Declinist Product Watch: Ionic Breeze

Difficult to express accurately with words, for some incalculable reason the Ionic Breeze is, for me, a potent sign of decline. For some time now I have reviled the television advertisements that push this dreadful little devise on us with fake enthusiasm and broken promises. These ads laud the ingenuity of its “filterless” system that “traps airborne pollutants on stainless steel blades.” Its patented design permits you to run it ceaselessly while only having to occasionally rinse or wipe blades clean with a damp cloth. No more filters to change, no more fan motors to fret about, no more sky-high electricity bills. Ionic progress. But what these fantastic exaggerations fail to address is the one question that should be foremost on all of our minds. Since when, exactly, did the air become so filthy, so horrifically polluted, that we need the Ionic Breeze in the first place? The Sharper Image website boasts that you can run the Ionic Breeze for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, all while using a minimal amount of electricity. 24 hours a day!? Has it come to this? Are things this dire? Do we as a nation really need this much air filtration? And if we do should the people at Ionic Breeze be profiting from the spoils of global pollution?

But the declinist nature of the I.B. is most ostensibly visible in its putrid design. Just look at it, standing there…it’s absolutely hideous…some kind of alien monstrosity that has been installed in your house to silently monitor your life functions. It resembles a gleaming office tower in the Atlanta skyline, or maybe Houston. When you pull those steely blades out to wipe them off the I.B. is instantly converted into some kind of gargantuan medical probe. Just imagine the I.B. as a blight in your living room, or giving your young children nightmares as it purrs away in their bedroom day and night, hovering there in its “attractive lightweight housing” vigilantly cleansing the air to save their tiny pink lungs from certain peril. How on earth have we become complacent about the terrifying implications of this machine? This obsession we have with air filtration points to a disturbing need in our collective psyche: the demented assumption that the very air we breathe is contaminated and causing us great harm. The thriving I.B. culture in the United States today implies that we are a sick nation, hermetically sealed away in our houses wrapped in Tyvek, trembling at the thought of carpet odors, pet hair, dust motes, pollutants, CFCs, spores, pathogens, airborne viruses, and other miasmic intrusions that circulate invisibly around us, silently collecting in our lung tissue and rupturing our helpless alveoli sacks.

Then again, perhaps the danger is real and we must remain vigilant and struggle against the grave and gathering threat of the air we breathe. We will not give up, we will prevail, we will emerge in pulmonary triumph from the air around us, we will not rest until every molecule of air is pure, until every room in ‘murica has an I.B.