Talking Critic - Uneasy Rider

Yes, we had 'Keep Britain Tidy' which you still see on many litter bins which date from the 1970s. I'm sure it was a similar process to that which you describe, we usually inherit most of the worst corporate behaviours from the US, except it seems more insiduous and subtle here...

Oh boy, Keep America Beautiful. What a crock of shit, pardon my French. In case you don't know the history of the Keep America Beautiful campaign, it was created in the 1950s by a consortium of corporate interests (we're talking big time corporations like Phillip Morris and Coca Cola) as a response to the growing concern about increasing waste products caused by the adoption of disposable products (tin/aluminum soda cans, wrappers, disposable filters on cigarettes) by American consumer industry. In fact one of its first campaigns was in response to the proposal to include a deposit on beverage containers. The whole idea was rather than take responsibility for introducing a ton of extra trash into the world by making all of these new disposable products, the corporations shifted the blame to the consumers, creating the idea of litterbugs. Rather than spend money themselves cleaning up the waste that their products were causing, they effectively used this campaign to get out of that responsibility and put it onto the people who were buying the products. The original "litter problems" that the group was founded to ostensibly fight against weren't even really the problems of people improperly disposing of things, but the buildups of new huge amounts of waste that these disposable products were causing, whether they were properly disposed of or not. In fact, the organization is so concerned with litter and recycling that they have lobbied against the adoption of better more recyclable packaging and are resistant to legislation that mandates corporate recycling. I really really hate these fucking corporate lobby groups. Also, please don't give Iron Eyes Cody props for living as a Native American. He was a guy who appropriated another culture in order to personally profit off of it, and his bullshit actually harmed actual real Native American people who were trying to be actors. I would heavily recommend anyone interested in Iron Eyes Cody listen to the episode of The Dollop podcast called "Two Indigenous Actors".

elliott hunter