An Invented Old Hag Walks into a Liquor Store

I’m sure you’ve heard this one many times before, a fiction that has racked up some serious mileage on the internet about some old gal who goes into a liquor store and is rebuked by a fabricated “young cashier” for not using recyclable bags when she makes her weekly purchase of 22 bottles of cheap gin. Then the figment of someone’s imagination older woman goes on to lecture the young socialist about how green she was a million years ago when she was young and what a solipsistic ass-wipe the young cashier is and how she should mind her own business and go back to Cuba.

But who created the world in which this haughty young cashier lives? Who built the world where you need a car to effect every necessity away from your home, where public transportation is looked upon as a socialist plot? Who created a disposable culture in which we use about a zillion paper coffee cups a day and single-serve plastic bottles of water? The alcoholic granny had more to do with making that world than a minimum wage liquor store clerk —or at least acquiescing to its implementation, and sorry grandma, the Nuremberg defense won't work.  Her generation also gave away American manufacturing jobs so that about the only work this kid can hope for are shitty and demeaning jobs without benefits where you have to bite your tongue when some sanctimonious cow goes on about how her generation was so much better than the snot-nosed little shits of today.

The subtext here is that anyone who talks about the environment is an over-privileged, know-nothing wiseass who deserves a smack across the face after you set them straight about the way the world really is according to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and other high priests of simplemindedness, people for whom “environmental wacko” and eco-terrorist” are synonyms for anyone who even hints at actually doing something to clean up our planet because some nut who chains himself to an old-growth redwood is a lot more dangerous than the logging company bent on chopping down every last one of them to make patio furniture.

I would imagine that the people this phony little anecdote appeals to are those who support political candidates who wouldn’t back a single environmental initiative, even something as basic as the protected species act. This is basic conservative propaganda whose sole purpose is to make people feel good about themselves for holding on to their narrow-minded and often dangerous world view when it flies in the face of reality.

Had this really happened I would have applauded the old drunk had she told the clerk to go take a flying fuck but it isn't a true story, of course it isn't.  So granny, the next time you visit the liquor bargain warehouse shut your fat cake hole and bring a reusable bag.