QOTD: "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it." - H. L. Mencken
Reading: Phyllis Rose (editor), The Norton Book of Women's Lives
Listening to: nothing, as once again I am writing later at night than I'd intended to
Decluttering accomplishments: brought two bags of clothes to Goodwill, took two pieces of needlepoint to the finishers, caught up on household finances
Fran Liebowitz once wrote about an elementary school teacher in the 1950's who explained that the reason the American way of life was better than the Russian way of life was that we could have any type of shoes we wanted, even Capezios. While the Russians were limited to wearing brown lace-ups. That presupposes that infinite consumer choice is a good thing.
I admit that I like choices but they also make errand running occupy way too much of my time, to the detriment of my happiness. Consider, for example, the errands I ran this week. Let's start with the simple ones. I had two bags of clothing to donate to charity. Most of that clothing was perfectly usable and most of it even fit. The problems with it were details - a color that didn't quite work, for example. If I were living in, say, Sierra Leone, I wouldn't have the luxury of discarding a blouse merely because it happened to be chartreuse.
Many of the errands I ran this week would not even make any sense in most of the world. Among the things I bought were a children's book to donate to a literacy program and a couple of journals to write in. The latter is complicated because I am fussy and I like the journals I use for any given purpose to be the same size. Which meant going to two stores before i found the right one and, if I count the need for a notebook to use when I travel, there was another store involved, too. These are chores that only make any sense in literate society. I don't know quite what the literacy rates worldwide are, but there are plenty of places where literacy is still rare - and, in general, women are far less likely to be literate than men are.
Even picking up some Polaroid film (I have a digital camera with a built-in Polaroid printer) is a meaningless task in much of the world. I've been to plenty of places where film comes as 35 mm rolls (24 exposures only, probably ASA 100 only) and that's all that's available. The obvious lesson to be learned is to buy all the film you need before you leave. But, of course, photography is inherently a luxury - as is travel. So my having booked a trip to Papua New Guinea for next year, which involved several phone calls, emails and faxes, is clearly absurd. The decision to book that trip means I won't go to Armenia in May or Greenland in July or any of a hundred other places I could choose to go to because I have way too many frequent flyer miles. The issue is the time off from the work that lets me afford any shoes I want.
My purchase of theatre tickets is absurd because formalized entertainment is. Most people in the world make their own entertainment and the development of a class of professional entertainers seems silly. Except, that idea seems to go back a long way. Certainly, medieval Europe had jesters and players and, I assume, Greece and Rome did. There are storytellers offering a chapter for a coin in the markets of much of the developing world. And the boys who sing for their supper to tourists must have gotten the idea somewhere.
Even the supermarket offers excessive choice. Do I really need to be able to buy 40 different kinds of cereal, many of them simply variants on a sugary theme? You can buy Kellogg's corn flakes damn near everywhere in the world. They're the universal food, in my experience, and, if they're good enough for me in Malawi, why should I even consider any of the other choices I have in Los Angeles? Incidentally, one of the more surprising stories of the week was that the charges against at least two of the people being held after the September 11th attacks involved smuggling corn flakes. We hear a lot about war diamonds (and, now, tanzanite), but should we be wondering about the true significance of Battle Creek, instead?
My most absurd purchase of the week was a bottle of Blockheadia Ringnosii Sauvignon Blanc. It's part of a gift that I'm having sent to a friend and I fully admit to having selected it largely because of the name. It did get a good rating in the wine magazines, but so did any number of other California white wines. Unfortunately, I couldn't find other top-rated selections with similarly amusing names so had to choose the red and sparkling selections more conventionally. Wine, in general, is a luxury that is unavailable throughout much of the world. If I were a worker in 1950's Russia, I'd be struggling to afford some homemade rotgut. But I wouldn't have spent the better part of two hours debating what to buy.
I'd intended to end this with some really brilliant conclusion, but I wasn't able to find one in any of the stores I went to this week.
Copyright 2001 Miriam H. Nadel