Owing to the fact that my normal five o’clock shadow had of late begun to appear around noon, three weeks ago I bought a new safety razor, a Schick, with a red handle, called, in good pseudo-macho manner, the Protector. This may not at first seem significant, but my buying a Schick razor marks a political Rubicon I have taken a very long time to cross. Twenty years ago I would never have bought a Schick razor, or a Schick anything else — no careful political shopper with even a lingering shred of liberalism would.
Political shopping involves boycotting those products whose owners have politics opposed to one’s own and are thus, ipso facto, injurious to the common weal. Robert Welch, owner years ago of a candy company, was a major figure in the strongly right-wing organization known as the John Birch Society, and this required my taking a pass on all Welch products, which I did. Other products were similarly taboo. I don’t recall exactly what Schick’s political connection was, but it was generally agreed that he, too, was dangerously on the right, which for those of us then on the left meant on the wrong, side of things, and so verboten.
Today a political shopper is more often exposed to the products of the left than those of the right. The politics of the hippie generation of the 1960s always tended toward retailing — and now, through retailing, they have arrived, in a smashing big way. One sees it in all the New Age products, in the outdoor-clothing madness, in the Holistic medicine vitamin-and-herbal biz, in the healthy-eating gastronomic putsch.
Hippie living at upper-bourgeois prices has infiltrated the quotidian life of the so-called educated classes. It’s the way we live now. If you don’t like it, there’s nothing for it but to take the hemlock, perhaps nicely chopped in a salad of arugula, watercress, cilantro, basil, maybe just a touch of tarragon, lightly dressed with balsamic vinegar and canola oil, and commit low-cal, no saturated fat, absolutely cholesterol-free suicide.
A part from the hemlock, all the ingredients for this salad and many more are available in a supermarket that opened across from our apartment a year or so ago. I go into it regularly, even brandish a card at the check-out that allows me a 10 percent discount on items from the frozen food and dairy sections. I pass on the grains and on the vegetable cocktail bar, also on the trout jerky and sprouts, and instead buy granny Smith apples (never organic ones — that organic stuff will kill you), milk, cereal, flavored yogurt, treating the place as if it were a convenience store.
Even though I have been there hundreds of times, each time I enter I feel myself a tourist — but on another planet. One enters at the produce section, yet the fauna is much more striking than the flora. Among the customers, pallid desiccation seems the dominant look, causing me to think of the joke about the new anorexic restaurant that’s opened in town — the one that’s closed twenty-four hours a day. Many mangy male gray ponytails are in evidence; the women seem to favor hats that have what I think of as Laplander chic. One day I saw a woman there wearing a lush mink coat. I told her to depart the premises promptly before they killed her.
Most people are eager for longevity, but these people, I feel, go in for it a good bit more ardently than the rest of us. I judge this by the intensity that they bring to their shopping; it is an intensity that precludes even perfunctory good manners: excuse me; thank you; no, please, you go ahead — this sort of thing goes unanswered here. Men pick out their green beans one at a time. The herbal section draws big crowds. Massage is offered on the premises. No one smiles. This is a serious place.
So serious that, at the check-out portals, there is no National Enquirer, no Star or Globe, but instead Mothering, Mother Earth News, Mother Jones, Organic Gardening, Yoga Journal, Veggie Life, Herb Quarterly, Natural Cat, Sage Woman, and Out!. Many of the checkers are refugees from that strange country, the Sixties, or the sons and daughters of refugees. Not a few nose rings, flowing manes, dreadlocks among the employees, a high proportion of whom, I note from their standing out behind the store in coldest winter, smoke cigarettes. The other day I saw one of the checkers, a chubby young woman in her twenties, walking away from the store eating what looked suspiciously like a Twinkie. My heart warmed. Go for it, kid!
Meanwhile, my right-wing Schick razor seems to have pushed my five-o’clock shadow two or three hours forward, so that now I don’t seem to need a second shave until two or three in the afternoon. As for what caused my beard suddenly to grow more quickly, your guess is as good as mine. Do you suppose it’s the yogurt?
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
