With all the cheerfulness of an ex-wife volubly petitioning for an increase in her unemployment (alimony) check, The Dreaded Plastic Bag Ban arises from the murky depths of Ballona Creek next Monday evening to bite our august City Council members – but we won’t say where.

A pity that it probably is too late in the spring for Culver City to change its name to San Clemente.

Would that we all lived there instead.

Not once but twice, in 2011 and 2012, San Clemente’s halo-deserving city fathers summoned the ethereal wisdom to take out their sub-machine guns and shoot The Dreaded Plastic Bag Ban to Smithereens, Tex.

Tonight, the best show in any town will be the San Clemente City Council meeting where The Dreaded Backers of a Plastic Bag Ban will drag the Dreaded corpse of the Dreaded Ban into Council Chambers, hoping, maybe, to catch the Council members in a drunken, short-memory stupor. No one said the Dreadeds were smart.

One of the Dreadeds’ favorite gotcha lines is that much of California – okay, just 60 cities, but that is more than none – already have adopted (some would say fallen for) this ruse.

The Dreadeds will claim that bereft shoppers can salve their psychological wounds by replacing the (suddenly) environmentally unfriendly plastic bags with reusable cotton bags that your mother and your grandmother would have laughed at.

Reasons to Just Say No

The Orange County Register this morning shines a flashlight on handy arguments to deploy against the Dreadeds:

• Reusable cotton bags are more deleterious to the environment than plastic bags.

• They represent a potential public health threat.

• Paper bags use four times the energy, which means four times the greenhouse gas emissions.

• Reusable cotton bags need a whopping 173 times as much energy to produce.

• If thrifty shoppers shlep a cotton bag to market for three years, it would be health threatening. Repeated use of reusable grocery bags jumps the risk of exposure to E.coli and coliform.

Finally, here is a statistic surely intended to induce a giggle from The Dreadeds and The Normal People:

In San Francisco County of all unlikely backwaters, a study found that food-borne illness grew 46 percent after a plastic bag ban was imposed six years ago. No such increase was found in surrounding normal counties.

Lady and gentlemen of the City Council, are you listening?