Shopping

Is it me, or does shopping in your average American grocery store make you suicidal? Was it the depressing rock love ballads playing, or maybe all the colorful packaging leading the mind in a hundred different directions? There are 20 different kinds of rice, what am I supposed to do? People are having riots over food shortages throughout the world, and here in Aspen I’m troubled over which rice to choose, while people are dying for just rice. I just bought four different types of chocolate from a few different third world countries. I’m eating their chocolate. America: the beautiful, the war mongering, and well-fed dieters to boot. We are having a plastic bag competition with Telluride. Who can use less plastic bags to save the world?!! Are you kidding? Isolated in our little mountain town, with mansions popping up on the hills like spring flowers blooming, with enough light sweet crude to keep the private jet running, we are oh so responsible and environmentally friendly with our cute little hemp tote bags, with which to carry imported brie cheese, and a few bottles of water from Fiji, in case we get thirsty on the way to yoga class. Will they open Aspen Mountain over the Food and Wine festival weekend? I sure hope so, cause like Duh, we need a reminder that after the winter of 2008 we can all be sure this whole Global Warming thing is really a hoax. It snowed in Baghdad after all, for the first time in a long time, but the Iraqi people might not have noticed, distracted as they are with all the pretty soldiers we’ve been powdering them with the last 5 years. The media is currently in the midst of it’s biggest lull in its reporting of the war. We can ignore our guilt now, amidst this huge year of natural disasters. I mean you can’t blame the earthquake in China, or the Cyclone in Myanmar, on America? Or can you? We’ve pumped more carbon into the atmosphere than any other group of people over the last hundred years. It’s been the American Way. It’s built up our American Dream. Then of course, there’s the coming down, and carbon emissions don’t cause earthquakes as far as we know. Speaking of natural disasters, has anyone heard of Hillary Clinton? A total lack of faith in her ability to lead, or win, is not sexism, it’s realism. Now there is talk of what a powerhouse team her and Obama would be if she ran as his Vice Presidential candidate. That rumor may have been started by Karl Rove, another criminal adopted by Fox News, sharing his fair and balanced commentary with us on a weekly basis. Great. Barack Obama has his work cut out for him trying to pull this country together behind the first black Presidential candidate in one of the last countries on earth that outlawed slavery. But let’s be honest, we did that before we gave women the right to vote. People ask which is more pervasive, racism or sexism. Let’s consider. Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus, right? Is the sky blue, or is this still a patriarchy we are living in? Misogyny, the word has been thrown about like a flaccid football this political season. The hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women is still just as American as apple pie. It was only a few hundred years ago that our forefathers were burning women at the stake, for nothing more than being accused of witchcraft, of dancing with the devil. Men, rulers of worldwide hegemonic patriarchies crossing cultures and continents since we made God a man, have been the greatest devils, and women have suffered our sins, and loved us even as we oppress them unceasingly. American women are broadly oppressed today, through their objectification. Women seem to do a great job hating themselves nowadays, as they kill themselves with eating disorders trying to look the way our culture tells them they should. Patriarchy gives names to women like Hillary Clinton, women who stand up to men, who do not sexualize themselves and submit to the status quo. Hillary should be applauded for being the tuff woman that she is, but that does not make her a good presidential candidate. Hillary has taken on masculinity like a woman whose husband has been cheating on her for the entirety of their marriage. She comes off like a big, crazy, power hungry man in a blond wig and a pantsuit. Giuliani could probably do a great impression of Hillary if he tried out a nice yellow pantsuit and a blond wig the next time he goes for drag. Hillary is not a terrible candidate because she is a woman, she is a terrible candidate because she is Hillary Clinton. The Democratic party has a debt to pay her and she does not seem too concerned with anything other than cashing in on the rest of the political capital she earned by staying with her philandering husband like a good little girl through Monicagate. Hillary Clinton is a great Presidential candidate for those who want today’s democracy, where the well being of the many is sold for the profit and benefit of the few, to continue at its wonderful capitalist clip. When it comes to the characteristics of many of the worst presidents in our history, like our current one, she has what it takes: a lack of honesty, integrity, and a willingness to say anything to get into pole position. I’m going to shove another huge bunch of plastic bags under the sink and continue to insist on my American innocence.