My favorite clerk at my favorite deli, which I visit several times a week, glances at my seven purchases and poses the obligatory question:
“Would you like a bag?”
I am saltily tempted to allude to my second marriage partner. Usually, though, good taste rallies and triumphs.
I try to imagine the image I will convey walking out of the deli with seven loosely arranged items dotting both arms while deftly dipping into my pocket for car keys that duck and hide while a package of meat re-colors the ground beneath us.
I was thinking of this friendly scenario while reading that the astute City Council from the obviously intelligent community of Huntington Beach looked the politically correct lookalikes in the nose on Tuesday night. By a whopping 6-1 vote in favor of sensibility, they declared they are repealing the town’s silly, feel-good ban on “one-time use” plastic bags.
Is Culver City this smart?
We shall see.
Council members said there is no evidence the ban helps the environment, which normal people around the country have been saying for years. Meanwhile, our daffy governor, Mr. Brown, for whom no law is too silly, imposed a state ban on plastic bags. Down at the Gay Oddfellows Lodge that evening, the boys congratulated Mr. Brown.
How, we wondered, is Culver City’s plastic bag is faring?
Have hungry fishies swum ashore inquiring where their plastic dessert went?
We poked around City Hall, officially closed for the day – to save on plastic chair covers, I suspect.
We found a live body.
Is the law working, the hardy single employee – who should know the answer – was asked?
“I don’t know if anyone is tracking the data,” the well-attired gentleman said. “Logically, though, if there are fewer plastic bag opportunities, there are fewer plastic bags polluting the environment, such as floating into the ocean.
“Fewer bags have to mean less pollution, I think,” he said, approaching an excitable crescendo.
“On the other hand, if people who used to dispose of their bags in some other manner, now throw them in the ocean, we might be back where we started.”
Vexed by the way he just had deconstructed his own argument, he turned his palms upside down and said:
“I suppose you can turn logic on its head.”
