October 17, 2007
I’ve had it with those people at The Center for a New American Dream. Here I’ve taken it upon myself to raise the consciousness of Americans everywhere regarding the unrelenting pile of detritus the government delivers daily to our door, the rising tide of unwanted ads, charitable pleas, seductive catalogs and shiny new AOL-CDs, and not one New American Dreamer had the decency to let me know about their National Junk Mail Awareness Week staged October 1-7.
What am I supposed to do, wait until next year to be aware? Well, sorry, I AM AWARE ALL THE TIME about the environmental terror that is junk mail. So I’m not telling anyone to go to their site and sign their petitions to encourage congress to create a national Do Not Junk Mail registry, something along the lines of the federal Do Not Call registry that put all those telephone solicitors out of work. They’re not calling you during dinner anymore to sell you cemetery plots or support the troops trash bags because they’re busy stuffing billions of envelopes and addressing millions of tons of catalogs you didn’t ask for. Yes, let’s put them out of a job a second time.
I’d link you to their website so you could start signing the petitions but I didn’t get that far in my blogging tutorial. Just Google them, you’ll get there. I did. The Center for a New American Dream. That’s right
Are they gone?
Okay, I just have to tell you what fun I had before my bruising encounter with the above mentioned Dreamers. I was shoving shredded junk mail instead of bubble pack or foam peanuts into the box of invite cards for our upcoming junk mail installation/happening November 9, 2007 at L.A. Contemporary Gallery to ship to my collaborator Barbara Hashimoto for her installation/happening October 20 in Chicago, and feeling pretty darn resourceful, when I started imagining all the great things I could do with shredded junk mail. Why, if that clever Andrea Zittel and her A-Z Advanced Technologies can make pulped scrap household paper into wall panels, why couldn’t I do the same with shredded junk mail? I could sew shredded rows of it into an ante bellum evening gown, or use it to stuff everything from sock puppets to sectional sofas. And if they can make airplanes out of folded paper, why not passenger airliners out of pulped junk mail (it would be light weight but tough–like flying in an egg carton!) Why there’s no end to the wondrous things that can be done with junk mail.
And if I can’t count on the anti-junk mail crowd to keep me up on what’s happening in their cluttered world, I think I’ve found a site that believes in no blogger left behind, a site devoted to publicizing the many positive aspects of junk mail. That site is PostCom.org, the official site of the Association for Postal Commerce. They don’t want us to worry about junk mail overflowing landfills because they have the statistics, the charts and graphs, to prove that there’s a glut of landfill space in America. That’s right. We’re not doing our part to keep America’s landfills full. If anything, we need more junk mail to fill America’s gaping holes.
They also devote a section of their site to “Mail: The American Jobs Machine” “In some sense,” they say, “the Postal Service is like an oil pipeline: It carries a vast amount of material which leads to the creation of other products and services.” Millions of jobs are related to the continued flow of junk mail. How many millions?
“Could there be more than 9 million jobs associated with the mails?,” they ask, and before you can scratch your head, let alone do a finger count, they answer for you with a resounding “You bet.” Sure, I knew the gathering, sorting and tossing of the daily piles coming through my mail slot were a second career for me, and I sensed the annual trip to the commercial shredder in Sun Valley was employing at least one other person on that particular day, but 9 million jobs!?! I had no idea the importance of that humble little paper pile.
I’d love to keep blogging on, tell you about the Chinese billionaire business woman who has made herself richer than Oprah Winfrey by importing America’s junk mail to China, but you’ll have to wait until the next post. I’ve got to go, the dog’s barking and I think the mailman just left another incredibly valuable and filled with endless possibilities deposit from the Postal Service pipeline just inside the front door. I don’t want it staining the rug.
