American Life

Women Deserve the White House as Much as Blacks Do


 

There is an article on MSNBC discussing Hillary Clinton‘s recent resurgence in Texas and Ohio. The author talks about her main base of supporters being Boomer women with the typical being a 50 year old white woman who is jazzed about the fact that as a gender we are SO close to putting one of our own in the Oval Office. Despite the fact that my husband insists that I am pretty much within spitting distance of being this “typical” Hillarite woman (and I am so not by the way as not quite 45 is hardly 50 at all), I am equally psyched about the prospect of having a woman president. So psyched in fact that my dislike for Sen. Obama is probably at times simply driven by not much other than his “Y”-ness. Though his serious lack of anything resembling a plan for this country and his lightweight Senate rep is not helping him score any points either.  Then there is the issue of his glowing aura. Charisma, a Jesus Christ Superstar-like halo, and a fawning media are grounds for immediate suspicion, in my opinion. Nothing good ever comes of even one of those things and all three could be harbingers of the Apocalypse for all I know.  But like most other old women, I can read a hand-written wall. Messiahs are male and really cool. 

 

Having been accused of being merely a bigot for preferring a female in the White House and having been told that voting for a woman because she is a woman is merely proof that women should never have been given the vote in the first place, I must say that if Sen. Clinton was just offering me “change” and “hope” without any clear idea of how to accomplish something that might actually be “change” and provide real “hope” I would scoff and dismiss her out of hand, much as I have done with Obama. I am too old to be drawn in by style (which the media is quick to point out that Sen. Clinton doesn’t have in comparison to the Chosen One). I want substance with my president too. I want someone who knows that being the president is damn hard work and has a proven track record of being someone who works hard. Well, isn’t that a bit simplistic, you might think? How like a girl to believe that the highest office in the land is achieved by qualifications and elbow grease and not the hand of destiny plucking the worthy from the unwashed. But I don’t believe that such an important job should go to the most popular kid in the class.  Didn’t we all suffer through enough of that in high school?

 

The reason that older women like Hillary Clinton is that she is one of us. She came up through the ranks and, thanks to the shortsightedness of the early feminists, had to do it all whether she wanted to or not. Be the mom. Work the full-time job. Do it better and faster and without a net. And for all that, still be dismissed as just a woman, or wife or daughter or sister.  Somehow in the wake of the Obama tsunami, it’s been lost that a woman being elected president is just as great a victory for civil rights as an Obama win would be. It would be an equal stomping of the White Male American way of thinking and doing. More, in a way, because women are still the near daily victims of the rampant and ugly sexism that dominates not just America but the world.

 

Women in the U.S., it could be/is argued, are on equal footing with men, but we are granted only the superficial freedoms. They keep so many of us – younger women especially – blind and mollified that it might be better if American men were as open with their disregard and contempt for us as men are in other less “enlightened” places in the world.  At least then we would know for sure and be able to point it out. That’s Obama’s advantage over Clinton in this race. Racism can’t hide but sexism in the West is subtle and so easily denied that women have begun to doubt its existence. Pay no attention to that old man behind the curtain, little ladies. Just listen to what the big head is telling you the truth is.

 

And the truth is that it is no more a black man’s turn at the White House than it is a woman’s. 

Shopping in Edmonton, Alberta


Shopping in Canada is almost an oxymoron. Though I am months past my American consumerism cold-turkey stint, I still am sometimes caught off guard by what Canadians call “shopping”. Take today for example, we ran down to South Edmonton Common which is an area on the south side of the city that is and continues to be consumed by big box outlets. Between the road layout and the parking the area is nearly as bad a driving experience as Yellowhead during rush hour, but the truly maddening part about going there to shop is that there is little in merchandise to actually buy. Clothing stores in particular seem to suffer from empty shelf syndrome. Do you remember the Reagan Era news reports of Russians lining up for hours to get into stores with virtually nothing on their shelves to purchase? That is almost what a person finds in many of the more popular clothing stores here. The other thing a shopper discovers is that in addition to the dearth of consumer goods there is an almost equally chilling lack of service. I wonder what the growing hordes of jobless Americans would make of Alberta with its “help us please – come in and apply of job!” signs in nearly every retail and service establishment window? There might be a flood of legal U.S. citizens willing to risk deportation for a job north of their own border, eh? I popped in to Old Navy today to check out a few items I saw in their most recent advertisement. It was no real surprise to find that the items were mostly sold out or sold to the point of only the uber-large or the insanely small left. And there were lines. Lines that snaked around the interior of the store for the fitting room and again at the check-out registers. Standing in queue is one of those unique experiences I have come to expect as the norm up here. A combination of really sincere but inept help and employees who know they can do nothing awful enough to get fired in such a workers market. After a frustrating half-hour, I decided to put shopping on hold until I vacation to the States in a few weeks. Between the three of us, we are allowed about $2100 in duty free spending down there and with the Loonie doing so well against the ever-sagging U.S. dollar, I think I will take advantage of the discount and the much better service and selection in my old consumer heaven home. Last I read, retail was way down so there has to be merchandise and sales galore for an ex-pat like me to scoop up and bring home at the end of the month. Oddly though, on my last trip to the States, I didn’t find shopping as much fun as I had when I lived there. Perhaps “fun” is not the word. I didn’t find it interesting and indeed found that I had much better things to do with my time even though so much of life down there seems built around spending and acquiring. I guess I needed to get away from it to really see it. Empty people filling empty lives with stuff. 

The One with IKEA


Des Moines was deemed too small and insignificant the consumer-fest that is the great IKEA. Although I confess to a love of wandering Pottery Barn, aside from the play kitchen I gave Katy for Christmas (because it was on sale), I really was too intimidated, and at the time too poor, to make any big purchases. Will was the one who loved dish-ware and cookware and dreamed of the perfectly outfitted home. Well, kitchen and patio anyway. And, I find it a tad insulting to be told by an entity, that basically sees me as a cash cow, how to decorate my own home. Those catalog layouts of living rooms and kitchens and scary clean children’s bedrooms are like the pictures of hairstyles that women take to their stylists. They look good on paper, but not on your own head. I have never seen a living room that looks like the display or the photo from Better Homes and Gardens unless the home’s occupants paid someone to do the decorating for them (and then paid someone else to keep it clean and tidy as well).

Phoebe: That fan kinda looks like ours. And the birdcage and the…wait a sec! This is our exact living room!

Rachel: No! No! No! No it’s not! No it’s not! Come on! Phoebe, ours is totally different! I mean we don’t have the… (Looks desperately for something different.) We don’t have the…that lamp! And-and that screen is y’know, on the other side.

Phoebe: Oh my God. This is where you got all our stuff, Pottery Barn! Oh my God!

Rachel: Okay! Okay-okay look—no I did, I just wanted this stuff and I know how you feel about Pottery Barn. Just… Come on don’t be mad.

Phoebe: No-no-no, but I am mad! I am mad! Because this stuff is everything that is wrong with the world! And it’s all sitting up in my living room and all I can think about is how I don’t have that lamp!

* Season Six of Friends: The One with the Apothecary Table

There comes a time in everyone’s life when furniture is needed and in our case it was a desk for Katy, cd/dvd storage and a bookcase. And thus began my introduction to home interior conformity on the grandest of all scales: IKEA.

The IKEA store is located in South Edmonton Common which is an outdoor mall so poorly designed for traffic that walking from store to store is impossible. The IKEA building itself is mammoth. There is a restaurant and a child-minding area on site. The top level consists of display after display of rooms laid out on a track complete with arrows on the floor and “street signs”. There is even a map with places to write down your selections for easy location once you reach the warehouse at the end of your visit. They even supply you with a pencil, and I think that the fact that it doesn’t have an eraser is no accident.

Deer in the headlights is my initial reaction. There was just too much to look at and I was glad that I took the time to locate what we needed on the company’s website before we went. My second reaction was want. I wanted the perfect kitchen and the storage options had me drooling for the day when we have a walk-in closet to put those lovely shelves and sliding drawers. My third reaction is disgust with myself. How can I hope to simplify my life if I am lusting after granite countertops (Will you settle for Corian, my husband asks, with an under-hung sink?) and a walk-in closet that could double as a small bedroom (or even a whole house in some places in this world). With horror I realize that I could easily become an IKEA slut.

We escaped though with only those items we came for (and okay a bag of multi-colored clasps for sealing opened bags of food – damn that perfect product placement) and so my virtue is intact for another day. Dodging the consumerism bullet requires full-time vigilance however. It is easy to slip into the mindset upon which mindless shopping is based. Want as opposed to need. Too easy by far and the people at IKEA know this.