PRESENTLY TENSEThe bottom line

My friends Mike and Jenny are having a baby. Soon they'll be faced with the dire dilemma facing all breeders in the first world: whether to swath their spawn in cloth or disposable diapers. In the third world, this is not yet as big a dilemma as, say, how to avoid starvation. And in the second world (Myspace), diapers won't protect your kids from sexual predators.

At this point, you might be tempted to skip right to the phone-sex ads: anything but diapers! Who cares about this? The ultra-conscious anti-Huggie Earth-huggers and their enemies, the corporate baby-waste-industry profiteers, do, that's who! And they demand that you choose up sides! For breeders, this has become the paper v. plastic v. canvas tote bag, the hybrid v. Hummer v. bicycle, of child-rearing politics. But it's worse-it involves baby shit, and you've only got two choices. Either you're gonna be a new-age, nappy-washing hippie or a landfill-filling, Wal-Martian Pamper camper. You're a pawn in the diaper war, consumer, and it's your move.

Now, I don't have children, and I don't particularly care for their company until they turn about 19, but I want to help Mike and Jenny, whom I pity. Someday, you will be saddled with this wretched choice or called upon to solve the dilemma for your lucky, lucky friends, so pay attention.

Diaper wars

The cloth promoters are losing the battle in the West. Though they've made diaper laundering chic for an image-conscious segment of the Whole Foodsy upper-middle class, 80 percent of all diaper sales remain disposable here in the land of trash-mountain majesties. Even in the U.K., where environmentalism is considered cool, 112 million disposable nappies are bunged into the rubbish bin each fortnight, and anti-disposable activist groups like the Women's Environmental Network have not yet convinced too many folks to buy and launder cloth diapers, despite their cutesy leopard-print nappy baby fashion shows.

But they have had some success in getting the leftist press to report their propaganda as news-and the latest version of this phenomenon is last week's article by Hilary Solly in The Independent identifying disposable nappies as a “looming environmental threat” that “could spell disaster for the environment... if a big new marketing push succeeds” in converting the third world into tomorrow's massive market for multinational throwaway poop pouches. But this is no “looming threat”; this is the almost certain future. If P&G (Pampers) and Kimberley Clarke (Huggies), who have upped third-world market spending 50 percent in the last five years, want third-world babies wrapped in their plastic and chemical-coated disposables, they will have their way, environmentalist efforts notwithstanding. Corporations rule the Earth. Bow down, roll over, and be dead.

I mean, the disposable menace must be stopped! Rise up against the corporate crap catchers!

Baby poop tolerance scoop

China isn't the name of a CityBeat Page 45 hottie-it's a big country with 40 million infants, and if they all start wearing disposable diapers, landfills will be choked, global warming will increase and everyone will die, so put aside your selfish self-interest for a moment and come with me on a magical journey to the land of the bottomless baby and the $300-a-year average rural income.

Over in rural China, infants wear kaidangku-trousers with a big split in the middle. It just makes sense down on the farm to let it all hang out, baby. Now that the Chinese are running Tibet (badly), it's possible they'll get hip to the Tibetan practice of using matted yak hair to capture baby waste, but it seems more likely that they'll follow the lead of urban Chinese, who have increased diaper use to as much as 90 percent in some cities, with disposable sales growing by about 40 to 50 percent per year.

Here are a few quotations from Chinese city dwellers in a ChinaDaily article about the urban move away from split pants: “That's so old fashioned!” (Annie Cao, Shanghai) “They're so uncivilized.” (Su Shaojuan, Guangzhou) “In the past, people did not have a strong sense of hygiene.” (Zhao Zhongxin, professor at Beijing Normal University's Education Science Research Institute). Wow, savvy investors might want to get in on the bottom floor of this! (I'm just sayin'.) On the other hand, considering the ever-widening chasm between urban and rural incomes in China, it will probably be a long time before the inevitable rural turn to disposables.

The trialectics of baby waste: a third choice after all?

Who among us would bravely let our infants crawl around crotchless like they do in rural China? Over there, parents practice close supervision and what those in the know call EC (elimination communication)-i.e., your baby lets you know when it needs to go, and you respond right then and there to the brat's needs and hold it over a bush or a hole or what-have-you, rather than the modern method of forcing the little monster to hang out in a soiled diaper until you're good and ready to deal with it. Some westerners are even arguing that we in the first world should move away from diapers entirely and go intuitive. Of course, that would mean constant supervision of the chubby little fun-bundle. Consider what kind of a society we'd need to build or rebuild (depending on whether you're a progressive or conservative utopian) to achieve a diaper-free environment.

But it looks like the only chance for Earth to survive diapers is in this third and oldest of choices. Hey, Jenny and Mike, go natural! Let that baby piss and shit when it wants to. Just hold it over a suitable receptacle and wipe it off with some matted yak hair. What's that? No, sorry, I don't know where you can get a yak. And, no, I am definitely not available to baby-sit until 2025.

I hope you all learned something today, and if you did, I hope it's that there are three worlds and they're all doomed, that you should get yourself spayed or neutered, that babies rock, and that diapers are evil. Have a nice day. Write to dakolodenko[at]gmail[dot]com and editor[at]sdcitybeat[dot]com