"Wrap Rage"

Telling Canada's stories to Canadians:

“Wrap rage” refers to the frustration people feel when trying to pry open hard plastic packaging that seems all but impenetrable. More than 90 per cent of Canadians who took part in the Marketplace poll say they have experienced rage when opening a product in the past five years, while 69 per cent say they have injured themselves in the process.

I take it that 90% of CBC viewers have never used a knife. This does not surprise me. What surprises me is that going on seventy-eight years the Canadian taxpayer has subsidized this level of "reporting." Should some poor wretch from a Third World country arrive upon our shores, capable of understanding English, what would he make of all this?

In much of the world the complaints of daily life are about naked survival. Food. Water. Work. Peace. Here in Canada we are so obscenely rich that the taxpayers funnel a vast fortune, $1.1 billion dollars a year, to broadcast television programs about how hard it is to open packages containing mostly useless crap. This is one of those remarkable examples of wasteful government spending being directed at the study of wasteful private spending. A kind of vicious cycle of bourgeois - bureaucratic decadence.

There are, of course, other angles to this story. There is the stupidity angle alluded to in the first paragraph. People who watch the CBC are too stupid to safely open consumer packaging. I understand their concerns. This used to be a common problem for your humble correspondent. Then at about the age of eight my mother let me use the big pointy scissors. From then on its been smooth sailing. I buy something. I get out the big scissors. Voila! Open sesame for my useless crap.

Not all of us had mothers who let them use the big scissors. Those people grow up and vote for the NDP and watch the CBC. The rest of us can enjoy the not so free entertainment these nitwits provide. Had any of these people shame, a concept that was abolished back in the 1960s along with decency and propriety, they would not admit their stupidity openly. Today admitting one's incompetence at meeting the petty challenges of daily life is encouraged. Heck there are parades through the streets celebrating dumbness. The usual government programs paying for the floats and banners. Medicare paying for the inevitable injuries. 

Ultimately this story isn't really about stupidity, except the stupidity of a "conservative" government that continues to finance the CBC and its team of intrepid reporters. Those valiant seekers after truth, as Francis Urquhart was fond of calling them in the original House of Cards. This is, above all, a story about the triumph of capitalism. Fettered, distorted and cronied, the old girl has still got it. Capitalism has succeeded so brilliantly, and so completely, that its enemies must resort to this petty nonsense. 

With "grave" problems like these, we have little to worry about in Canada. 

Comments

[Brian Mallard]

First world problems reported by first world ivory tower types paid for by first world foolx. Meh.

[Jaedo Drax]

Use a can opener on the seams... problem solved

[Copinacus]

Good lord. Your rant is like something I would expect from the CBC. Was this meant to be satire?

[John Chittick]

Actually, the level of competence required to handle such a story is a nearly perfect match for the CBC. If only Mothercorp would stay on such topics and leave politics, science and economics reporting to others....

Then again, compared to its private clone networks (CTV, Global), the CBC isn't that much worse. I suppose the institutional left's media tent just isn't that large.