510. Americans Are Pigs

                        BROWDERBOOKS

                                          Wild New York

Lots is happening:

• I and an in-house editor are working on my new novel, Lady of the Chameleons, no. 6 in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  It will hopefully be published this year.
• I continue to promote Forbidden Brownstones, no. 5 in the Metropolis series.
• I and a technical expert are working on a one-minute book trailer for  Forbidden Brownstones, something I have never done before.
• I am working on a new edition of Fascinating New Yorkers, no. 2 in my Wild New York series of nonfiction titles about New York and New Yorkers.  The new cover is stunning.
• I just finished a Books Butterfly promotion of the e-book of New Yorkers: A Feisty People..., no. 3 in my Wild New York nonfiction series.  The e-book was offered at .99 cents, bit is now $2.99.

Yes, I'm a busy boy.  But not without problems, mostly technical.  Hopefully they will somehow be resolved.  But SEO (search engine optimization) continues elude me, and mastering it is necessary to boost your online sales.  So it goes.

              AMERICANS  ARE  PIGS

I have often visited the Jefferson Market Garden on Greenwich Avenue near Sixth Avenue in the West Village.  As I walk its paths, I usually see litter near the fence.  The litter is only near the fence, where passersby on the sidewalk outside can toss it onto the grounds; the rest of the garden is clean, for people who visit it are not ones to foul it with litter.  But the litter near the fences reminds me of something the renowned theater director Harold Clurman once said at the Actors Studio, while commenting on a scene from a play about life in small-town Middle America: “Americans are pigs.”  He said this in a certain context, but it has stayed with me ever since.

New York City litter, as seen by a Dutch visitor.
Steven Lek

         Yes, Americans are pigs.  We have many redeeming qualities, but when it comes to littering and the environment, we are pigs.  We use gardens like ashtrays, and parks like  dumps.  In my hiking days a trail sometimes went for a short distance alongside a highway, and always, without exception, the shoulder of the road was littered with plastic cups and spoons, tinfoil, crumpled paper napkins, cigarette butts, whatever, and the litter often went for eight or ten feet off the road.  People in passing cars toss stuff out the window and, for them, it is disposed of, vanished, gone.  Yes, it has gone, but it hasn’t vanished; it has added to the litter along the highway.  I experienced this especially on the Palisades and in Pelham Bay Park.

         Once, on Staten Island, I was hiking through the woods in Wolfe’s Pond Park, hoping for a bit of nature, but what struck me most was the litter.  Disgusted at first, I finally began to feel a weird fascination at the richness and variety of it, and began jotting down notes that would later become a poem.  Looking at that poem today, I find a chronicle of the specifics encountered back then:

·      Cheese Doodle bags

·      Yoohoo bottles (“Five vitamins, three minerals”)

·      matchbook covers (“Finish high school now”)

·      Tangy Taffy wrappers

·      dented Budweiser cans

·      crumpled tinted tissues

·      soggy mattresses

·      Eureka disposable dust bag and filter packages

·      empty Merit and Marlboro and True cigarette packages

·      Snickers and Doublemint wrappings

·      Pepsi bottles

·      deranged grocery carts

·      bits of foam rubber and sponge

        This list is, in its strange way, a comment on American consumerism, and as regards the culprits involved, the proximity of Tottenville High School is not irrelevant; the youth of our nation are just as culpable as their motorized elders.  But the presence of discarded grocery carts and mattresses incriminates the elders of the neighborhood as well, or rather, it incriminated them back then, since I don’t know what the situation is today in Wolfe's Pond Park or Tottenville High School.

An attempt at better in New York, courtesy of the EPA: a cement trash 
can, not easily overturned or stolen.  But have you seen one lately? 
This was back in 1973.

         New York City litter can sometimes achieve the status of surreal.  The French Surrealists of yore imagined a locomotive abandoned in a forest as surreal, but in this country their fantasy has become only too real.  While hiking the Blue Trail in the Greenbelt of Staten Island (with apologies to the responsible citizens of that borough), I often crossed over the Staten Island Expressway on an abandoned highway ramp known as Moses’ Folly, a relic from an attempt by Robert Moses to ram a highway right smack through the Greenbelt, a project that was stopped by local opposition.  The abandoned ramp, lunging high in the air to nowhere, is surreal enough, and the graffiti covering it do not detract from the victory, literally monumental, of the embattled local residents and environmentalists.  But after crossing the expressway on the ramp, the Blue Trail turns sharply to the left and steeply descends a wooded ravine to a trickle of a stream, before climbing up another steep incline to another abandoned ramp and continuing on its way.  In that wooded ravine I have seen numerous abandoned cars, overgrown with vines almost to the point of vanishing: New York City litter on the grand scale, if you like, and absolutely surreal, but litter none the less.  

Tommi Nummelin

Email a link
to this fileInformation
about reusing

         On Broad Channel in Jamaica Bay, Queens, while accessing the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, I once also encountered an abandoned car.  Incensed at this violation of otherwise unspoiled nature, I relieved my bladder on the offending vehicle.

         Visitors to our cities have commented on the prevalence in the streets and parks of trash, particularly used condoms and orange peels.  With some justification they conclude that Americans have a great propensity for making love and eating oranges.  To the litany of New York City trash I would add plastic as well: plastic cups, plates, knives, forks, and spoons that I have found fouling the most delightful vistas of natural scenery, not to mention the gutters and abandoned lots of our cities. Such is trash, nycike .  And in winter, when the trees are stripped bare of foliage, one can see, impaled high lup on twigs like tattered ensigns, dozens of plastic bags.

         Yet Americans, when they set their minds to it, can do better.  The state of Maine, where I have often vacationed, has highways free from litter.  The moment you cross the state line, you notice the change, the result of a statewide campaign to keep Maine green.  And here in New York City, the volunteers of various conservancies and neighborhood organizations have done wonders in eliminating trash and litter from our parks and public spaces. 

         Keep Britain tidy: such were the signs that I used to see during a visit long ago to England.  “Tidy” is not a concept to be applied to the United States, a vast nation stretching the width of a continent; we’re just too big to be tidy.  But if every citizen picked up a single bit of litter every day, the result would be astonishing.  

        Humans are capable of keeping their cities clean.  A world traveler of my acquaintance assures me that Tokyo, with a much greater population than New York, is spotlessly clean and unlittered.  But here in the U.S., except for a blessed minority, we are too hurried, too involved in our busy lives, to be concerned about such trivia as trash and littering.  To judge by the litter in New York City and its environs, yes, alas, Americans are pigs.

©  2021 Clifford Browder