspiciously brown and tinged with lumpy globs) carry us all to the brink of oblivion (or perhaps even to extinction, in the case of what we are now encouraged to delicately refer to as ‘climate change’).

Paradigm shift: Every now and then I encounter individuals on ‘Authors’ Den’ who affect a curiously and ebulliently optimistic stance. One such recent example took the form of a poem, and some of the comments directed to it echoed the upbeat sentiment (i.e. “We have enough doom-sayers and critics among us as it is; let’s all try to be positive and look on the bright side of things”, or words to that effect). Such unbridled enthusiasms invariantly make me feel ill, for it’s exactly that sort of attitude (for an analogue here, imagine an airliner in a steep dive to a horrific, unavoidable and unsurvivable impact, wherein all aboard are totally unconcerned because they are being served expensive Russian caviar and premium French champagne ‘on the house’) that is responsible for not just the eventual end of all human life on our tragically abused planet but every single one of the smaller, every-day battles and fights we all must contend with that make life such a bittersweet proposition.

Numerous philosophers (far more sagacious than third-rate little ole me) have often noted that the human life experience is no place for either snowflakes (perhaps they used a slightly less contemporaneous term than that one, which is presently employed to signify someone who is delicately brittle in their perceptions) or reflectively astute and intelligent individuals. That indictment certainly is true enough.

As I enter my 7th decade of life, unendingly coping with the gross ignorance of the masses as each of us must, it seems as if every single day is fraught by encounters with others who either cannot or will not accept the fact that we must all share this life with each other in a mutually considerate, compassionate and thoughtful manner. These encounters may be somewhat tolerable when one is younger (since when you are young, a good, direct, physical ‘in-your-face’ response is oh-so-much-more satisfying than swallowing the bitter pill of angry resignation that comes with age & experience), but as one gets a bit longer in the tooth, facing the unending dipsh*tery manifested by these crap-for-brains people can be absolutely exhausting.

I get my share of these experiences in several ways: in the park, trying to walk our dog on a leash without having her ‘messed-with’ by loose dogs whose owners refuse to obey the leash-laws, and by people on the local freeways who threaten your life constantly with their disdain for driving safety. With regard to the latter group, no single group is responsible for all the potential mayhem that a wrong move can cause in a traffic stream: equal among them are young drivers without experience, ‘house-mouse’ sports moms in a rush to get their carload of kids to a soccer practice, legions of covert methamphetamine users, blithe souls who persist on using smartphones while driving (e.g. distracted driving), illegal aliens who can now drive legally on our roads without being citizens (and who usually can’t drive worth a healthy dump)...the list is endless. Welcome to Californica (sic)!

A simple drive to take care of something like getting the groceries at a local store can suddenly take on the seriousness of the Indy 500 race, when some dipsh*t cuts you off without signaling or passes you with his hopped-up-on-steroids car in the bicycle lane at high speed. Grrr, grrr, and more grrr!

I am reminded here of a comment made by a reviewer of that excellent 2016 movie 'Lucky' describing the melancholy state-of-being experienced by the movie's main character, who is experiencing the 'agonising existential purity of very oldness and not-yet-deadness'.

That quite perfectly summarises life for a great number of older individuals for whom each day is a challenge to flagging life enthusiasms. A state wherein each day seems increasingly reduced to a state wherein the ennui, ordinary burdens and unhappy encounters of every-day life start to become overwhelming and incapacitating. Naturally, it is impossible for anyone who is younger and still in the prime of life to fully comprehend exactly what this devastating change of life entails for a substantially 'older' person.

Meanwhile, just about every day we are bombarded with articles and ‘self-help’ stories about how to ‘de-stress’, lower general angst and cope with these daily disasters without becoming homicidal. A whole lot of help that is!

Frankly stated, regular, unexceptional life is difficult enough to live appropriately, without the added burden of being admonished to be ‘everyone else’s keeper’ in the bargain. My personal compassion quotient only extends, after all, just so far before I find myself starting to daydream about how best to eugenically deal with some of these miscreants and their problems permanently! Beyond that, I neither have the spare energy nor regard for the messes others make of their personal lives...as long as they stay well clear of me while they screw themselves and those around them over!

Very recently a good friend forwarded an article from a daily on-line journal about certain aspects of life in contemporary Japan, Korea and China. The article detailed that fact that marriages in Korea are on a rather precipitous decline and the birthrate in Korea is now causing great concerns on the part of economists who predict that by the year 2030, the majority of that nation’s inhabitants will be over the age of 65. Lest that sound like not much of a problem, keep in mind that without younger wage-earners helping keep old-age pensioners and social security support programs solvent, the only prudent thing to do with so-called ‘old folks’ (as grossly non-productive, highly consumptive social units) would seem to be to grind them all up into a sort of ‘Soylent Green’ protein powder to help feed the nation’s citizens.

Now clearly, that is an exaggeration, but it’s a fact that in a nation where marriage can set a young couple back the equivalent of several hundred thousand US dollars (seriously), the vast majority of younger individuals are no longer bothering to get married. Not just that, but a preponderant majority have given up entirely on dating in any form whatsoever. Whaaaat?!

Naturally, this begs the question: “If they aren’t marrying and if they’re not even dating, how do they take care of the natural biological mating instinct?”

I am informed that in Korea, a nation with a strong Confucian ancestral heritage, young people do not yet emulate many American teenagers (who simply walk up to each other and say “Wanna f*ck?”) but it doesn’t take much imagination to see something like that convention taking root in the hoary old culture of Korea.

It’s interesting, when speaking of Korea (and I refer to South Korea here), that ostensibly Christian cult-like religious groups like that of Sun Myung Moon have responded to this conjugal crisis by conducting mass marriages, in which sometimes on the order of a thousand or more young couples are married simultaneously at ‘marriage events’ that take places several times a year. Er, um, well… I guess one could say, whatever it takes to keep Korea intact as a modern, viable nation, d’ya ‘spose? George Orwell would stand in absolute awe to learn of this approach, I’ve no doubt.

Consider here, if you will, that marriage has only succeeded for several thousands of years of mankind’s (I’ll say ‘mankind’ in preference to the more politically correct ‘humanity’, although some radical souls would prefer even that to be modified to ‘huwomanity’, LoL) history because of the influence of the various religious indoctrinations most Americans were formerly subject to. Predominantly, this ‘religious indoctrination’ I refer to took the form of Judeo-Christianity.

Only in recent decades has that formular method of reinforcement (of the imperiousness of matrimonial bonds) undergone substantial modifications, as America continues to undergo a transmogrification from white, northern European cultural attributes to a Heinz 57 mongrelisation process that has come about as the concept of ‘diversity’ gains a foothold on the popular imagination. One of the consequences of this is that traditional covenants between paired couples (i.e. as ‘marriage’) have become submerged in such a wide variety of definitions that the word now tends to lose its entire substance of identity, form and definition, as the flood of change-over-time distinctions storm over our senses like an unannounced tsunami.

Of course, institutions like ‘marriage’, whether between two conventionally heterosexuals or between a pair of homosexuals (oh, excuse me…I mean LGBTQ), has always been a frustrating prospect. Particularly, however, a marriage between a man and a woman, since as sages throughout history have pointed out, men and women will never be able to fully optimise any arrangement they have come to, to legitimize or otherwise sanction 1) the basic human coital urge, or 2) the equally biologically programmed urge to replicate small versions of themselves (i.e. a family) in an unconscious effort to achieve the immortality that nature otherwise denies them.

John Gray’s interesting investigations into the forever incompatible differences between the genders (I speak here of ‘men’ and ‘women’ and not of the more than 200 separate ‘gender distinctions’ that modern LGBTQ proponents have worried things into) were certainly highly entertaining, even if they were an effort to explain and perhaps somewhat reconcile the irreconcilable. But the fact is that after a certain basic level of understanding has been achieved, there can never be a fully satisfactory reconciliation between what men want/think/demand out of life and what their gender opposites wish for.

This is an amusing thing to contemplate and it pleases me to resort to a form of extrapolated quantum physics here. I like to think that the prospect of any man ever fully understanding any woman is a proposition that deserves a Schrödinger’s Cat approach. Namely, it is impossible (for a man) to understand any woman for the same reason it is seemingly impossible to know whether Schrödinger’s cat is actually alive or dead in its box, since the minute you open the box to take a peek, the quantum shifts, thereby invalidating your effort to understand directly and openly.

Quantum physicists have recently been exploring the intriguing possibilities that ‘quantum entanglements’ theory has opened up, in which a single sub-atomic particle may be somehow linked to a duplicate that is physically unconnected (as well as we may determine this, with our rather primitive quantifying means), and yet removed from each other at a distance of as many as a hundred million light years. Startling, no? And yet recent experiments seem, according to a recent PBS special that investigates Nils Bohr’s challenge to Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, to suggest that this is a distinctly real possibility. Imagine what that bombshell of a revelation could open up, alternative multiple universes being just one prominent likelihood among an infinite number.

I say all this to make a point: that trying to understand (fully) a woman is both an esoteric and physical impossibility. Therefore (QED), the human institution of marriage as it has come down to us through the various religious litanies of mumbo-jumbo, is presently not even remotely workable…unless one succumbs to that same religious mumbo-jumbo, a status that requires discarding any last vestige of secular, rational reflective intelligence.

The fact is that we ‘huwomans’ are still subject to the laws of biological necessity, no matter how much we try to ‘niceify’ our mating and reproductive urges. No matter how many conventions of erstwhile ‘civilised’ behavior we adorn ourselves with, no matter how many superstitious projections of excused or rationalized human insecurity we saddled ourselves with, down at the core of things, we’re still just slightly ‘smarter’ (read: more cortically endowed) brute animals than our four-footed friends.

‘Slightly smarter’ certainly fits the need for definition here, since we’re still immensely primitive and rudely developed mammals that evolution oddly favored a bit more than others (or perhaps I have that reversed: perhaps ‘cursed’ is a better fit). For those who are still wondering, that 'favor/curse' comes in the form of a greatly enlarged pre-frontal cortex...supposedly an asset that should help all us human critters a great deal in maintaining our place on top of the evolutionary pyramid.

It isn’t at all hard to imagine a widespread chucking of all this civilized nicety we constantly submerge ourselves in (as a species) and just going for that previously mentioned ‘Occam’s Razor’ solution, regarding coital urges: “Wanna fu*k?” How vastly simpler that would make things. Just think! No hundred-thousand-dollar weddings, no need for so-called college funds for offspring, no obligations or debits to either associates or society to worry about. Just a complete and total reversion to absolute, fabric-ripping social anarchy and a rapidly-coming-unhinged world in which sheer might and insuppressible aggression are the ultimate determinants of any outcome conceivable in the affairs of our species.

I have been a huge appreciator of wolves and dogs for most of my life, as most of my closer associates and confreres know. It is a well accepted fact that wolves have been favored by the forces of evolution (as have been every other species of animal except man) with the need to determine mating outcomes on the basis of ‘might and aggression’ solely. In other words, only so-called ‘Alpha’ (dominant) animals are allowed to successfully mate. This assures that the best genetic material suitable to enhance the chances of survival is transmitted to succeeding generations. Nothing but the biggest and the strongest wolves survive (this has often been poorly alluded to as Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’, although that appellation is far too oversimplified to stand on its apparent merits as a valid theory, without a LOT of niggling further modification).

When one is dealing with sub-human animal life forms, this principle works efficiently and extremely well. Only when an animal such as Homo sapiens emerges from the biological soup of evolutionary creation does this process utterly fail, resulting in the emergence of a life form (‘huwomanity’, if you insist) that is fully capable of utterly destroying not just itself, but the entire planet all earthly life forms were biologically programmed by nature to share in balanced harmony.

Humans (alone among all of Ma Nature's family), you see, insist on succoring the weak, the frail, the disabled, the mentally ill (ahem, 'challenged') and in general giving a free ride to fellow beings who would surely fail to thrive out there in the uncivilised wilderness, if left solely to their own devices. This defeats the natural selective winnowing processes of evolutionary mechanisms that help keep one species from making a total mess of itself (& preventing a collective sh*tting of one's species' pants, perhaps, as long as we're talking about defecating little furry pink bears that love soft toilet tissue).

Meanwhile, even if one manages to rise above the collective herd-thinking that dominates human societies and cultures, along comes a totally artificial socio-economic construct to screw any possible chances of becoming aware of the fact that the best thing that could ever happen to this poor old, much abused planet is for Homo sapiens to die off, and the faster the better for the sake of everything else on it.

[Note: For those of you who wish to help bring this ambitious goal closer to reality, there is a movement called VHEMT (the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement) that aims to help do just that: rid the planet of people. You can find their website here. As the VEHMT faithful put it: "Live long and die out!"]

While the vast majority of Americans love to extoll the ‘marvels’ of our uniquely distinct American way of life (loosely referred to as a democracy’, when in fact it was actually instituted as a ‘federation’), the plain & simple fact is that American style capitalistic materialism is a deadly recipe for wanton destruction (of the planet, its resources, etc.), since under American capitalism (with its corporate superstructure and unstoppable forces of commercial marketing, read social brainwashing psychology), nothing has any intrinsic value in and of itself aside from the monetary profit that conversion from basic natural resource to marketable product may confer upon it.

Such a social-economy may seem to exist amicably for a couple of hundred years, but once the sheer pressure of demographics gains momentum, any such system is ultimately as doomed as Plato’s Republic was by the rise of oligarchies and supremely tyrannical dictators. It’s actually a simple matter of economics, and unfortunately we still have enough ‘wiggle room’ to avoid any serious engagement with the inevitable consequences before we find ourselves back-to-the-wall in the inevitable end-game that awaits any such allowances of social/economic ignorance on a scale of America’s potential.

The young Koreans mentioned earlier in this discussion certainly are not dummies. They only too well understand exactly how impossible it has become to perpetuate and emulate the traditional culture of their forebears that has been foisted off upon them. And they may well take that ultimate step towards reversion to a ‘less-civilised’ but possibly more satisfying state of interpersonal anarchy that is summed up in the phrase “Wanna fu*k?”

As America itself heads off into uncharted waters of socio-commercial extremes of unbridled economic exploitation (of the dumbed-down masses, of course), there are signs not only that America is coming apart at the seams (i.e. as described in Charles Duhigg’s excellent THE ATLANTIC article, titled ‘The Untold Story of America’s Rage—and Where it’s Taking Us’, Atlantic, January-February 2019) but that glibly mindful of all these circumstances, our entire species is presently whistling past the graveyard on a path that leads to (secular) Armageddon.

At any rate, I am amused to reflect on the impossibility of achieving any sort of conjugal/marital harmony in our personal lives that logic and biology predicates, and I for one, who has never felt the slightest need to perpetuate my own genetic lineage, am perfectly happy to take my leap into whatever 6-foot deep hole happens to open up in front of me at any time, without much agonizing over ‘what-ifs’ that may lie beyond.

And now, I must end this somewhat prematurely, for ‘she-who-must-be-obeyed’ has a list of things that ‘she-who-is-unfathomable’ thinks absolutely must be done during this several-hour break in the weather, before the next rainstorm hits us.

Me? I’d be perfectly happy to snuggle up with a good book, a warm fire and my wolfish husky girl at my feet. Why can’t women be more like wolves, anyway? Female wolves make great mothers, they never ask you if you REALLY love them, and they rarely talk back unless you’re being a complete (and deservedly stupid) jerk about sharing the raw Caribou meat!

As famed Canadian author Farley Mowat put it (describing the mother wolf named ‘Angela’ he was observing in his landmark study of Canadian Tundra wolves titled ‘Never Cry Wolf!’, back in the mid-60s), “Why have I never met a woman as perfectly wonderful as Angela?”

Woof!

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PS: Referring back to the title of this piece, a recent media report has it that a bear was observed in the valley at Yosemite National Park raiding garbage containers situated near a toilet facility used by visitors. It wasn’t a pink bear, to be sure, but as it waddled around, a large clump of what clearly resembled toilet paper was spotted adhered to its backside. Whether the bear sat down on this and it just coincidentally stuck there or not, some alert marketing guy might conceivably be tempted to use that sighting to verify the veracity of the Charmin’ Toilet Tissue advertisements! Stranger things happen every day in corporate America…