Garbage in What Ways Does Term Paper

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Much as Porter discovered playthings as a little boy in bottle caps, rather than collecting more and more matchbox cars, for example, remnants of consumerism only to be disposed of in weeks rather than things to be kept as relics of a bygone era, one must begin to see from an early age the slim line of difference between, say a Happy Meal Toy or a bottle cap from one's father's favorite soda.

Thus Scanlan asks, how do we decide what is considered junk in Western society? Simply because the discarded remnants one's immediate life may no longer be of interest to the original user of the commodity does not mean that garbage cannot provide a historian with a potent artifact later on, or even an enterprising art student with raw material to create something of beauty. What would we not give to see the trash of the ancient Egyptians, and is indeed some of the Mesopotamian broken pottery we so carefully assemble in art museums across the world what would be garbage, if it were only a few years old?

The memory of a society is thus always written in a kind of garbage.

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And, as the adage about trash and treasure cited at the beginning of this essay suggests, material waste viewed anew can produce something to be treasured and beautiful even in today's present. But to attain such insight, Scanlan suggests, modern Western philosophy, science, and technology must cast away its obsession wit cleansing, which only produces overwhelming mountains of waste.

This cleansing obsession creates ultimately unsupportable landfills but also, the author argues, creates a sad and abject culture where our lives themselves become disposable as we become unable of forming real attachments in a lasting fashion to either things or people. At least by creating attachments, however, to the lives of others through refuse, we may escape the immediate past in its totality becoming garbage, a way of recovering lost lives -- the cast of finery in thrift stores, given by the survivors of the dead, or simply finding beauty in a child's toy by the side of the road that one converts into a piece of bedroom furniture for a dormitory.

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