With the plastic instruments, people can sneak them on planes and serenade unsuspecting passengers.
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I think you mean prejudice? It’s a common mistake, probably too common to read well “ironically.”
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But we need to know how unfair some hippies have been about poor plastic… /s
Well, if we want to protect it the way the US government protects minority races… /s
But anyway… I feel I should also note that much of our “recycled” single use plastic gets shipped out to foreign countries (and rarely get taken out of poor communities, especially communities of color here), and often ends up polluting their environment…
Even then, I’d argue it’s not prejudice, because it’s, you know, inanimate. Is there some arguments to be made that plastics have been useful? Sure, that’s a conversation worth having. Is there a very real problem with the over use of single use plastics that is part of us literally killing ourselves as a species? Plastics come from oil, and the gas and oil industry is literally trading our lives for some cash in their pockets. If there are some things that we could use made from plastic, not literally every thing in our lives needs to be. There are so many times that we could use more sustainable alternatives to something made of plastic that would not impact our lives one bit.
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Doctor Who references are always on point!! Now I understand.
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I assumed he meant that plastic stuff is (assumed to be) made in China and just doesn’t have that good old American workmanship 
Words have meaning; negative perceptions about the potential durability and safety of a synthetic material are not even remotely on the same level as the insidious societal institutions of racism and personal prejudice against other human beings.
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Yeah, like we don’t make cheap, disposable stuff here.
And @Melizmatic is correct that people need to offer clarity in their comments.
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Is the guy with a violin a Busey?
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We don’t make hardly anything here anymore. We’ve outsourced almost all of it, and then blamed the people in [country] for wanting to work instead of the CEOs for moving the jobs.
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Yep, Jake Busey
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Actually a lot of instruments have a plastic counterpart, even Really Expensive Units have had plastic parts with mixed results. https://www.chuppspianos.com/teflon-bushings-the-steinway-sons-teflon-piano-era/
Other lesser piano makers tried in the 50s to use plastic parts with the result that these cheap pianos were too expensive to repair. A Steinway or a Baldwin Grand have some value and changing all the hammers makes sense. A cheap no-name spinet vertical no.
So the problem is that plastic is perceived of lesser quality even if it could be actually better, and of course it depends of the type and machining used.
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To be fair, it’s on the rise again:
https://census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/manufacturing-in-the-us.html
Not near what it was of course as you can see in the chart, but it is going back up and has been since the great recession (some amount of that is of course recovery from the great recession). We are starting to make more here than we have a while, and it seems like a trend slated to continue for now.
Either way, the entire point is that comparing discussion on the over abundance of plastics in the world to racism is just plain offensive.
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He was a good villain/pinhead in Stranger Things.
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Isn’t everyone using plastic for the tops of the white keys these days (replacing ivory)?
In 1964 I had a Mickey Mouse guitar, it was plastic.
I think I read that John Coltrane used a plastic saxophone, and he’s been dead since 1967.
One cpuod argue that the Casio midi keyboard is plastic, but I know this is really about instruments making traditional sounds but made of plastic. I keep seeing very inexpensive plastic recorders for sale, aimed at school kids. And even fifty years ago I remember instruments which you blew into but had a small piano like keyboard on the side. But they were plastic, I think I first saw them in Denmark in 1965. A check says they were probably Melodicas.
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Eventually we might switch to bioplastics, though more research and development is needed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioplastic. I’ve gotten into stupid arguments over the importance of oil to the plastic industry, ie, we can’t stop drilling oil because plastics, to which I respond, if oil is so essential, why are we so committed to drilling it all now and setting it on all on fire, as opposed to saving some to make the all important plastics? Plastic manufacture to an extent sequesters some of the carbon, as opposed to releasing it in the atmosphere, so doesn’t ad as much as consuming it as fuel. It is of course a horrible pollutant on land and especially in the ocean.
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I think an alternative to petrolum based plastics would be excellent, especially if we can make something that is biodegradable and doesn’t end up floating around the pacific and gunking up the ganges or what have you.
I would love to see people thinking critically about bioplastics, too, though. I know that for a while, an alternative people were thinking about to gas/oil for cars was biodiesel, but there is the issue of what are you going to plant to make the biodiesel, how much land is it going to take up, and does it come from a food source?
There are workable solutions, I think, but letting industry make those choices rather than all of society seems foolish, at best, as they don’t really care about us or the planet.
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I read somewhere that Charlie Parker played a gig in Toronto with a borrowed white plastic sax because he’d pawned his real one to buy… um… medicine.
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