Fair is fair: Trump's return of plastic straws. The toy for those poor in spirit is supposed to come back to annoy the smarter ones.
The brand new American president Donald Trump embarked on governing with unprecedented verve. Many of his steps were contested by the courts, and questions remain over the realisation of others. The current presidential order regarding straws is one of them. While it seems reasonable to limit the production of plastic waste, which pollutes our world from overflowing garbage cans to plastic islands in the oceans, the straw debacle is meant to please Trump's supporters. There is a parallel to the European Union's effort to limit the sale of air in excessive packaging.
Even some eurosceptics have appreciated the new plans of the European Union against the marketing (read fraudulent) method of selling a small amount of goods in huge, usually plastic, packaging. For the merchant, it's a clever way to sell packaged air, for the customer a reason for annoyance, and that twice over.
The first time, when we open a huge package of chips and find only a small pile of favorite delicacy inside, and the second time a nervous system attack is threatened by overflowing rubbish bins. Without unnecessary waste, our life would calm down twice. At least that's how sensible people think.
Trump's ban on federal paper straws
However, in human society, sensible solutions are not always in the first place. This is well known by American President Donald Trump. With a conservative mask on his face, he issued a new presidential decree aimed at restoring the glory of plastic straws, which have become one of the symbols of polluting the world with plastic waste. Their paper counterparts do not have a lifespan of a thousand years.
"These things don't work, I had them many times and sometimes they break, they explode. When something is hot, they don't last very long, so a few minutes, sometimes a few seconds. It's a ridiculous situation,"
According to the BBC, Trump brought up a topic that is of interest to the American president.
Not to mention that a true conservative would hark back to the days when there were no plastic straws, the conservative president signed a straw decree with his flamboyant signature, which recommends federal employees stop using the paper ones (older than plastic by date of creation).
Now everyone can see American department officials tearing their drink from their mouths with a paper straw and beginning to search the entire skyscraper where they work for a plastic equivalent to quench their thirsty throats. Adults at work, after all, apparently can't drink without a straw.
Not all Americans are mentally at the level of three-year-old children, but some are
The Presidential Decree thus presents Americans as dumb infantile individuals who have the same problems as three-year-old children. For them, drinking from a larger glass is indeed a minor threat, they might spill it and so they prefer to use a straw.
The citizens of the most powerful country in the world are not fundamentally dumb nor unusually infantile, and definitely, Donald Trump is not like that. He just knows very well that both mentioned unflattering characteristics are present in the segment of his supporters.
In fact, Trump does not care about the material of straws. The only straws Trump ever cared about are those sold during his campaign with his logo, a pack of 10 costs 15 dollars (about 350 for ten plastic straws in Czech crowns). They earned him a decent half million dollars.
Why does Trump sign ridiculous decrees? The point of the straw decree is not the applause of dimwitted infants, but the attempt to annoy the wiser ones. It's an act trying to trample Biden's policy of reducing plastic waste and to scorn liberal opponents.
Some people don't care whether the policy is purposeful and improves their lives, they're happy as long as it steps on the chicken for the eye of those who project different opinions and are the source of their daily frustration. Europe has a lot of experience with such labelling from the whole 20th century, unfortunately, the proven political tactic is coming back in full force, in the shadow of fencing with plastic and paper straws.
Sources: author's article, commentary, BBC
