I used to love Tom Arnold’s stupid 1996 movie The Stupids. The premise was that the whole family was. . . stupid. The plot revolves around Tom Arnold’s character, Stanley Stupid. He’s a sort of neo-conspiracy theorist who is perplexed about who keeps stealing his trash every morning. He is determined to track the thieves down.
One day, he takes out the trash and then hides in the bushes to see what happens. He watches in horror as strangers in uniform whisk away his trash.
The rest of the movie is spent watching him trying to track down where the trash goes. There is also a rather long side-plot of him trying to track down who “Sender” is, because he keeps getting letters that say “Return to Sender.”
In both instances, it turns out he isn’t as stupid as he seems: both of his hunches check out. Sender is a demonic man in cahoots with the police who burns mail in a giant snake’s mouth in his underground lair:
There are also aliens involved in the Return to Sender scheme, but y’all don’t pay me enough to re-watch the movie closely enough to explain what exactly their role is.
Stanley Stupid’s Trash Thief Conspiracy also checks out. It turns out his refuse is being stolen every morning as part of an elaborate weapons deal between the US military and an Al Qaeda/ Yakuza / Caribbean / Mob / Mafia /Nazi / Native American conglomerate.
It really is a stupid movie and the role won Tom Arnold a 1997 Raspberry Award for Worst Actor. But, like all seemingly low-brow content, it has some high-brow angles. For my purposes, it’s a commentary about the deep interconnectivity between the military-industrial complex, the police, and the apparent peace and stability of our everyday lives. And most poignantly, it highlights the gaslighting we receive when we question it all: we are called stupid.
Think now of the poor conspiracy theorists screaming that Covid was made in a lab while the scientifically minded populace was busy guffawing, “You can’t know until there is evidence!” It’s now clear there really was a conspiracy—i.e. people in power worked together to suppress information and misinform the public in service of some financial or political goal. Glenn Greenwald’s great reporting on this in 2021 shed light on how the Anthrax outbreak was a clear precedent to the Covid lab leak theory—and Fauci was also involved in suppressing that information!
I’m not saying it’s part of the conspiracy, but sender even looks like Fauci a bit, back in his lair burning important cultural evidence:
It’s a Conspiracy, Man!
I don’t mean to go all Stanley Stupid on you, but transporting our trash to big holes in the ground many miles away might be a bit more nefarious than the public service it’s framed as. More than I daresay any other aspect of the civilized world, the trash removal apparatus severs our connection to the environment. It is the clipping of an umbilical cord. It’s done in broad daylight, supposedly for the greater good, on our doorstep, and there is very little way of avoiding it is we want to live in detritus. Unless you’re Lauren Singer and can fit a year’s worth of trash in a mason jar, but not everyone can be as hot and dedicated as her.
If we could look at the Earth, our home, as a singular house, then what happens in one room really does have an effect on the other rooms. For instance, we are always told that veterans went to war “to keep us safe,” and “to make our freedom possible.” But imagine I lived in a house with my family and we led relatively peaceful lives except for that one room where some guy was killing and maiming people every day. It would be kind of dubious for me to say: “I live a peaceful life, everything is great, and we are very civilized people.” Sorry to break it to you, but pledging allegiance to the flag, or even paying your tax bill, is signing up for this kind of cognitive dissonance, and paying your trash bill is no different. Your main house might be clean, but you'd be disgusting if the landfill were in your basement.
Trash management is an imagined reality. Necessary to keep the peace, but imagined nonetheless. While conspiracy theorists are often accused of being accused delusional. I want to flip that on its head, given recent events.
Even the term “Conspiracy theorist” is a derogatory term, implying that the idea that a conspiracy could even exist is a stupid suggestion. These theorists often use now cliché and comedic lines like “That’s what they want you to think!”
But there really is something to the idea that the people in power—government, corporations, billionaires—benefit from the populace’s ignorance. I think few readers would deny that. So why is it so hard to believe they might be working together to achieve their goals?
After all, it’s too hard and complicated to make big moves and operate freely with a well-informed public. Even the revolution man himself, Bernie Sanders, delicately danced around the elephant in his room: his revolution required everyone else to get involved in politics and resistance (i.e. proletariat rise up). He took one for the team and let the attention be focused on him, but he definitely knew that if he told the people the truth too often—that he couldn’t change anything on his own—that no one would vote for him. Why don’t Americans want to take collective action on anything of importance? Is it cause we have been misled about almost every aspect of our lives, down to our trash management?
Of course we all know it’s being dumped into a putrid, stinking, toxic hole in the ground never to return to the cycle of life or carbon except via plastic bottle caps in the intestines of a dead bird, but what other choices do we have?
As Marshall McLuhan said, capitalism is not about an informed consumer; it’s about as stupid of a consumer as possible; that’s why we sell bubble gum using sex rather than touting the benefits of the bubble gum. And that is why we were all disinfecting our groceries in 2020—because we had been purposely misled.
While I think many conspiracy theorists use poor reasoning, experience delusions, and fall victim to propaganda, that doesn’t mean all of their conspiracies lack merit. Similarly, while I think that in general educated liberals have their heads on correctly, everything surrounding Covid showed me just how deep down the propaganda groupthink rabbit hole they are willing to go with their octogenarian zombie president at the helm.
I think my takeaway from watching New Age plandemic and lab-leak people turn out to be kind of right all along and the anti-vaxxers be kind of right about how much of a scam the vaccine was, is that just because someone says a lot of loony things doesn’t mean everything they say is loony. And that’s a hard pill to swallow given how modern Americans are expected to goosestep with their political party or niche.
Turns out, like in The Stupids, you can be both stupid and correct.
You Buy It You Break It You Buy It
We tend to think of hoarders as mentally ill, but they’re the realest people around. Hoarders don’t care about taking out the trash. For whatever reason, they live in their detritus; they hold on to each scrap with what can only be called reverence. The landfill is their home, and they aren’t trying to polish our POS civilization so that we can all shake hands at dinner parties in our clean houses and agree everything is going great and everything looks fine.
Who is more ill? Who is more delusional?
The fact is, trash doesn’t exist “in nature.” Trash is unnatural and it by definition is extracted from the traditional cycle of matter on this planet. Living in the forest, trash was not even a concept because everything was organic. Abandon your hut? It will turn into dirt if it isn’t dirt already. Shit in a forest? It will turn into dirt. Abandon your basket full of food in the forest? It will all turn into dirt eventually. But even our food is so inorganic it doesn’t decompose anymore.
Maybe I’m being too extreme, let me try to play devil’s advocate. The Earth has its own repressive cycles, such as compressing organic materials into crude oil. And rocks are kind of trash I suppose, meaning they’re mostly inert and last millions of years. And maybe there is even a world where I can look at Idiocracy’s trash mountain range and revere it like we once did Mount Everest before we turned Mount Everest into a landfill. And time will tell. Maybe Earth will burn up and take our trash with it. It will all equal out on a cosmic level. If you look at the universe like a house, our planet and civilization are just rusty little screwheads rolling around and never to be found behind the toilet in the guest bathroom.
But enough devil’s advocate: all of human civilization is a hoarder. And clearly it’s the people making the trash who benefit the most from taking it away. If it weren’t so easy to replace my electric kettle, I’d probably try and take it apart and figure out why it wasn’t working great. Instead, I toss it in the trash and order a new one on Amazon.
If trash service weren’t so reliable, I’d go to great lengths to make sure everything in my house, even broken things, were somehow useful.
But buying things and trash go hand in hand. Everything in the landfill had to be bought. That’s why it has been made so easy to upgrade and trade in your iPhone, because at some point, it started to feel really weird to get a new iPhone every year and have your closet full of the past versions like some tech graveyard. Like a privatized trash service, Apple said, “Let us throw those in the landfill for you while you dish out more cash for the newer one.”
If the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, it’s because the poor are in a system where they give their lives working for big corporations, then return that money to the corporations via the purchase of ephemeral and cheap products which are whisked into a landfill so they can buy them all over again.
Trash service is a not a small part of the mechanism which worsens wealth inequality. Trash service is a disservice to the healing of this planet and our connection to it.
I say let it pile up. Let us all smell the dank cheese that is our civilization. Let the waste of Earth’s bounty pile on the doorsteps of the rich and poor alike so that we can all let our guards down and breathe in the fresh air of today, the air of the here and now, the air of your half-eaten macaroni and cheese and your expired pepto bismol and your ripped undies and your slightly mushy strawberries and your broken kettles all marinating in one another’s uselessness.
Have a good week ya filthy animals.
And please click one of the buttons below.
As always I end my posts with a picture of my breakfast and a picture of my sons.
Actually not breakfast, but it’s some fish jerky we had at a Japanese restaurant the other night.
Trash Doesn't Exist: The Conspiracy At the End of Your Driveway