Marking Time

Mr Roche denied the new cost implications on the manufacturing industry would drive up the price of goods.

“I don’t believe that is going to happen,” Mr Roche said, adding that the disposal costs would be included in the price of goods all across Europe.

Minister Dick Roche, 6th July 2005

I bought an iron in Argos last weekend. When I was paying for it I was asked if I would like to purchase the 3-year extended warranty. I politely declined, recalling to myself that the circumstances that led me to having to replace my old iron in the first place would definitely void any warranty, no matter how generous. Anyway, that’s beside the point.

Along with my cheap and cheerful iron (catalogue number 410/8757) I purchased the irresistable item identified by catalogue number 981/1087 for the princely sum of 2 euro. Unfortunately I was not given the opportunity to politely refuse this item described on my receipt as ‘Producer Rycl Fnd2.2′.

It’s more commonly known as the WEEE charge, the one that Dick Roche assured us would not be passed onto the customer. Thanks for the assurance, Dick.

Although this was written with the US in mind it certainly rings more than one bell when I think of where Ireland has come from and where it’s going.

In this light, we can regard the notion of “privatization” as a social phenomenon far broader than a process by which government contracts are granted. Citizens are redefined as consumers. Public participation in electoral politics falters, and with it any sense of collective or individual political power. Public space itself—the site for the First Amendment’s “right of the people peaceably to assemble”—withers away. Free association is aptly termed, for there is no profit in it. And since there is no profit in it, we are instead encouraged by our great media and advertising id to fear one another and regard public life as a danger and a nuisance, to live in secured spaces, communicate by electronic means, and acquire our information from that self-same media rather than from one another. The barkers touting our disastrous “ownership society” refuse to acknowledge that it is what we own in common that makes us strong. But disaster makes it clear that our interdependence is not only an inescapable fact but a fact worth celebrating—that the production of civil society is a work of love, indeed the work that many of us desire most.

The Uses of Disaster