{"id":5670,"date":"2015-12-21T15:21:13","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T20:21:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=5670"},"modified":"2015-12-21T15:21:13","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T20:21:13","slug":"pooping-unicorns-in-paris-a-solstice-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/pooping-unicorns-in-paris-a-solstice-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"Pooping Unicorns in Paris: a Solstice Prayer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Creative Director Daniel Harmon <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=7l7MXfYWahU\">is talking<\/a> about the viral commercial he and three of his brothers produced\u00a0for Squatty Potty.<\/p>\n<p>But he could also be talking about how capitalism is dealing with climate change.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The big challenge for us was taking the really gross world of the colon to a place that was clean and fantastic and friendly and approachable. And <em>delicious<\/em>, for lack of a better word.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div class=\"video-container\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YbYWhdLO43Q\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>The Harmons nailed it. A douchey medieval prince presents a plush unicorn squatting to defecate\u00a0perfect rainbow soft-serve ice cream onto a quaint conveyor belt of cones. The\u00a01970s children\u2019s TV\u00a0art direction recalls the sets of Friendly Giant or Mr. Dressup. Except that high-def does something strange to the nostalgia of regression. As if Gen Xers can only remember childhood through the hyperreal lens of the ecstasy they took in their twenties.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019re good at pooping,\u201d smarms our prince in a phony British accent, referring to unicorns generally. He swallows a rainbow lick. \u201cBut you know who sucks at pooping? You do.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A toilet is suddenly shoved up under the unicorn\u2019s furry butt, right-angling its hips, and causing instant soft-serve blockage, as shown by an overlaid graphic showing rainbow goop bloating above the unicorn\u2019s cinched chute. It\u2019s true: the porcelain throne keeps the puborectalis muscle taut, kinking the sigmoid colon. Squatting is the natural, mechanical, evolutionary fix.<\/p>\n<p>The unicorn stays on the can but is offered the product \u2013 a mold-injected plastic footstool \u2013 and resumes defecating\u00a0with an erotic sigh. The prince serves the production line of rainbow stool-cones to smiling kindergartners, dressed up as little serfs.<\/p>\n<p>The Harmon brothers can&#8217;t retain anything, apparently. They complete the Freudian acid trip with the prince offering toilet paper for the children to wipe their mouths.<\/p>\n<p>Let\u2019s be real here. The unicorn isn\u2019t just a euphemistic device for addressing toilet posture. Amalgamated with the children, the unicorn presents the idealized and infantilized consumer, producing virtuous waste in alignment with the libidinal pleasures of new-age and natural health dictates. The delights of anal and oral sphincters are made interchangeable through bright colours and sherbet tastes.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing that works so well is simply cute. The best comedy depends upon taboo. Here, a smarmy daddy-superego feeds feces to children.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIsn\u2019t that the best thing you\u2019ve ever had in your life?\u201d, he asks in a borderline ominous baritone.<\/p>\n<p>The children eat silently and smile.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a clean-cut Louis C.K. moment, expressing all of the ambivalence of parenting. The children are simultaneously loved, hated, mocked, and fooled &#8212; all while they lick up the waste of the parent&#8217;s self-absorption.<\/p>\n<p>The surface shadow of the commercial says <em>Stop dumping your hardened pellets and smelly runs onto your kids: give them your creamy\u00a0best.<\/em> But the deeper\u00a0shadow hopes\u00a0that children find the self-care preoccupations of their parents tasty. The new age parent says: <em>Eat the stool of my virtuous neurosis, and smile for the camera.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Squatty sales are up 600%, 2015 revenue will top $15 million. CEO Bobby Edwards tells me by email that they&#8217;ve sold about two million potties\u00a0since 2012. That&#8217;s\u00a0a lot less straining in bathrooms across the land. Around the hidden blade of their commercial, the company radiates wholesomeness far and wide.<\/p>\n<p>Why has the spot done so well? The concept is unconstipated. The production is ripe. The ribaldry heralds an even newer liberality in web\u00a0media, perhaps facilitated by the proximity of YouTube and YouPorn.<\/p>\n<p>The psychoanalytic giggle-cord it pulls is obvious. But the Harmon commercial also packs its punch against the backdrop of a critical anxiety around production, consumption, waste and filth.<\/p>\n<p>This might seem like a hard-left turn, but what are these long nights for, if not dreaming?<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>Ozzie Zehner researches the energy consequences of how we try\u00a0to console ourselves in the\u00a0shadow of our scatological\u00a0anxiety. His 2012 book <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=--OqCMP5nPI\">Green Illusions<\/a><\/em> is an extended defecography on the unicorn-poop of the energy sector \u2013 wind and solar \u2013 that the techno-evangelists of corporate environmentalism are offering our children.<\/p>\n<p>Zehner\u2019s thesis goes like this. Wherever it comes from, energy and its waste is never rainbow ice cream. It\u2019s always dirty. And\u00a0we don\u2019t have an energy crisis: we have a consumption problem. And most of the technology we produce to address climate change not only fails to inhibit consumption, but in many cases actually increases it.<\/p>\n<p>The details are stark. Solar and wind power represent a vanishingly small percentage (one-tenth of one percent) of global energy usage. That percentage is not likely to increase, because promises about economies of scale are hollow: photovoltaic cells and turbines demand materials like copper, glass, plastics and aluminum with high fixed costs. The total carbon footprints aren\u2019t any smaller than fossil-fuel methods, nor does it look like they can be. Manufacturing, maintaining, and disposing of solar cells is an extremely dirty business.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s one of several slam-dunk paragraphs:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cIf actual installed costs for solar projects in California are any guide, a global solar program would cost roughly 1.4 quadrillion, about one hundred times the United States GDP. Mining, smelting, processing, shipping, and fabricated the panels and their associated hardware would yield about 149,100 megatons of CO2. And everyone would have to move to the desert, otherwise transmission losses would make the plan unworkable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Even worse, the advertised efficiencies of green solutions are touted as if they\u2019d always be operating in perfect lab conditions. You know that old saw about generating the planet\u2019s energy by covering a fraction of a desert somewhere with solar cells? Zehner reveals it\u2019s a mirage. When the United Arab Emirates ran the first large-scale comparison test of solar panels for their planned ecometropolis Masdar City, they found that the peak midday output was under 40% of the panels\u2019 rated capacity, because of haze, high atmospheric humidity, dust, soiling, and \u2013 get this \u2013 <em>because the solar cells got too hot<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Zehner shows\u00a0quite convincingly that green tech really is unicorn poop: a way of reframing waste as a largely individual responsibility requiring just the smallest tweaks to assure\u00a0moral vindication, while ignoring\u00a0the larger structural\u00a0questions about our\u00a0rates of consumption. He shows how companies \u2013 some of them oil companies \u2013 mask their core operations with photo-op gestures at solar innovation, while petitioning governments to shift their drilling subsidies over to green projects\u00a0and bolstering the \u201cproductivist mentality\u201d of business-as-usual. Even more damning, Zehner\u00a0details how green tech solutions are most often marketed to and consumed by wealthy \u201ceconnoisseurs\u201d, who use them to weakly mitigate their low-density lifestyles of hyperconsumption. These are folks who have to cut down trees and increase their lot sizes so that their solar panels can\u00a0soak up more of the sun.<\/p>\n<p>The squatty potty releases\u00a0the anxious retention of filth within the individual body, where the rules of wellness are obvious and self-regulating: eat and eliminate simply, according to appetite. The Harmon narrative unfolds its pragmatism in the bucolic dream of a pre-industrial childhood. And &#8212; the product works.<\/p>\n<p>Green tech attempts to do the same, but it fails. At best it helps to absolve the individualist energy-guilt of the rich by offering solar arrays to suburban mansions that should never be built, and wineries in the Napa Valley.<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>How dark is this midwinter, this solstice? I cuddle up with my toddler on the couch. He wants me to read a Thomas the Tank Engine story. I like Thomas well enough, but the Island of Sodor is a\u00a0dreary\u00a0industrialist penal colony. I perceptibly cringe whenever I have to read the lines of Sir Topham Hatt. Somehow it&#8217;s bearable by putting on my own hammy\u00a0British accent\u00a0to soften the fact that I&#8217;m telling trains personified as\u00a0little boys to work harder and &#8220;be very useful.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I suggest the <em>Velveteen Rabbit <\/em>instead,\u00a0and pull my son closer. I can smell his diaper. The part of me that wants him to hurry up with toilet-training relaxes as his body heat melts my side.<\/p>\n<p>Later in the evening, the bleak reports from\u00a0the <a href=\"http:\/\/unfccc.int\/resource\/docs\/2015\/cop21\/eng\/l09.pdf\">COP21 treaty<\/a>\u00a0stack up on my screen. The \u201chigh ambition\u201d to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C is aspirational, even though any hotter\u00a0will constitute\u00a0genocide for many. The final text, which neither mentions the phrase \u201cfossil fuels\u201d nor adequately addresses human rights issues, are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/views\/2015\/12\/12\/cop-21-what-it-does-and-doesnt-accomplish\">as binding as<\/a> \u201cOf course I\u2019ll still love you in the morning.\u201d James Hansen, one of the original climate change whistleblowers, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/2015\/dec\/12\/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud\">called the agreement<\/a> \u201cbullshit\u2026 worthless words.\u201d George Monbiot <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/environment\/georgemonbiot\/2015\/dec\/12\/paris-climate-deal-governments-fossil-fuels?CMP=share_btn_fb\">wrote<\/a> of a \u201csqualid retrenchment\u201d. The New Internationalist <a href=\"http:\/\/newint.org\/features\/web-exclusive\/2015\/12\/12\/cop21-paris-deal-epi-fail-on-planetary-scale\/\">details<\/a> how COP21 utterly fails the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/peoplestestonclimate.org\/\">People\u2019s Test<\/a>\u201d \u2013 researched and proposed by Southern hemisphere social movements \u2013 for a livable and equitable agreement. In the best case, this non-binding agreement has a 66% chance of halting any rise over 2.7C.<\/p>\n<p>But if you listened to the official announcements, you\u2019d think that world leaders had all just learned to squat rather than sit, that everything backed up since Kyoto was now clearing out, that ingenuity will save the day.<\/p>\n<p>The optimism was amplified in the green tech trade sideshows that bordered the meeting spaces in Le Bourget. The Sustainable Innovation Forum at\u00a0the Stade de France, and Solutions COP21 at the Grand Palais both\u00a0featured giddy gatherings of green techies. In the Paris Review, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/11\/letter-from-cop21\/\">Porter Fox reported<\/a> \u201cIn the Solutions Gallery set in the nearby Museum of Air and Space, renewable-energy companies and fossil-fuel interests duke it out selling their wares. \u2018The average shortness of skirts and availability of alcohol at the gallery is shocking,\u2019 one NGO consultant told me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Grown-ups and\u00a0their unicorns.<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>I close all of my browser windows but one. I light a beeswax candle and re-read parts of the <a href=\"http:\/\/dark-mountain.net\/about\/manifesto\/\">Dark Mountain Manifesto<\/a> by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cAnd so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">We believe it is time to look down.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><em>Some deal with it by hoping it is true.<\/em> This line strikes a chord. What pleasure do I find in this darkness? Are the oracles confirming my wounded beliefs?<\/p>\n<p>Apocalyptic relief is\u00a0self-indulgent.\u00a0If despair becomes self-righteous or even beautiful, it too can taste like ice cream. But I won&#8217;t\u00a0feed that to my son.<\/p>\n<p>_____<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s nothing self-indulgent about Naomi Klein\u00a0or Rebecca Solnit, who both posted from Paris. They&#8217;re direct, without foundering\u00a0in apocalypse. Their writing\u00a0doesn\u2019t get off, in subtle ways, on death.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe treaty is miraculous and horrible,\u201d Solnit writes in <a href=\"http:\/\/harpers.org\/blog\/dispatch\/\">Harpers<\/a>. \u201cIt neither gives enough to the most vulnerable nor takes enough from the profligate, but it shifts the arrangement between them for the better.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNation-states never were our saviors,\u201d Solnit added on Facebook, for clarity. \u201cMore activism is required. From below, not above.\u201d Like Klein, she positions hope in the travails of on-the-ground resistance, like indigenous peoples and allies blockading pipelines and fracking, which <a href=\"http:\/\/revolution-news.com\/activists-shut-enbridge-line-9-canada\/\">continues<\/a> as I write.<\/p>\n<p>Klein opened <em><a href=\"http:\/\/thischangeseverything.org\/\">This Changes Everything<\/a><\/em> with the account of realizing, on the seventy-fifth reading of <em>Have You Ever Seen a Moose<\/em> to her two-year-old, that her child may never see a moose.<\/p>\n<p>I used to be Catholic, and I\u2019m thinking about assembling a cr\u00e8che again, this time for my son. I\u2019ll scour the charity shops for figures and animals. Especially wild animals. Especially moose. A polar bear, for sure. Reindeer, which the Sami people <a href=\"http:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/indepth\/features\/2015\/11\/climate-change-arctic-reindeer-herders-thin-ice-151130075606930.html\">are watching<\/a> starve. My son\u00a0can add his dinosaurs.<\/p>\n<p>If I find a unicorn, I&#8217;ll pick that up too. But it has to be beat up. It would be perfect if its horn is chipped.<\/p>\n<p>Over the years I\u2019ll tell him the story in a new way, somehow, about the miracle at midnight, but about how there are no miracles, really.<\/p>\n<p>About how the hope that comes from feeling\u00a0things is higher than the hope that comes from imagining\u00a0things.<\/p>\n<p>About how little energy we really need, beyond our own intimacies, to survive.<\/p>\n<p>About how humanity must protect\u00a0the defenceless, and that this requires sacrifice.<\/p>\n<p>And\u00a0in a few years I\u2019ll show him how I learned to squat when I was a traveller, perching with my feet on the toilet rim, like a clumsy condor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Creative Director Daniel Harmon is talking about the viral commercial he and three of his brothers produced for Squatty Potty. But he could also be talking about how capitalism is dealing with climate change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6832,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,21,23,65,24,66],"tags":[437,469,470,471,472],"class_list":["post-5670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activism","category-articles","category-blog","category-climate-change","category-featured","category-politics","tag-climate-change","tag-cop21","tag-naomi-klein","tag-rebecca-solnit","tag-squatty-potty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}