Every single person who makes a comment on my lovespoon post about how it would be WAY COOLER if people did it with knives instead is getting blocked immediately and also owes my cat £3.
Real talk, though. I think that Welsh / quote-unquote ‘Celtic’ culture (which I put in inverted commas because there isn’t one universal Celtic culture; it’s lots of different ones) forms the basis of so many fantasy narratives, like Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Prydain etc, that people in general (I’m gonna say it: mostly Americans) have sort of absorbed this bastardised, high fantasy version of Welsh culture, where everyone frolics around the woods with enchanted swords and has affairs with saucy elves and performs magic inside stone circles with daggers and moss, and so when they see information about actual Welsh / quote-unquote ‘Celtic’ culture, they’re like “excuse me, where the fuck are the elves? Where are the knives?’ because to them it’s like a fantasy downgrade from what they’re used to, rather than, y’know, an actual culture, and it’s missing the elements that they’re used to, and therefore feel entitled to.
They’re so accustomed to only consuming Welsh culture through the lens of artificial pseudo-Medieval fantasy that the real source material seems like it’s missing something to them, and as far as they’re concerned, it’s something that merits complaining about or mocking, because clearly it has less intrinsic value or interest if it doesn’t involve enchanted blades and prophecies.
And I’m absolutely not saying here that no-one should use elements of Welsh or Celtic culture for fantasy worldbuilding; just please, for the love of all that is holy and delicious, remember that the Welsh stuff came first, and that Welsh people do in fact still exist, and so treating Welsh culture like the boring magic-free little cousin of Dungeons and Dragons lore is not only offensive, but also ignorant. Don’t act like real Welsh stuff is somehow less interesting than your DnD campaign because people don’t, like, propose to one another with daggers and then fuck an elf.
That campaign - the little recycling logos on our plastics, the upbeat videos about a future where plastic was part of a circular economy of use and recycling - convinced us to buy, wash, and sort plastic.
90% of that plastic was never recycled. It never will be.
NONE of those splashy campaigns - the announcement that all NYC school plastics would be recycled, the recycling in national parks - ever worked. They all lasted long enough to get some upbeat press, and then they quietly shut down.
This week’s NPR/Planet Money investigation by Laura Sullivan doesn’t just talk to the ex-chief lobbyists, now serving as belated Oppenheimers, lamenting the impending destruction of our planet.
It also talks to the current round of executives who have announced a fresh round of plans to recycle plastics - completely disingenuous, insultingly obvious distraction tactics to convince us that their projections of TRIPLING production by 2050 isn’t a form of mass murder.
Then Sullivan circles back to those retired executives, the ones who oversaw the first disinformation campaign, and they confirm that this latest round of promises are literally the same tactic, barely updated for a world on fire.
The world is on fire. My sky has been orange all week. Our family’s socially distanced meetings with friends in parks or back yards have been cancelled because we cannot breathe outside.
Exxon - and Chevron, and the rest of Big Oil - knows.
In a secret recording released to the New York Times, oil execs meet to cheerfully discuss how they will burn the world and murder us all but make a buck in the process.
Their plans for climate change don’t involve reducing emissions - they’re building bunkers and hiring mercenaries to keep us at bay when we come for them. They know what they’ve done.
Exxon knows.
Exxon knows.
When I searched for the “Exxon Knew” campaign to find a link for this piece, the top of Google’s search results included a blisteringly expensive ad for a disinformation site, paid for by Exxon.
The sky is orange. The oceans are choking. The air is unbreathable. Your body is full of microplastics.
