Dustbin Of History Closed Amid Environmental Concerns

The first indication of trouble was that Richard Nixon kept escaping.

Jerusalem, November 29 – The Dustbin of History will no longer accept any discredited or defeated ideas, its management announced today, after a report found that the facility has largely failed in recent years at keeping those destructive ideas out of circulation.

The Dustbin, long the repository of political systems, ideologies, and views of the world that had failed the test of time and practice, will close its doors as of December 15, meaning that unless an alternative venue is found in which to dispose of those notions, the world will be forced to continue maintaining them,  a prospect that experts say will only cause more misery.

Administrators note that for some time already, the Dustbin has been slowing its absorption of obsolete mores and systems, which is why so many Communists still populate the ranks of the political Left. “It’s only kooks and hateful bigots who hold by fascism anymore, once it was thoroughly defeated in 1945,” said Superintendent Obie Guthrie. “But we’ve had trouble storing Communism in its various forms even though it was convincingly discredited decades ago. It keeps leaking out and infecting people, and all the trouble we’ve had has kept us from properly processing and composting other worthless ideas, such as Reality TV.”

Historians say the Dustbin of History has been in more-or-less continuous operation since the collapse of mercantilism two centuries ago. It has absorbed the failed remains of Napoleonism, the Concert of Europe, Railways through Africa, the Ku Klux Klan, abstract impressionism, flappers, and the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and performed well in allowing those phenomena to die abandoned and alone, as they deserved. Through the middle of the twentieth century,  the facility continued to dispose of such deservedly short-lived notions as Transcendental Meditation, bell-bottomed trousers, and Dixiecrats.

However, capacity and physical integrity problems began to plague the Dustbin in the second half of the century. The first indication of trouble was that Richard Nixon kept escaping, but that series of fiascoes gave way to the much more problematic persistence of Communism in societies that should know better, long after the colossal failures of that doctrine had been amply demonstrated across multiple cultures and contexts. In addition, the failure of Palestinian nationalism to achieve anything constructive should have relegated it to the Dustbin by the 1970’s, but the facility was no longer capable of its previous achievements.

The last known item to be successfully contained in the Dustbin was the expression “jump the shark.”