Westminster Dog Show

“Best in Show,” which is one of the funniest movie spoofs ever made, really doesn’t do justice to the absurdity and pathos of the Westminster Dog Show. The contrast between beautiful dogs (we’ll talk about the distastefully groomed and ugly ones later) and their handlers is almost too much to take. Do you ever notice the women handlers’ shoes? They sparkle. Remember those flats we wore to high school in the sixties, with our matching lime green and pink sweater and skirt outfits? Well, most of them wear flats like that but they actually sparkle. Usually they’re black, but in this year’s show one handler was actually wearing silver ones. Is there a dress code for women handlers that for some reason says that to run around the floor of Madison Square Garden with a dog on a leash you have to wear the ugliest shoes ever made?

Are they also required to wear these weird suits that have little flairs at the waist over tight skirts that show off their bottoms? And a lot of the bottoms are of ample proportions in the Westminster Dog Show, as well as bosoms, which when their owners run around the floor with their dogs do a lot of jiggling. To be fair, there are plenty of heavy-bottomed men handlers at the show as well, but their bulk is more discreetly hidden in your typical street suit (although one guy this year wore a tuxedo!). I didn’t see one handler who looked like that cute little Parker Posey from “Best in Show.”

But enough about the handlers. The huskies and terriers and St. Bernards and spaniels are all beautiful, of course: pampered, indulged, and treated like children rather than dogs, but still beautiful. Even the standard poodle, before grooming, is kind of cute. But what they do to the poor poodle — this year’s Westminster finalist was black, the one in Best of Show is white — is beyond the pale. First they shave all the hair off its skinny little legs except for these puffballs at the ankles. Then they attack the poor dog’s rump with the clippers until the only hair left on its body is around the ruff. Then they shave the dog’s face, where any semblance of its embarrassment could be hidden, and tease it’s topknot into a beehive. Finally, they produce a puffball at the end of its tail, and voila, you have the ugliest, most humiliatingly desecrated creature one could ever create. I don’t have the heart to do the research to find out who started this hideous practice, but they’re all complicit, as these poor poodles seem to win more Best in Shows than just about any other breed. This year, a cute old Sussex spaniel named Tiger Woods won Best in Show. I’m not quite sure how this happened, as the woman who is the judge for the final award not only wore sparkly shoes but a sparkly dress and arrived in a limousine after being sequestered in a hotel without a TV so she couldn’t see any of the previous Best in Breed winners before she picked the Best in Show. She stood imperiously on the floor in her sparkly high heels and diamonds while little old Tiger Woods ran his little old legs like spinwheels down the length of the floor, ears flapping, to the roar of the crowd. Yeah, Tiger Woods!

Consumer Culture

Somehow the idea of intellectuals deconstructing Enlightenment values that failed to enlighten and liberate while mindlessly participating in privileged consumer culture seems absurd. And the idea becomes more than absurd when it declares that the values that determine how I try to live my life are mere constructs based on style, not substance, that there is no rationality and truth, progress is a myth, and pluralism and heterogeneity are alternatives to mainstream, normative life. Of course, all of us who came of age during the sixties revolution of consciousness were creating and living these rejections and assumptions. But the hope was not that, in the inimical words of Terry Eagleton, “A radical assault on fixed hierarchies of value [would] merge[d] effortlessly with the revolutionary leveling of all values known as the marketplace.” In the rush to smash hierarchy, it seems the postmodernists forgot that it is necessary to smash capitalism as well.

The juxtaposition of two halves of page A12 in a recent New York Times couldn’t have been a more revealing testament to just how decadent, how obscene, really, our consumer culture has become. On the left side of the page was a Bloomingdale’s advertisement with an anorexic model decked out in a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat.” On the right side of the page was an article detailing the incursions of Sudanese Arab gunmen into Chad, where they were killing and wounding hundreds of civilians.

How do these mink coated people live with themselves? I know that money buys you protection from things you don’t want to know or think about, but they do pick up the New York Times occasionally and see page A12, don’t they? Even if wealth is equated with success, isn’t there some line over which the excesses begin to bother them, just a little? Like “dyed sheared mink double breasted coats?”

Apparently not. Maybe this blog can’t really be separated from the one on Capitalism — cultural materialism is inextricably linked to an economic analysis — but there is still some part of me that believes there must be a human, gut level connection that transcends these analyses. I know, I know, this has been wrestled with by the likes of Rousseau,Voltaire, Locke and Weil and everyone one else worth his or her salt, but there’s just something about conspicuous consumption that baffles me. One clichéd answer is that once shopping and accumulating goods becomes the focus of your life, you can never have enough because then you wouldn’t have anything to do. But why does one think that shopping and accumulating goods is fun? I hate shopping: clothes shopping, household goods shopping, even food shopping. I rarely end up with any piece of clothing I truly like, buying toilet paper is boring, and I race through the grocery store as fast as possible so I can get home as fast as possible.

Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t particularly like leaving home. Home is my life’s work, essentially. It’s where I surround myself with everything, or almost everything (I can’t make my kids stay home forever) I value. Inside my passive solar adobe house I have access to an incredible music collection (Mark is an incomparable audiophile and our record collection is comprehensive); books I’ve read once, am waiting to read, and will probably read several more times before I die; a lifetime collection of art and photos on the walls, ranging from John Wenger’s spaceship landings, Mark’s contemporary santos (Emily Dickinson, Rene Magritte), and Alan Labb’s fat-bellied men to collages of each of our children from infancy to public school; our two dogs Django and Sammy, and Mavis the cat (who also belong outside, but seem to want to stay inside as they age alongside us); and various lifelines out—telephone, satellite internet, and satellite TV. Outside I have ten acres of pasture, orchard, vegetable garden, flower gardens, casita, river frontage, and small village life, which is both colorful, comforting, and fraught with annoyances, just like any other place one decides to call home.

Why do I need to go out other than to see some of my friends occasionally, go to a movie theater to see a first-run movie instead of waiting for it to appear on DVD (although I can barely stand the commercials and booming sound in the theater), hear some live music (there’s always YouTube), or god forbid, actually have to attend a meeting to cover it for La Jicarita News, the alternative journal we publish monthly. When we first started producing the paper we were caught up in the immediacy of the battles among the Forest Service, environmentalists, and community people over access to forest resources. Those battles, at least for the communities, were largely lost, and the Forest Service barely has a budget left to mark enough trees for community firewood. The environmentalists went on to other issues like wolves and salamanders, which fortunately don’t live in northern New Mexico (it was the spotted owl that started all the ruckus in the 90s when the enviros insisted it lived in our woods). While other battles still rage, over the commodification of water and the nuclear mission at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we see that our fourteen-year newspaper run may be nearing its end. We don’t even want to attend the few meetings we’ve determined must be attended to maintain our viability.

So because I don’t go anywhere, I certainly don’t need to shop for clothes. If I happen to find a good deal on a shirt or pair of shoes at the thrift store, which I do like to cruise through for additions to my cow collection or a file cabinet for 30 years of collected papers, I make it a policy to give away a shirt or pair of shoes I already own. One of my favorite entertainments is to periodically go through my closets and cabinets and throw or give things away. With tremendous delight I watch files of battles I’ve had with the Forest Service since 1985 burn up in the wood stove. I sigh with satisfaction when I’ve depleted a closet enough to be able to push hangers from end to end to see what I actually still own.

I chose time over money. If through some fortuitous circumstance I ended up in a life with both, maybe I’d like to shop, too. But if the “me” in that life was still the “me” in this life, I would hope I knew where draw the line in the sand. And a “dyed sheared mink double breasted coat” wouldn’t even be in my cultural vocabulary.