Those Ticky Tacky Houses
Last weekend I met up with a few friends. After singing the Internationale, knocking back a few tumblers of vodka, and making fun of the bourgeois, we had an inspiring conversation about how the quality of Canada’s housing stock has declined since the golden years of the 1930’s.
You will recall that excellent socialist song, about those ticky tacky houses (link) that most everybody lives in now. Ah, how the evil heteronormative Americans urinated in the coffee pot of our budding socialist paradise by increasing the housing supply and stuffing these blasphemous temples of consumption with consumer goods that use electricity, running water, and have the same temperature year round. Oh, how our proletarians have been drugged with three bedroom bungalows in the commuter suburbias, where they choke on food, ale, and hockey.
The good old days. Environmentalists agree that the rural Canadian worker, farmer, or peasant house of the 1930’s was much more in tune with green reality. Well do I recall visiting relatives living in such a simple, robust structure in the old growth forests surrounding Hillsburg, Ontario. A durable wood stove heated the structure; it provided heat and a surface for cooking food, usually a large kettle of nutritious boiled roots and grasses. Everyone slept in the same room with their feet to the fire, huddled in communal proletarian splendor in aromatic woolen blankets, sleeping on sturdy peasant straw pallets. No electricity was needed and everyone lived intimately with nature, man and beast, bird, fish, amphibian, and crawling insects.
Outside, where it should be, was the outhouse. Constructed of wood, it celebrated a one class system where everyone was equal. Everyone sat on the same wooden plank over the same hole where everyone’s waste mingled in multicultural splendor. Today, activists miss the diversity of the outhouse; internal plumbing and running water is a capitalist plot meant to divide people by class, gender, age and to cause global warming. Rarely do people outside of the fetish community share the intimacy of their bowel movements. The outhouse is missed.
Vegetarianism was the standard in the 1930’s, not because of trendy Hollywood ‘let the women look like skinny little boys’ fad, but because people liked eating hyper-boiled potato slurry. Few people ate meat because they realized that other things were more important. I miss that in people today. Only in homeless shelters do I find people eagerly eating bran mush with goat milk from a communal food bucket.
Our brothers, sisters, bisexuals, transvestites, and other multi-gendered activists in the environmental movement lament the passing of the wood stove heated one room primate-barn. These fine structures did not have walls stuffed with toxic insulation, but instead allowed nature’s refreshing breezes to pass right through. Air tight houses cause third hand smoke deaths. How many tens of thousands of people will die today because they live in a house with insulation and central heat?
Running water is another opiate of the masses. Aside from the earth raping strip mines, the choking smelters, and the swarming capitalists needed to create copper and plastic for piping and pumps, running water requires that one of the most rare and valuable commodities in Canada, fresh water, be squandered on the vanity of hot water for laundry and warm water for showering. For thousands of years our happier socialist communes lived longer happier lives without laundry and bathing. It is time to work towards a Greenpeace future where bathing is no longer an option. Bathing is bourgeois. Laundry causes global warming.
As I sit here in an office tower in Toronto, looking over Lake Ontario and listening to a floor of telemarketers, I can only dream of a green future where everyone uses an outhouse, uses wood for heat and fuel, and eats boiled roots spring, summer, and fall in the splendor of a one room shed. Share this vision with me by supporting Green activism. Let those ticky, tacky houses be swept away for the communal primate barns.
I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this. I care.
Cross posted at Dust My Broom, located close to one of Canada's last pristine reserves of 1930's vintage housing.
You will recall that excellent socialist song, about those ticky tacky houses (link) that most everybody lives in now. Ah, how the evil heteronormative Americans urinated in the coffee pot of our budding socialist paradise by increasing the housing supply and stuffing these blasphemous temples of consumption with consumer goods that use electricity, running water, and have the same temperature year round. Oh, how our proletarians have been drugged with three bedroom bungalows in the commuter suburbias, where they choke on food, ale, and hockey.
The good old days. Environmentalists agree that the rural Canadian worker, farmer, or peasant house of the 1930’s was much more in tune with green reality. Well do I recall visiting relatives living in such a simple, robust structure in the old growth forests surrounding Hillsburg, Ontario. A durable wood stove heated the structure; it provided heat and a surface for cooking food, usually a large kettle of nutritious boiled roots and grasses. Everyone slept in the same room with their feet to the fire, huddled in communal proletarian splendor in aromatic woolen blankets, sleeping on sturdy peasant straw pallets. No electricity was needed and everyone lived intimately with nature, man and beast, bird, fish, amphibian, and crawling insects.
Outside, where it should be, was the outhouse. Constructed of wood, it celebrated a one class system where everyone was equal. Everyone sat on the same wooden plank over the same hole where everyone’s waste mingled in multicultural splendor. Today, activists miss the diversity of the outhouse; internal plumbing and running water is a capitalist plot meant to divide people by class, gender, age and to cause global warming. Rarely do people outside of the fetish community share the intimacy of their bowel movements. The outhouse is missed.
Vegetarianism was the standard in the 1930’s, not because of trendy Hollywood ‘let the women look like skinny little boys’ fad, but because people liked eating hyper-boiled potato slurry. Few people ate meat because they realized that other things were more important. I miss that in people today. Only in homeless shelters do I find people eagerly eating bran mush with goat milk from a communal food bucket.
Our brothers, sisters, bisexuals, transvestites, and other multi-gendered activists in the environmental movement lament the passing of the wood stove heated one room primate-barn. These fine structures did not have walls stuffed with toxic insulation, but instead allowed nature’s refreshing breezes to pass right through. Air tight houses cause third hand smoke deaths. How many tens of thousands of people will die today because they live in a house with insulation and central heat?
Running water is another opiate of the masses. Aside from the earth raping strip mines, the choking smelters, and the swarming capitalists needed to create copper and plastic for piping and pumps, running water requires that one of the most rare and valuable commodities in Canada, fresh water, be squandered on the vanity of hot water for laundry and warm water for showering. For thousands of years our happier socialist communes lived longer happier lives without laundry and bathing. It is time to work towards a Greenpeace future where bathing is no longer an option. Bathing is bourgeois. Laundry causes global warming.
As I sit here in an office tower in Toronto, looking over Lake Ontario and listening to a floor of telemarketers, I can only dream of a green future where everyone uses an outhouse, uses wood for heat and fuel, and eats boiled roots spring, summer, and fall in the splendor of a one room shed. Share this vision with me by supporting Green activism. Let those ticky, tacky houses be swept away for the communal primate barns.
I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this. I care.
Cross posted at Dust My Broom, located close to one of Canada's last pristine reserves of 1930's vintage housing.
posted by The Mayor at 9:49 PM
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