Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Oh fucking grow up

Many are the times when I'm accused, often correctly, of being a bit immature. Ooh, all that swearing. And using adjectives to describe things! The horrors. But, juvenile as I may be at times, at least I can fucking well sort my rubbish out without wetting myself in terror at the prospect of it.

Some time ago, in This has wheelie bin a shit campaign, I looked at the Mail's obsession with rubbish. Not the kind of rubbish they spew out on a daily basis *apologetic cymbal crash* but the kind of rubbish you throw away. They can't stand the idea of wheelie bins, or fortnightly collections, or anything that might involve sorting out your rubbish, or more recycling, or putting food waste all in one place - which they call a 'slop bucket' so it brings to mind the idea of a prisoner shitting into a plastic tub.

They're back again at it today.

Microchips spying on our bins! Some pressure group barely more organised than me and a couple of mates deciding where to have a kebab after a few pints, called Big Brother Watch, have decided that there are chips in bins - and not just of the fried variety *feeble drum roll quickly abandoned* - which are spying on our rubbish and ruining our lives and trying to make us kill ourselves by sorting glass from plastic, and not letting us chuck away half a ton of turd every week because we're too cunting lazy to take some time out from our busy bloody lives of tut-tutting at celebrities in the Daily Fucking Mail to try and reduce our contribution to the ever-growing landfills - which would, of course, were they ever to be carved near to somewhere nice in Surrey near where Mail readers live, be a horrendous crime of some sort, but they'd never connect the two things, oh no.

What strikes me as a little odd about this never-ending campaign against wheelie bins, recycling and fortnightly collections, amongst other things, is that it jars with the Mail's constantly-pushed idea that life was so much better in the 1950s - you know, before too many of them came over, and when everyone was still under rationing, and single mothers were treated with utter spitting contempt, and people were poorer, and everyone stood up for the national anthem, and so on, and so on. People didn't just chuck rubbish away back then - they recycled everything they could, because it was an age of austerity, and they were fucking poor, and you couldn't just chuck ten bin-bags out every half an hour.

But there's another element to this. Whenever I go down the dump - or recycling centre, as it's now called - the people I see doing recycling are, by and large, in their 50s and 60s... the key Mail demographic. Perhaps these are people who do remember a time before it was acceptable to just throw away as much as you possibly could and then expect the council to somehow deal with it; maybe these are people who have a more mature attitude to household waste than simply "I want to throw away as much as I can, and if I'm not allowed to, then I will kick up a big fuss and say it's Big Brother trying to stop me from doing what I want". Maybe older people have a more mature outlook on all this and maybe the Mail is missing a trick. They had a campaign against plastic bags, for example, which was very popular - why then go against that kind of thing by lashing out at recycling and the ways in which councils go about doing it?

It just seems, to me, to be a pretty childish attitude, to expect that "I pay my council tax" and therefore you should be able to send a truckload off to landfill every week without a second thought, or imagine that any attempt by anyone to stop you is somehow Big Brother clamping down on your unassailable right to pollute as much as you bloody well like.

Sometimes I read stories like these and think, oh will you just grow up? A lot of us live with fortnightly rubbish collections and wheelie bins and all that. It's not the end of the world. If you want to get incentives for recycling more, then great: I'm sure it'll be Mail readers and people of the older generation who will be doing the most. Which is why it seems so bizarre that the Mail is dead-set against it. After all, the very paper they print their dreadful crap on is recycled, and quite a lot of stories inside it are completely recycled, so why should they be against householders doing their bit? It just puzzles me.

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