Chris Berg, and a pig driven solution to the ills of globalisation ...

(Above: a giraffe fed on high fructose corn syrup. I keed, I keed, it was the mercury in high fructose corn syrup that did it, and the giraffe was just exercising its god given right to choose. Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury).

Amongst the more delusional outpourings of the commentariat, Chris Berg can be regularly be relied upon to deliver some beauties.

And Capitalism is ruining the planet, and pigs might fly is truly an awesome beauty.

First a confession. My house contains signs of ongoing, sometimes turbulent waste. Used tissues, which over the years have amounted to a small pine forest, pile up and are never tucked into the recycling bin; reams of paper have been printed out in what should theoretically be a paperless home office; and endless bottles of water, which usually help Coca Cola to deplete the water at Peats Ridge springs/Mangrove mountain, but have also helped deplete water in foreign lands, have been conveniently shipped to my home to confirm our trendiness. (Or our distaste for Sydney tap water).

The idea of waste is embedded in my house, and catered for by the consumer dream (as anybody who's spent time picking over the treasures in a rubbish dump will confirm).

The idea of indulgence is also considered not a privilege, but a right, or in American terms, a choice. If you've got the goddam money to hook up an SUV to an RV (and load on board an ATV and a boat and a bicycle) and cruise all over the United States on a joyous 8 miles a gallon at 65 miles per hour, then goddam it, it's your choice and your right.

And who could disagree? Personally I love to get in a car and just cruise and look at the sights. These days, what with the price of gas and sneaking suspicion that nobody's yet worked out a solution to a post peak world, it's a kind of precarious conspicuous consumption, but not so conspicuous as if I pissed the money against the wall on an Armani or a nice pair of Bvlgari sunglasses.

Indeed fashion relies on assuring people that they are constantly out of touch, out of date, declasse and in urgent need of trendiness assistance, which can be had for a price, provided all last year's clobber is consigned to the bin, or sent off to Vinnies.

Now you might think this is simply recycling - clobber sent to Vinnies dresses the poor in a way that confirms noblesse oblige - but truth to tell, that's just the well-off consoling themselves about their conspicuous vanity.

So when Berg gets entirely ecstatic about the joys of an efficient capitalism, I wonder which planet he's been living on, and whether at any time in his life he's visited the United States, home of the obesity epidemic, or California, where conspicuous waste is a way of life. Or even looked around in Australia, second home to the obesity epidemic.

Not to mention a world-wide collection of splendid garbage dumps, with New York showing how it's done by producing 25,000 tons of residential and commercial waste a day, and 3.3 million tons of residential waste a year.

Less waste means bigger profits, and that should make everyone happy.

The home insulation program has been scrapped. And the emissions trading scheme has been abandoned.

But try not to worry too much. We are all a lot more environmentally sustainable than you imagine. Just look what happens when a little piggy goes to the market.

Uh huh. Don't worry about the big picture, or the oil pouring out in the gulf right now. Contemplate the way pigs can be used in all kinds of imaginative ways. It's the Homer Simpson solution - is there anything pig can't do?

Homer: Are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?

Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No!
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad, those all come from the same animal!
Homer: Heh heh heh... ooh... yeah... right, Lisa. A wonderful... magical animal.

Here's Berg doing his Homer impersonation:

The bladder becomes the skin of a tambourine. Haemoglobin goes into cigarette filters, and is added to ham to enhance its appearance. From pig's bone fat we get antifreeze, floor wax, toothpaste, crayons, anti-wrinkle cream, make-up foundation, and hair conditioner.

And even bullets. Gelatine from pig bones helps move gunpowder into shell casings.

Cigarette filters! Coffin nails with piggy class. Pig that enhances ham so that the packaged pig takes on an enhanced appearance ... of ham. Now with enhancing honey glaze!

Anti-freeze, for use in improving the taste of wine!! Anti-wrinkle cream, essential to mental stability and the smooth running of society! Wrinkles after all are the cause of an immense loss in productivity. And best of all bullets, the bigger the better as the gelatine slides the gunpowder into the shell casings. Handy for a holy war against Islamic fundamentalists.

Why I can't imagine anything better than pig, unless it happens to be high fructose corn syrup, which is highly beneficial to the body, on the same principle that all greed is good.

It seems like Berg regularly sips on high fructose corn syrup as he contemplates the marvels of modern waste-avoiding capitalism.

We've been taught that we live lives of reckless, wasteful consumption. We're told we have ''affluenza'' - an illness of consumerism with symptoms that include high credit card bills, environmental degradation and moral soullessness. Australia's affluenza theorist, Clive Hamilton, has written that ''consumer capitalism loves waste''.

Well of course Berg is relying on an immediate automatic response against the lonely asceticism of the likes of Clive Hamilton (who nonetheless seems to like to get on an aeroplane every so often) and his acting out a monk in the cave routine, as if he's in a Robert Bresson movie (say Diary of a Country Priest, where a little bread and red wine is all you need to keep body and soul together).

But while Australia has shifted away from credit cards to debit cards, we still as of February this year carried $3,250 in debt on cards - and paying interest on the sum at rates that amount to usury. (here). And we continue to degrade the environment, and without wanting to sound like the Pellites or the Jensenite nepotic heretics, surely there's a little moral soullessness at work in the win at all costs mentality of the Melbourne Storm (and every other professional sport in the country).

Just observing this doesn't automatically turn you into Clive Hamilton, or show signs you must buy Shaker furniture (too expensive anyway), or reveal hints of Amishness, or suggest that the Puritan tradition is buried deep in your DNA.

Nor does it mean you have to meander back to the days when bread and milk and ice were delivered to the door, and you took your own shopping bag to the grocers because you purchased goods on the day for consumption that day.

Nor does it mean you have to get terribly excited like Tim Blair about the attempt to get rid of plastic bags:

Australia has been struggling for some time with its 6.9-billion-bag-a-year habit.

That’s how much the community hates plastic bags. Imagine how many we’d use if we liked them. (here).

But then Berg, in his ecstatic rapture about a Scrooge-like, waste not want not beneficial capitalism, doesn't even begin to follow the strands of his own logic. Here he is berating wasteful natives:

... every school child learns that the Native Americans used ''every part'' of the buffalo they killed. Often they did - that's subsistence living for you. But sometimes they herded them off cliffs (''buffalo jumps'') thousands at a time.

One 19th-century explorer, Meriwether Lewis, saw tribes killing ''whole droves'' of buffalo, salvaging only ''the best parts of the meat'' and leaving the rest to ''rot in the field''.

Even at their most frugal, earlier societies could never match the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

Oh yes, you naughty failed over consuming Pandorans.

But um, I wonder if it occurs to Berg that we still manage to pick the best parts of the meat and fish and chook, but now we leave the rest (with bonus vegetables) to feed millions of cats and dogs so that we can indulge ourselves by having live fur, purring and doggie barks for company? And to hell with the starving millions in other parts of the world?

Only a dipstick who's never experienced poverty could marvel in this unilateral way at the resourcefulness of the global marketplace.

On and on he rants, in a vision splendid, about how Walmart is reducing its packaging, and hotels are no longer washing their linen on a daily basis (even in Vegas, in the middle of a desert, fancy that), before pausing to berate food miles advocates:

Even the globalisation of food produce is an example of market forces pursuing sustainability.

''Food miles'' advocates believe we should only eat food produced locally, that it's environmentally obscene to be transporting food across the world.

But the biggest carbon contribution of food isn't how far it has travelled. It's how efficiently it was produced. And efficiency is caused by things like climate. So a British government report found that importing tomatoes from Spain was more sustainable than growing them locally. A study by three New Zealand academics found that the same was true for apples grown in New Zealand and sent to the United Kingdom.

Uh huh. And is the same true for water? Is it true that it's more efficient for Perrier to ship bottled water all over the world so that we can console ourselves that we are sophisticated drinkers of French mineral water? Is it truly efficient, after benzene was discovered in several bottles of Perrier, for the company to recall 160 million bottles of Perrier? (here).

Is it really more efficient for us to enjoy tasteless grapes from California out of season simply so we can have grapes all year round? Should everything run on the level of infantile desire, dressed up as meaningful choice, on parade here and in the United States? Is it true that everything capitalism manages is done for reasons of economic utility, as opposed to inventing or catering to new kinds of consumer whimsy? If the world isn't in to excess and waste, why are so many of us fat?

The ecstatic Berg has no doubts:

... we live in a world where tiny bits of pig are used to produce the copper that makes up computer circuitboards, and other bits used to reduce moisture in newspaper. Globalisation is definitely weird. But it's not as unsustainable as everybody says.

But here's the thing. Globalisation means that if America sneezes, the world catches a financial cold. And so do mad cows.

Sure, globalisation is no recent phenomenon - the British practised globalisation in the nineteenth century as they ripped off the sub-continent and every other part of the world they took over as they painted the map red, and then shipped the profits back home.

But were the satanic mills of Manchester, now reinvented in various parts of Asia to build Nikes and iPads for the world, truly an unencumbered blessing? How about some products helped along by child labour? Are they truly an unmixed blessing? No matter how efficient they might be?

I guess they are if you like to wear Nike at a modest price, but perhaps not if you happen to be a twelve year old in a factory in one of the more remote provinces of China.

Okay, globalisation, as much as the tower of Babel allows, is ongoing and unstoppable, on a cultural level by the web, and on a physical level as transport increases connectivity (unless we run out of the means to fuel that connectivity). And there's nothing wrong with that, in the sense if you can't stop the flow, you perforce go with it.

But you might at least recognise the mixed blessings, and not try to build a mountain of bliss out of a dissected pig. Perhaps even try to organise and regulate it.

You don't have to be in the grip of Thomas Friedman's unctuous optimism to realise that in many areas The World is Flat. Or getting flatter. But flat doesn't always mean svelte.

A blithe assumption that all is well, with a couple of anecdotes trotted out as evidence to support the notion, and the argument that globalisation, as practised now, is sustainable, relies heavily on the ability of technology to provide sustainable upgrades to the way we currently do things.

It's hard to imagine six or nine billion people living at the level of waste currently indulged in by the United States or Australia, without a huge amount of boxing clever. Tragically of course a lot of conservatives tend to the superstitious and technologically luddite, incapable of imagining the need to change the way we do things. After all, if the rapture is just around the corner, why worry about a ravaged earth.

I suspect that I'm like many people when it comes to waste and conspicuous consumption. Occasionally moved by guilt, but also in love with the pleasure of a giant plasma screen, and even now thinking about an upgrade to a giant 3D plasma screen.

Can this level of indulgence continue?

If you read Chris Berg, sure thing, we're just like pigs in a field of mud. But what if special pleading and joyous rapture isn't so much an argument, or even an observation of the way the world works, but a deludedly optimistic state of mind?

(Below: and now a joke about pigs and the conspicuous consumption of Fox news).