Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Austin, the Capital
of Preciousness
The
democratically-elected city council of Austin, Texas has inhaled the pixie
dust. Effective in March of 2013,
retailers who provide customers with a sack for their purchases will be in
violation of the awful majesty of the law and the dilated pupils of the Eyes of
Texas.
And
not a moment too soon, I say, for who, while visiting Austin, has not feared
being stalked by a drug-crazed grocery sack in the parking garage late at
night?
Grocery
sacks are increasingly notorious for their home invasions, and don’t even get
me started about the drunken grocery sacks staggering around 6th
Street.
Grocery
sacks gang up at intersections and at the entrances to stores holding out
buckets and demanding money “for the missions.”
You
can see grocery sacks lurking in dark alleys making drug deals, and more
grocery sacks luring children into lives of crime.
Grocery
sacks hang out in the parks playing loud music and smoking cigarettes and
stomping the flowers with their carbon feet-prints.
There are some who presume to defend the capitalist grocery sack. The humble grocery sack, they say, can be used
over and over (in AustinSpeak, “post-consumer recycling”). A grocery sack can cover the hot-dish for the
church luncheon. A grocery sack makes a
pretty good Halloween mask. The more
Occupy-ish among us can use a grocery sack for a facial disguise when holding
up a stop-and-rob in order to liberate The People’s goods from the belly of the
capitalist beast. A smaller sack can be
popped loudly in order to annoy big sister – maybe the Big Sisters on the
Austin City Roost. Paper bags carry
groceries, used dishes from a garage sale, good used clothes to Goodwill, ‘jammies
and a toothbrush for a sleepover, and magazines and books for the nursing
home.
And
in the end, the brave little grocery sack, its life of humble service at an
end, is easily composted with full military honors. If, for some reason, a beastly Republican
disposes of it improperly, the remains of the grocery sack simply fly away into
the country, there to biodegrade back into the natural world from whence it
came, into the Samsara of life and death, to be reborn as a majestic oak tree
or as a happy little petunia.
Well,
comrade, that’s reactionary thinking.
Grocery sacks are evil; the Austin city council acting in concert with
the will of The People and of the gods has decreed their banishment into the
desert. So let it be written; so let it
be done. Carry those carrots home in
your pocket, you fascist.
Someone’s
sister-in-law, and you know her, the unemployable thirty-something with the
jet-pilot glasses and a master’s degree in fashion design or hospitality, is to
be granted a $2 million dollar budget to persuade The People that nuisance and
humiliation are somehow good for them.
Thus, subjects of Austin will not only be punished for possession of an
illegal grocery sack, they will have to pay for the propaganda – um, teachable
moment.
“Keep
Austin Weird?” But Austin no longer
possesses a weird to be kept; Austin is now simply another dull, grey
provincial town of fearful subjects trudging their grim, grocery-bagless streets
with heads bowed in passive obedience to their heavy-handed soviet.
-30-
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