When the National Geographic magazine published an article entitled “Ballerinas in Pink” about flamingos in their October 1957 issue, they little realized what a significant impact it would have on the Western world. On the lawn and garden industry. On our definition of words like “tacky”–at least in some minds.
It was from photos published with that article that Donald Featherstone was inspired to design the first plastic lawn ornaments. In a strange attempt to live up to his name, Featherstone found a way to make inexpensive stationary monuments to approximate the graceful plumage of this member of the Phoenicopteridae family.
Aficionados of such outdoor decor are grateful that Donald sculpted his pink birds in not one pose but two, “so you can choreograph them,” he says. The variant designs help, no doubt, in fooling the passerby whose casual glance convinces him that two Floridian birds (one of each pose) have decided to live out their days far from the majority of the homo sapiens retirement communities farther south.
This year heralds the fortieth anniversary of the pink plastic flamingo (PPF). How many have been bred in captivity at Union Products, Inc., of Leominster, MA, since that fateful day in 1957? Almost enough to give one to every man, woman, and child in Canada; or one to be shared by every ten persons in the U.S. That’s right–more than 20 million of them!
“They’re really not so tacky,” Donald pleads. “I think they make a nice accent to the yard. It all depends on how you use them.” Can 20 million people be wrong? (Sorry, 10 million–remember, there are two poses.) Yet in spite of his insistent defense and obvious success, the PPF has become the unofficial mascot of all that is artificial and superficial about our society.
This world is a wilderness. Make no mistake about it. Build your grandiose castles from its plentiful sand. Lay the luxuriant green sod of material gain on its hot, dry breast. Water it with sweat from your body and tears from your soul. Plant your PPFs–or anything else you wish–to claim your transient rights to its territory. But history will tell you, if your heart doesn’t, that underneath it all is the parched dust of a desert world. The monuments of past generations have long ago been covered over, Ozymandias-like, by the shifting dunes. The prideful inscriptions of little man’s assumed greatness are barely legible to any who may care to read them.
Israel’s forty years in the wilderness left not a trace on the desert’s unforgiving harshness. Days turned to weeks turned to months turned to years as they wandered, waiting only to die. How debilitating is unbelief to the child of God. Not even their graves can be found among the wastes of the Sinai. It is a parable that needs to be remembered: “Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted…Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come” (1 Cor. 10:6, 11).
Forgotten are the ten spies who would not believe their God; can you name one of them? Instead we remember intrepid Joshua and Caleb, who “wholly followed the Lord.” Still today you can find the memorials to the prowess of their faith. See the torched ramparts of Jericho; climb the heights of Caleb’s Hebron; and is that Joshua’s altar on Mount Ebal? This, too is a parable: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope” (Rom. 15:4).
Yet even in the wilderness God provided His people their Elims with deep, refreshing wells–and their Marahs with deeper, and more refreshing lessons. Lessons, yes, but the land He would give them was on the other side of the river. Then what would the wilderness have to offer? Or the memory of Egypt, for that matter.
So it will be when we cross to that Land where “the Lamb is all the glory.” When we see Him and what He has waiting for us, we’ll wonder what we ever saw in this old desert-world that attracted us. It will all look like PPFs.
Good riddance.