The world needs a Mr. Clean Corps

I know we're supposed to be tolerant of other cultures; respect them, even. . . . But I can't. I see a picture like this, above, and I just shake my head and think, Who the hell are these backward imbeciles who'd live like this?

I would never advocate the invasion or bombing of a country based upon its lack of municipal hygiene. And I certainly wouldn't discriminate against a person in a hiring situation because they originated from a country that embraces a more open and loose attitude toward mounds of garbage in city streets.

But respect? No. I just can't.

We don't need the Peace Corps, we need Mr. Clean Corps to send around the world. How can you have peace where everything smells of rot and decay? How can one even contemplate peace where nausea is a permanent part of the national character?

Why are we sending shipments of food to countries where the recipients are only going to consume it amid such filth? So they can have full bellies while enjoying all of the benefits of dysentery and plague?

My point is not to mock the poor, but to shame those who feel that disposing of masses of garbage in city streets is a viable sanitation strategy.

Doesn't the World Health Organization have some sub-sub-arm that deals with teaching people to put paper on public toilet seats, not to eat their toe-nail clippings, to avoid using used toilet paper for home decoration, or that garbage-strewn streets may be a detriment to public health?

The photo above is from an article about Egypt and how they are only now learning that it was a bad idea to kill every single pig in the country at the first blush of the misnamed "swine flu," H1N1. You see, the pigs there used to eat all of that garbage. Somehow, I don't envision pristine clean streets in the aftermath of pigs consuming that vast buffet of refuse. Unless the pigs are airlifted out of the area immediately after feeding, would they not simply replace the garbage they just ate with shit? So, what's worse? Streets filled with garbage or streets filled with pig shit? The WHO needs to weigh-in on this question.

In the meantime, cultures and countries that treat their cities and countries like a teenager treats his bedroom, are not high on the scale of things I respect, admire or care about.

Bono's running around the world talking about Third World debt. Christ, he should be making deals with Glad, Windex, Purell and Lysol to send massive shipments of their products to these hygiene-impaired countries.

We always hear about how high the unemployment rates in these developing countries. Why not hire masses of citizens into garbage brigades? Surely there's enough abandoned military equipment around that could be converted into garbage trucks.

I don't know. Surely in the year 2009, the world has better solutions to handling garbage than having swine simply eat it and turn it into shit.