june 4: i haven't been posting a lot here because i feel like i haven't been thinking/having as many thoughts as i did when we first started the blog, but as usual reading through your incredibly insightful and wonderfully-written blurbs never fails to switch my brain light on! so prepare yourself for a semi-long to actually-long post about plastic flamingos.
in grade 12 english, to practice rhetoric, we had to read these passages and write a rhetorical analysis essay on the passage. the one i remember most clearly was this passage about how the plastic flamingo became so ubiquitous in the states. i read a statistic a while back about how there are more plastic flamingos in the world than real ones, and reading through your post reminded me of that. the passage i read described how in the 1920s (the gatsby years). this fancy hotel in the florida used a flamingo as its logo and thus made it "synonymous with weath and pizazz" (yes i dug up the essay we are citing sources now), and travellers would bring back little flamingo souvenirs. in the post-war economic boom, more people were able to travel to the fancy hotels on the coast, and so the flamingo started popping up everywhere in american yards.
your point about how we are drawn towards controlled simulacrums of the natural world was really interesting, and i think very true. even when we try to "connect with nature" in our lives, it's always in a manner of our choosing, for a purpose we choose. i think that's what differentiates us from nature, even though we exist among it. while certain animals are more powerful than others, none of them really get to choose how nature acts on them as much as we do.
maybe i'm taking an overly cynical view of this, but i find myself asking whether it's possible for us to create little manifestations of nature in our own lives for ultimately non-selfish reasons. the pink plastic flamingoes are on one extreme; they began as an explicit symbol of wealth and audacity and flamboyance. what does a pollinator garden represent, if anything?
p.s. i just noticed one of the lights on the lamppost is green. i did not know this was possible. hello, f. scott fitzgerald???
