BORN TO EXCESSORIZE

Essay by Reb L Limerick, 2019

My 1 year old sibling wears a pink onesie embroidered with the phrase “born to shop!” Trader Joe’s dresses each location as a simulacrum of ‘your local farmer’s market.’ Packaged and Distributed in Monrovia, CA. Middle school vaping is up 50% this year. This never ending cycle of nicotine addiction tastes like creme brûle. Access to excess is widening. Our plastic Costco cards slap on our keys rings. Everyone we know is in this parking lot. I’m on my tippy toes but I can’t see where the concrete ends. If every forgotten plastic credit card, gift card, and hotel key were stacked one on top of the other, they would tower 7 miles into space. Scraping the sky, but too high up to kiss the boo boo.

Do you know the story of Topsy the elephant? While forcibly entertaining crowds on Coney Island in 1903, a man fed her a lit cigarette, so she killed him. She was then publicly executed by poison, strangulation, and electrocution. Who are the accessories to Topsy’s murder and more pressing yet, was Topsy made into ivory accessories?

Excess is our most fashionable accessory. In Sex and the City, Carrie knows she can finally trust Big once he builds her an 1,000 ft2 closet for her 400+ pairs of shoes. That’s love. My friend just moved into a South Florida farm mega-mansion to care for her elderly parents, when they die, she’ll be left with the $600/month A/C bill. That’s family. I’ve moved every year for the last 10 years. I have modulated my life into boxes, bins, pods and cubes. In my most recent cross country reconfiguration, I squeezed every thing I own into a 5’ x 6’ x 7’ ReloCube TM. The night before the load-up I was an anxious wreck. Re-measuring and re-calculating and under/over-estimating my odd- shaped property, oscillating between zero faith and full confidence that everything would fit. In a Minnesota shipping container yard on a clear summer day, two friends and I organized boxes by weight, content, and shape, arranging my life into perfect balance and order. When my cube arrived in LA one week later, almost every plastic bin had cracked or downright shattered, and my clothes presented themselves to me in an unruly snarling pile. That’s life.

A peek in a dumpster or a quick Google search will inform you that somewhere between 79% and 91% of our plastics are not recycled. I’ll admit, I’m bitter about litter. Cigarette butts never biodegrade, they are the most littered item on the planet, leaching toxic chemicals into our waterways, and killing hungry fish and birds. We flick, we stomp, we walk AWAY. We use once, then we throw AWAY. But our piles are mounting, our mouths are widening, soon we’ll have to fill in the mountains with our waste. Imagine a flat Montana. Land filled with garbage. Landfill backyard. We can’t go backwards. Our demonic Vice President Mike Pence once said that Roe v. Wade will be "consigned to the trash heap of history where it belongs.”

Artist and activist Sue Coe says, “call it what it is! If I murdered him, you wouldn’t say I made him go blue. Call it what it is. It’s not ‘climate change,’ it’s planet murder.” We are all accessories to planet murder.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the mall. The place where I was taught to accessorize (shout out to Claire’s and Icing!) and shown how excess could be neatly tagged, hung and folded. One very cold Spring Break in Minneapolis I spent the day in the Mall of America. I wandered around sipping a tropical smoothie, gazing off the fourth floor vistas down at the unfilled roller coasters, grazing the birds of the paradise with an outstretched glove. During mall construction in 1992, 65 semi trucks were needed to haul 30,000 live plants and 400 trees into this climate-controlled interiority of modernity. I was petting a palm frond when two paradoxical announcements blared over the loud speakers. 1. Attention shoppers! This is an active shooter drill. Please report to your nearest store immediately for a lockdown procedure. 2. The Universe of Lights show will be starting in 15 minutes and can be best viewed from Floor 2 near the Lego store. I was torn. I continually find myself in immobilizing ethical quandaries at grocery stores and other places of commerce. There may be “no ethical consumption under capitalism,” but some choices are better than others.

Once, at a restaurant with my friend, who organizes student power around fossil fuel divestment campaigns, I anxiously posed a dilemma: if you want to take home leftovers, but did not bring your own tupperware, and see no recycling bins within walking distance, and the restaurant only has styrofoam and plastic to-go containers, which one do you ask for? They surprised me by saying that they don’t stress out about the occasional one-time-use plastic. “I worked at Gap in high school. In one shift, the store would waste more plastic than I could use in my lifetime.” Most of the news I choose to absorb is environmentally focused. A recent article reminded, "Eco- consumerism may expiate your guilt. But it’s only mass movements that have the power to alter the trajectory of the climate crisis. This requires of us first a resolute mental break from the spell cast by neoliberalism: to stop thinking like individuals.” Upon visiting Northwestern University, nestled in a wealthy white Chicago suburb, I was thrilled to find that their Art Theory and Practice MFA graduating class had broken competitive individualistic precedent to collaborate on one cohesive thesis exhibition. Can you guess the place where the content and forms of their work could all overlap? A dystopian American shopping mall.

The National mall functions as a public memorial green space for residents and tourists alike, and contributes to Washington DC’s excellent ParkScore. I recently moved to Los Angeles, a “park poor” city where the imported palm trees have reached

their life expectancy and are rapidly dying off. As I hover above my neighborhood via Google Maps, I fiendishly scan for indications of natural spaces within the urban environment. Of course, the largest green shape within walking distance is a private golf course. I navigate to an open tab, Merriam-Webster; one of the synonyms for “abundance” is “yard.” On my daily walks I admire neighbor’s “zeroscaping.” The second largest green space in my radius is the Hollywood Forever cemetery. A public yet exclusive manicured lawn adorned with movie star mausoleums. If our parks are for the dead and our streets are for the cars and our rents are skyrocketing, where are we to live? When 600,000+ Syrian refugees entered Germany seeking asylum, Germans converted an underutilized airplane hanger into a massive shelter. Imagine if the Beverly Center shopping mall was converted into a big dormitory to house our 55,000+ homeless folks here in LA.

As climate catastrophe continues to ensue, there will more and more refugees, and our systemic valuing of certain bodies over others will become even clearer. Ironically/tragically, animal agriculture is the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions and yet the animals in factory farms are the first to be forgotten when a “natural” disaster bears down. In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, I retweeted Sydney Azari “Millions of animals drowned in factory farm cages. Prisons wouldn’t evacuate. The working class & poor couldn’t afford to leave. Disasters reaffirm who is considered disposable. You can it mismanagement, priorities, bureaucracy, etc. It’s violence.” These losses of life may be less theatrical than Topsy’s execution, but climate change is a slow death penalty for the disenfranchised.

I believe in the power of language, otherwise, why would I write? It’s my theory that trump trumped because his name is trump. More so than his monstrous wealth and greed, it was the insidious power of the repetition of his name that rewired psyches. So by that logic we can dissolve gender binaries with a singular pronoun “they.” Studies show that if every American ate beans instead of beef, we could almost meet our greenhouse-gas emission goals. But maybe it starts with a shift of vocabulary? “Let’s hit the gym and bean up our biceps!” “Bean. It’s what’s for dinner.” PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) recently put out a list of alternative animal friendly idioms. Instead of “beating a dead horse,” how about we “feed a fed horse,” or instead of “killing two birds with one stone,” how about we “feed two birds with one scone.” But a slew of internet readers criticized PETA for equating anti-animal language (or, "speciesism") with racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia etc. We have a long way to go in all of these realms. I’m sure I can still walk into certain stores and buy a tank top labeled “wife beater.” It’s my view that all beings on this earth deserve respect and that calling for use of anti-oppressive language of one marginalized group is only going to improve awareness for other oppressed groups.

My baby sister is just starting to verbalize (in both Spanish and English!) She is spoiled with a crib full of interactive musical toys and yet her favorite game is ‘pillage the tupperware cabinet and bang two lids together.’ She had 15 pairs of pink shoes before she was even birthed into this world!!! “Born to shop” her onesie says. She lives in South Florida, the state guaranteed to sink first. One day she may need to evacuate and leave her birthright accessories behind. Little ones in Vietnam ride on their mother’s laps on motor scooters through the polluted populated streets. Face masks are a necessary accessory. They come in colors and patterns. Face masks for the whole family! How do we raise our kids or raise ourselves to be “extra” to “do the most” while consuming the least? How do we embrace conservation while fearing conservatism? Fun fact: 258 Statues of Liberty could lie down inside the Mall of America. You make your bed and then you lie in it. Or you just lie to yourself to rest easy at night. It isn’t easy to refrain. It isn’t easy to refrain. It isn’t easy to refrain.