Trying Deprivation

Each fall, in order to be supportive of my granddaughter and her Girl Scout troop, I subscribe to two or three magazines that I otherwise wouldn’t subscribe to. Nothing against them, per se, but just that I find that The New Yorker and Harper’s pretty much serve all my needs. Last year, it was The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, and The American Prospect. This year it is Foreign Affairs and Mother Jones. I like the idea that the Girl Scouts are getting a cut out of making these available to me, although they would also make available to me things like Oprah! (if that’s what it’s named), The Journal of Nascar Racing, or Neocon Projects, and such like. They are not in the business of pushing left-ish magazines (although that may be a basic misrepresentation of The Atlantic, with the exception of James Fallows’ work).

In any case, I sat down today to work on my several issues of Mother Jones, largely because I have a cold and have only about one cup of energy to do anything that requires me to stand up. When that cup’s worth is used up, I’m back on the couch under my quilt, restoring the cup by reading from the stack of magazines. It’s like some kind of personal exercise in sustainable power and neutral carbon footprints which, as it happens, is largely the topic of this magazine I am reading. Another thing about this issue of Mother Jones is that here, Obama has not yet been elected. I keep wanting to write a quick email to tell the writers how it all came out.

The third thing that Mother Jones has provided me today is an article about a national trend in writing and personal-choice-deprivation. Who knew? It works, apparently, like this: You decide to give up something (coffee, plastic, things made in China, buying expensive clothes, shopping at The Gap or Starbucks, going out to dinner) for a year, and then you get a book contract to write about what it was like and what it means to you and, presumably, to the rest of us. Like the prior trend of tiresome memoirs, I doubt seriously that it means much of anything to the rest of us, but according to the reviewer of these books, it doesn’t mean much to the writers, either. They find it hard to live without plastic (one piece of advice, apparently, is to have a vasectomy because children are the main target of plastic objects), or buy only things made in America. They even find it impossible to do so. So after a month or a year, they’re back to their prior lives, and in need of yet another book contract.

I’m happy to know that this is what is occupying our dizzy American minds these days as we march right up to the point where global warming is not just a possibility but an unstoppable deal. And I’m sure the discipline and focus learned by such an experiment might be useful in some actual life project. And it’s even conceivable that this is the economic development that Point Roberts has been looking for. Certainly there are lots of things that we are naturally situated to do without for a year (or even more) at a stretch (sewers, sidewalks, street lights, book stores, The Gap, Starbucks, movie theaters, etc.). And we're mostly literate, I'd guess.

In a contrarian spirit, I’ve decided to spend the next year adding to, not subtracting from my life: I will have a blooming flower in my house every day. It can be the same blooming flower for more than one day at a time; it can come from the yard or from a commercial source: it just has to be in bloom; it has to be real. This one came from the grocery store. But it’s just the same as the ones that are coming in 6 weeks or so from my yard. I doubt if I’ll learn much from this, but I’ll have the pleasure of the company of a flower every day. Didn’t The Little Prince have a flower? Alas and alack, the book has already been written.