Retro rockets.

You will never guess what this is! Actually, you probably will guess right away.

Yes, it's old friend the poop bag, sometimes known as the pet waste bag. A clean, unused one, thank you.

Why should I show you such a thing? The graphic design, of course.

Dog owners know that these kinds of bags come with a variety of virtues. You can have bags that are extra-large, for your big boys; extra-tough, for nervous types; bags that are scented, like hyacinth, or have odor-killer coatings; bags that have handles for easy tying; even bags that glow in the dark so you can find where you left them behind the house when you're trying to get the trash together in the night. Some have camouflage patterns. Some have the silly dog trio of symbols: paw, bone, hydrant. And then there are the ones above.

Glad sells them, and they're pretty cool. They are mildly scented, and have a white stripe where you tear the bag off the roll, a feature all rolls of bags should have--when it's hard to find the perforation you can rip a bag. Glad is one of the top names in trash disposal, so they did not have to do goofy dog drawings all over the friendly green background, but they did. I really like the design. It is a very pre-hippie sixties look, comic and happy. (I think the actual Glad company, a division of Clorox, may have franchised the name for their pet products, but whoever put these together did a great job.)

I think it may be a style revival. A friend of a friend was thrilled to find these big-boy sheets for her son at Pottery Barn Kids:

The Things That Go sheets are a classic mid-century design, fun and cute and bouncing with energy.

It evokes a kind of cheeriness and optimism that has been missing from our national culture since Vietnam. So much of our misery is political; for half the country the era of Reagan was morning in America, while for the other half it was five seconds to an Armageddon that almost but didn't quite make it. Such doomsayers were available in plenty in the 1950s and 1960s, but they were not the dominant culture as they are now.

What I'd love to see is a happy culture than can produce stuff like this for more than its most innocent members (kids and pets). I'd like Googie revival. But Googie doesn't mix with snark, and it recoils from screaming, and that's what we have now.

Well, at least some designers are trying. If, as the highly annoying Shelley said, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," then we need some Glad bags because they've been doing a crappy job. Let the graphic designers have a shot.