Hermits and Holocausts

A local pet store was displaying some new wares in the form of themed vitrines for pet hermit crabs. Arrayed on a shelf was the usual mainstream fare featuring colorful Scooby Doo imagery, Spider Man etc, nothing out of the ordinary in our brand-conscious country. But upon closer inspection I saw that inside the vitrine was the real product: an injection molded plastic hermit crab shell with Spider Man’s face emblazoned across it. Yes, your little pet hermit crab will one day out-grow its shell and crawl into the only available replacement which you have conveniently supplied. Your goddamn hermit crab is going to live inside a man-made hunk of ABS adorned with Wilma Flintstone. The number of criss-crossing vectors in this situation is difficult to disentangle- there’s some ghastly mix-up of branding, aspiration, play, animals, plastic, fun and artificiality.

Somehow, the image of a little crab dragging around a picture of the Hulk on it’s back is all wrong. Return to the notion of aspiration, where kids are assumed to want the product because it makes them feel cool or powerful. But in this case, it’s hard to see how the super-hero traits transfer to the kid rather than staying native to the hermit crab in which case it’s just weird or at best funny.

There are some problems with forcing an animal to inhabit a piece of plastic, but while we’re on the subject, c’mon couldn’t they come up with something better? How about a shell with rivets and armor plate, wings and thrusters, turrets and biohazard logos? What about a little house with molded chimneys and windows? But the larger issue isn’t one of design, but of process. This product didn’t just manifest out of thin air but rather is the result of a series of decisions. At some point in time a bunch of real people sat together in a room and agreed “hey, here’s a worthwhile idea…” Now what the hell were they thinking? Perhaps there’s an over zealous application of branding into inappropriate, or downright irrelevant domains, but hiding here in this silly product is something slightly sinister.

My mind works in funny ways by leaping across gulfs to draw connections between arguably totally unrelated entities. The image of those shells resonated and when mulled- drew my thinking far, far afield. I can’t shake the image of a meeting of individuals around a table. Anyone by themselves can be deluded into thinking they’re pursuing a worthwhile project, but other people entering the picture should be a system of checks and balances to provide an additional external view of the value of one’s undertakings. I suppose people who work in offices are used to “meetings” where all manner of idiocy gets propagated. Indeed somewhere there must be meeting notes saying “plastic hermit crab shell- APPROVED”. The reality is that somehow groups of humans can collectively agree on terrible ideas as readily as good ideas. Several recent books I’ve read discuss the ethics of allied strategic bombing in WWII. They depict circumstances of decision where individuals sat around a table and arrived at a course of action. Just the type of physical situation I envision resulting in the commitment to make branded snail shells. I’m frankly reminded of the Wannsee conference where a bunch of bureaucrats sat around and planned the extermination of millions of innocent people in concentration camps. In each case one’s assumptions about people providing some degree of oversight of each other have to be abandoned.

Yes, all that from a few shells. People will agree on bad ideas about a living animal as readily as they’ll agree on bad ideas about air fresheners. This line of thinking provides a dim prognosis for our world when natural systems are pitted against groups of people sitting around tables making decisions. That little shell embodies a proprietary relationship to the natural world which will eventually destroy it.