Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  SEPTEMBER 14

  Identifying our own household lemon, Paul is making something like lemonade. Optimizing the upside of our private Prohibition, which he finds as misguided as the last, federal one, he has begun to brew beer at home. It’s relatively quick and extremely cheap: ingredients come to as little as $1.40 a six-pack and fancier brews cost only twice that (we allow all manner of food ingredients on our Necessities list). Paul has borrowed equipment from Charlie and his son, Nic, and collected used bottles; now the first batch, an amber ale, is burbling in a carboy in the pantry. Paul spends countless happy hours checking the vapor lock and reading a book on the “joys” of home brewing written in the Sixties. The buzz of beermaking is contagious. I’m reading the book, too, skipping the technical parts and turning straight to the hippie bacchanalian philosophy and photos of bosomy chicks giving head of the foamy variety.

  SEPTEMBER 16

  Incorrigibly, Ann sends Paul and me a CARE package of videotapes and DVDs. We immediately break outTouching the Void, about a climber who falls down a crevasse in the Andes and over the next six days—crippled, frostbitten, starving, parched, hallucinating, and given up for dead—crawls down the mountain to safety. The film puts our own deprivation in perspective.

  Still, I can’t help thinking, if only the mountaineer had had a cell phone! If only the mountain had had a cell tower! Of course, then he would have either had to seek out a more perilous feat (fighting terrorists?) or miss this opportunity to face death and change his life. And we’d be out a good movie.

  SEPTEMBER 20

  My birthday. I can’t buy myself a gift, but to be around my favorite consumer item I stop in at the Galaxy Bookshop to visit with Linda, the bookseller. I mention the news that Hardwick has received $9,500 from Homeland Security to build a six-foot-high cyclone fence around the town reservoir, with three rows of barbed wire on top. In 2003, the feds granted our police department $995 for bulletproof vests and $600 for “explosives mitigation.” Violent crimes in Hardwick that year numbered seven, mostly domestic disputes. The number of homicides was zero. As far as I know, there were no arson attacks, anthrax deliveries, or suicide bombings.

  Linda tells me a customer has suggested a way to get a piece of the disaster dividend. The Galaxy could sell those Support Our Troops yellow ribbon car magnets that are such a sensation in town. Linda’s customer said, “We can put them on our cars. Then liberals can take back patriotism.”

  Linda and I ponder the problem of how to distinguish liberal, antiwar support for our troops from the conservative, war-positive kind. The yellow ribbons already have undergone several rounds of repurposing. They were originally created to raise money for military families, but the idea was appropriated by a company that started manufacturing them in Taiwan—a kind of war profiteering that, incidentally, drove the original makers out of business. Now, the yellow ribbon brand is pretty much sewn up by the warriors. It doesn’t just mean Support Our Troops, it means Support Our President’s Invasion of Iraq.

  “You’d definitely have to put the ribbon on a Volvo,” I venture.

  “Or maybe a Subaru,” says Linda. Just about every Kerry supporter in Vermont drives a Subaru. On the other hand, not all swans are black; some Subarus are owned by non–Kerry supporters. An auxiliary sticker might help clarify the peaceful intention of the appropriated yellow sticker—perhaps one from Northern Sun: Products for Progressives, promoting random acts of kindness.

  SEPTEMBER 21

  I clean out the third and last jar of hoisin sauce. If we had a bigger refrigerator we could have stocked up and made it through the year.

  SEPTEMBER 23

  We do have a bigger closet now, and will soon have many bigger closets, which we hope will give order to our many possessions. Paul brings home $500 worth of Mill’s Pride coated particle board closet drawers, shelves, dividers, and poles from Home Depot. It’s a permissible purchase, since it’s part of the new construction.

  The closet “system” is one element of “household storage,” a manufacturing and retailing industry that is large enough to pack away everything everyone has accumulated since the Middle Jomon Dynasty. On Google, the entry “household storage” yields over 2,350,000 hits, including enterprises like the Container Store, StacksandStacks.com, and Hold Everything, all of which sell nothing but things to put things in. In addition to household storage, there’s out-of-household storage, or “self-storage,” the windowless boxes dotting the outskirts of American cities that contain, at this writing, 37,000 facilities, averaging 80 to 90 percent occupancy.

  Everyone wants someplace to put her things, whether she owns one cup and saucer or half the Russel Wright dishware in America. But household storage is not just a space, it is an attitude. Things-to-put-things-in create a pleasant paradox. They allow a person to enjoy the comfort of owning many things and also, since they place those things out of sight, the illusion that she does not own them. She may have her cake and throw it away, too.

  Bolstering this sense of owning little, household storage containers are often made of materials evoking the lives of people who actually own nothing. Last season, Hold Everything featured Bamboo Fence, a “crushed, laminated bamboo rattan” (a word of Malaysian origin). This year it’s Hapao wicker, named for a terraced rice-field district in the Philippines, woven up in side table/boxes (two sizes, $150 and $300), a desk set for paper and pens ($38 per basket), a “media box” for CDs ($84), laundry hampers, and so on. These fibers speak of grit and flintiness and thrift (hasn’t that CD box been in the family since Great Grandma homesteaded the Great Plains?). They look light and sturdy, as if you could strap the side table to your back and take up the nomadic life.

  In case you do (or even if you don’t), you can deposit whatever you’re not taking with you in a self-storage unit. These facilities preserve not only the things, but also the fantasies that inspired their purchase (say, that the owner will start hooking rugs or train for the Tour de France), as well as the fantasy that she will soon exhume the thing and pursue the fantasized activity. Generally, neither happens. As a National Public Radio reporter delicately mentioned to the renter of one such unit, “Uh, I notice you have an ab cruncher over there.”

  Modern consumer culture cannot be blamed for this hoarding. It’s old, really old. The Egyptians, believing youcould take it with you, gathered up a person’s jewelry and cutlery and her mummified cat and packed them into the pyramid, along with a chicken picnic, for the voyage to the next world.

  And then there was the nineteenth-century version, which, true to form, Thoreau condemned:

  Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects [he writes inWalden ]. As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.

  I go upstairs to find Paul reading the instructions of the Home Depot closet parts and measuring the inside of the closet. A man who has trouble acquiring new things, he nonetheless grieves to part with old ones (it’s a mystery how he got so many in the first place). Maybe his disposaphobia can be traced to his mother’s death, when he was nine. Maybe I—and Jim Merkel and, retrospectively, Thoreau—should be more tolerant. Maybe Dana, in the Voluntary Simplicity group, was right when she undertook to “make friends” with her clutter. Mortals adrift in this terrifying world, we need our things to weigh us down. When Paul is feeling insecure he says, “I want to go home and touch my stuff.”

  SEPTEMBER 26

  When an ab cruncher dies, it ends up in theGreen Mountain Trading Post, whose function is to facilitate the migration of
things from body to body, one person’s garret to another’s dust hole. Perusing the publication, I have located a promising clawfoot tub in East Northfield, so Paul and I drive the Chevy down to take a look.

  The tub is not in a garret, but it is in a dust hole, lying rusty and filthy under the falling timbers of a 150-year-old barn belonging to a couple of fourth-generation Vermonters. They want $300 for the tub and a hideous sink and toilet. Paul drives the truck through a thicket of alders and he and the man heft the tub out of the barn onto a plank, over which the three of us slide the tub into the truck bed. Paul and I can’t persuade the couple to let us leave the toilet and sink behind, so we throw them into the truck, too. On the way home, we figure we should have offered them $250 with the toilet and sink and $300 without them.

  The tub is another allowable house purchase, and recycled to boot. But the shopping is not fun. Paul and I have a spat driving back. I’m not sure I like the tub, which is narrow and has stumps instead of feet with toes and toenails. It’s an amputee clawfoot. Paul says he felt we had to buy it, having committed a three-hour round trip to viewing it. This is the rationale of someone who can stand to shop only once for any item, but now he is suggesting that we put the tub in the cellar and keep looking for another tub, at which point we can sell this one. Consumption, it is rarely noted, is a full-time job.

  We stop in Woodbury to pick up two Adirondack chairs from a filmmaker friend named Abby, which she’s left at her ex-girlfriend’s house. The chairs are rotting and their screws are falling out, but they are pretty and surprisingly comfortable, with wide flat armrests just right for holding gin-and-tonics. We load them in beside the tub.

  Back at the house, we leave the disputed tub in the truck, set up the chairs beside the pond, break out the gin (last year’s; we’re not buying tonic), and watch a pair of ducks feeding. We are gaining skills as gift receivers and losing them as shoppers.

  SEPTEMBER 27

  Now that I’ve got my tub, I can begin thinking about what color to paint the unenameled outside. This leads me to thinking about the color of the wood floor beneath it, which leads to thinking about the color of the bathroom walls and door and from there, the color of the walls outside the bathroom, and so on.

  After dinner, I take out the paint chips I have been collecting and spread them across the kitchen table. Engrossed in the pure, flat colors, grouping them in twos and threes, placing them in light and in shadow beside fabric swatches and blocks of wood, I forget global warming, the war in Iraq, the egregious George W. Bush and the only slightly less egregious John Kerry. As I make a note to bring home several cooler grays from the hardware store—Benjamin Moore alone must have a hundred—it occurs to me that I have better choices in paint than I do in presidents.

  But organizing our things in the new closets, buying a tub, and envisioning the colors of the walls are more than distractions from other anxieties, more than creative outlets or excuses to shop. They make the world manageably small, personally controllable. Hodley Red, Garrison Red, Yellow Marigold, Pale Smoke—each square of color suggests a mood, a possibility, narrates its own little story of tranquility or surprise, stability or adventure. But like charmed tarot cards, all my paint chips foretell a future that is bright, warm, and safe.

  Back in April, Ellen Willis talked with me about the consumers of the Atomic Age, fortifying their suburban garrisons with Buicks and Kelvinators against memories of devastation past and fears of devastation future. Now we are entering another age of security consumption, its salesmen in the White House and the housewares department goading on our purchases with visions of terror real and manufactured. If only we buy the right things and arrange them in the right ways, we will be immune to uncertainty and disorder. We will be ensured against loss.

  The ease with which I cozy up to the idea of security through stuff tells me I am as susceptible as the next person to its lures. But not shopping has also had a paradoxical effect. As our stockpiles of socks and sauces dwindle and the buffers between ourselves and extremity fall, I can see that Paul and I have everything we need. This makes me feel less, not more, afraid. Add to the picture of the future the kindness of our friends, so solidly demonstrated these nine months, subtract the acquisition of most new things from the budget, and the requisite thickness of the garrison shrinks considerably. Having less, I feel financially more secure this year than I have in decades.

  Meanwhile, outside the window the clarion of terror blasts, the amber alert flashes. When the terrorists come, will I be able to withdraw to my perfectly painted room, spray the perimeter with my personal canister of nanoemulsive decontaminator, and hope my AIG account is still full when the air clears?

  Our government’s all-guns, no-butter war on terror has me more scared than I’ve been since I crouched under my desk in the 1950s, preparing for the A-bomb to drop on my second-grade classroom. The president’s first post–September 11 speech sought to persuade us that a united front of shoppers would buy the safety of our homes and homeland. In my year of loitering on the margins of theagora— the market square where people go desiring products, not other people—I am coming to know that the opposite is true. There is nothing wrong with painting my walls; in these fearful times we will all want and need the prettiest of homes. But security, or the hope thereof, can be found only by walking out the door into the roilingoikos— the forum of human conflict and human exchange, of deeds not things, of politics not purchases.

  October

  Brand America

  OCTOBER 2

  Buy Your Own President! I’m doing my best. But sending money through the ether of the Internet—the point of purchase of presidents these days—is not as rewarding as spending money the old-fashioned way, whether that means dropping a buck in the papier-mâché hat, or sliding a five across the counter for a tube of mascara. Beyond a momentary flush of virtue, all you get when you type in your credit card number and click Submit is the most attenuated sense of belonging.

  Still, if participating in the election by joining MoveOn or Concerned Women for America is not as satisfying as shopping, it feels a little like using an Apple computer or wearing Nike shoes—what Merkley + Partners brand manager Douglas Atkins calls “joining a brand.” The twenty-first-century political group is not a group in the human sense. It has no voice, no flesh. There is no room to meet in, no one to meet. You send your money (or not), you get your e-mails (just like your software updates and porn-site come-ons), you “buy in” to the organization’s politics. Shopping may be “in lieu of,” as Ann says. But this kind of joining is in lieu of, too. You might say it’s in lieu of political engagement.

  What do I expect? The transformation of the American from citizen to consumer has been a long, slow process, nearly imperceptible until virtually complete. The candidate with the better commercial almost always wins, but no matter how loud, insulting, or fictive the TV spot, political advertisers have the same problem as laundry soap hawkers: getting the consumer to pay attention for thirty seconds—not to mention for a significant enough portion of the campaign season to decide which candidate to vote for.

  To entice (or scare) young people into exercising the franchise, hip-hop mogul turned apparel merchant Sean Jean (aka P. Diddy) is sponsoring an ad campaign under the slogan “Vote or Die.” The campaign says nothing about whom the target audience should vote for or why, and so far there’s little evidence that the consumer is responding positively to this simultaneously empty and hyperbolic slogan. Or maybe the kids don’t think it’s hyperbolic enough. On a “Vote or Die” poster in New York, I notice a graffitist has crossed out “or” and scribbled in “and”—“Voteand Die.” I guess that means he’s not intending to vote.

  OCTOBER 4

  I stop to chat with Karen, a South African émigrée, at Mai-Mai, her shop on Smith Street. Mai-Mai traffics in elegant serving plates woven from reused telephone wire, pull toys made of recycled tin cans, hand-painted hair-parlor placards, and other crafts bought directly from
native South African artisans and their co-ops. I adore almost everything Karen sells. Two of my favorite possessions, a beaded doll with a high African derrière and a paper-cloisonné bowl made of red and yellow sardine can labels, come from Mai-Mai.

  Although she is not an American, Karen is married to an American and has an American child. Passionately engaged in American politics, she is just as unnerved about the elections as I am. I generally stop by so we can whip up each other’s frenzies. On these occasions I also apologize for a year of no business. Karen knows about my project, and far from disappointed, she is enthusiastically supportive. If she didn’t own a boutique, she says, laughing at the contradiction, she’d stop buying, too. “Sometimes I can’t believe I am in retail,” Karen tells me today. “I feel so guilty.”

  No, no, no, I reassure her. Your store does good. You’re supporting the livelihoods of black South Africans, helping the struggling post-apartheid economy. Plus, you introduce Americans to South African culture—you’re an ambassador! I blather on like this, sounding like a World Banker.

  “No, there’s no excuse for it,” she says firmly. “I’m in retail.” It’s as if she has said, “There’s no excuse for it. I killed him.” We laugh.

  Karen and I have often talked about “socially responsible business,” some of whose boosters believe that the Body Shop and Working Assets will save the world. Most businesspeople who try to act responsibly, like Karen, are humbler about their effect. But today I’m a little worried she is feeling personally responsible for the worldnot having been saved yet. If she decides to do something more meaningful with her life, I will miss those sardine bowls.