As spring reveals seemingly perma-litter of Chilltown, what's a not so obvious cause?
And what does the original "Toxic Avenger" film have to do with anything?
There was a winter this year on the American East Coast, or at least there was a winter that was less tepid than the ones in recent memory. Enough for snow to collect in banks and become that gray and occasionally yellow slush that slowly melts away, making the re-appearance of — in the most concentrated sections of under-resourced neighborhoods — the trash underneath all the more pronounced. In that scenario, the area is one where there’s enough occasional clean-up during warm months to remind someone who passes it by that it doesn’t always look so derelict.
There’s something the way litter sets a purported tone. For many people, first impressions loom permanently; and litter is a door to somewhere that’s, at best, “urban” — American urban, which is walled off and cherry-picked as it weaves its way into cosmopolitan American urban.
Litter is something that information can be discerned from. Why, in a pile of trash that looks like the emptied contents of someone’s very particular household, are there so many plastic water bottles? In under-resourced neighborhoods, that’s due in part to the extra burden placed on them in securing lead-free waterlines, according to an article from Grist.
Litter and under-resourced neighborhoods around the world go hand in hand. This litter is comprised of pollution on every level: garbage, noise, sometimes waste toxic enough to necessitate specialized cleanup procedures. So generally, what someone can discern from litter, they’d rather not. Or they should rather not, given ample enough education.
Earth Day isn’t a federal holiday but if it were this year it would probably be cancelled by the present presidential administration. What Earth Day intends to instill about being caretakers of the environment, after all, is the problem of those who are downhill and away from the few people who matter — is the concentrated wealth baron reasoning.
But clean-ups will likely come to a city of dense urban neighborhoods near you. And in neighborhoods where the once-a-year or so event the powers that be or some civic-minded person organizes is supposed to be a major change of tone, the concentration of litter will come back; and enough people unfamiliar with neighborhoods will tend to assume it’s entirely down to the people there. But this Chilltown Blues piece would argue it’s also the tail-end of a bigger beast — one more complicated the denser a place is.
Historically, in any Western place comparable to a city today, people wanted to live uphill partly because other people had a way of trying to make their garbage the problem of someone downhill.
Contemporaneously the uphill part of that dynamic is invisible.
Before Jersey City’s “renaissance,” when it was sometimes referred to as “Dirty City,” as one longtime local artist put it, all quarters of it had sections where people — a mix of people local and just as often not-so-local — would dump trash. Along a highway. Beside the shell of a warehouse or a factory, abandoned railroad tracks. The lot of an abandoned home. All of those crisscrossed throughout JC. That sets a tone, and instead of empowering the people who don’t let that tone reverberate in themselves, a lack of resources naturally disempowers them.
The business of junk
There are people who do odd jobs — construction, junk removal, lots of things along those lines.
Junk removal in and of itself is a respectable line of business, because junk can be valuable — particularly if someone is maximizing collection of things with valuable components, or just a lot of things with little value. Both of these approaches can be done responsibly and be of real value to the world, but as is the case with large-scale enterprises of all stripes, they can also be done irresponsibly and not be of value to the world beyond a few people.
A landlord becomes a slumlord because they give up any sense of responsibility to provide the quality of a life they’d want for themselves — and maybe more so, when they let the property they own become part of a slum with no resistance whatsoever, because in an under-resourced city or place a landlord can effectively be abandoned by the pillars of their local system … and still know how that system is supposed to work to their (and others’) benefit.
When someone who does odd jobs decides to find a spot where no one’s watching, or no one’s supposed to care, and dumps items there, they are working in that slumlord mold in a way that’s maybe just a bit sadder.
If you have a nice neighborhood and a site effectively abandoned by the powers that be is closer than a dump, getting rid of something there makes a kind of hierarchical sense (that is ultimately sad, but more on that later) — trying not to make their littering the problem of the people around them, partially because people are more likely to act on a basic entitlement to a world that at least looks orderly.
(And so it goes with all other forms of pollution and toxicity, including why there’s far less open-air drug dealing in a “nice” neighborhood. Also, if you lower the bar too much, a “nice” neighborhood is just a half-decent one.)
But back to that local odd jobber, who tells someone, “Yeah, I can clear that out and get rid of it for you no problem, for a cheap $__” and then dumps it “downhill,” where the proximity of that space is very close to where they already live … in a place they may or may not own which is already channeling practically abandoned. This person’s effect is a particularly sad one, because like some bass stereo that gets to hum all hours of the day, the local junk person dumping trash that locally sets an immediate and very sharp tone.
In an area with resources, people don’t have to see as readily how (relatively speaking) trashy someone can be, even if they’re trashy on the inside. The distance is the point, making something that is also a form of self-harm removed enough to be business as usual.
And in in the mold of “business as usual,” that’s not sad at all. It just is what it is.
Toxic
The 1984 film, “Toxic Avenger,” us set in fictional Tromaville, New Jersey (and billed on its poster as having "the first Superhuman-Hero ... from New Jersey!
) It has a shot of the original World Trade Center towers, a sight that was a fixture of North Jersey cities like JC and Hoboken.
In the film, protagonist Melvin is a janitor at a gym who’s chased and falls into a vat of toxic waste. The film has multiple villains: corporate, corrupt governmental, muscle-head, drug dealers. It’s considered (and is) a sleazy, lowbrow “splatter horror” picture, but in the scope of the business of junk entertainment, that’s not all it is.
It has a more multifaceted sense of reality when it comes to its premise — Melvin’s transformation is the embodiment and reversal of the toxic disregard at just about every level of power, sanctioned and unsanctioned, in the world around him — and it at least imagines a city where people who are “troma-”tized by any combination of toxic things around them recognize their own and rally around them.
At your average Earth Day, that doesn’t happen. Even if people do clean up the trash that collects downhill, the litter collects again because of the overall infrastructure:
Those who are a little more uphill, or a lot more, just don’t see themselves as part of the same equation, where the remainder of the metaphorical (occasionally literal) toxic waste has to go somewhere and, without something atypical to business as usual, will keep festering.
A consequence of longtime red-lining is simply that toxicity is empowered; and the forces as represented by the ones in this aforementioned older, sleazy film (with a remake due soon) have an ecosystem where some places being “trashy” works for the local big picture … until it doesn’t work for enough people there almost purely because of capital, not because those standards aren’t already there living ever more densely between the business of junk.
