Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Christopher Hitchens, my favourite writer of short non-fiction at the moment, has a piece in The Atlantic Monthly discussing Englishness. Despite being a fascinating topic, it gets rather dense half-way through. Not one of Hitchens' pieces, but it is at least a little autobiographical.

In an interview with Virginia Postrel, she says this:

I'm fortunate, because I'm younger than Hillary Clinton. People of her generation and earlier got the message much more strongly than I did that to be feminine—to be a real woman—you must be interested in fashion. You must suffer to be beautiful. Those ideas used to be fundamental to feminine identity. Then Hillary's generation rebelled and rejected all of that, and then, lo and behold, she wakes up and she's living in the nineties.

She goes on about Hillary and how she was the first First Lady who had to really worry about how she looked.

Then, on the subject of consumerism:

We in the United States are a hundred years beyond what we "need." You don't need an indoor bathroom. You don't need air conditioning. You don't need a lot of things that people in this country lived without before World War II, even. You don't need a car. You don't need more than a couple of outfits of clothes. In terms of something like computers, I think the objection tends to come from people who are engineers—from people who see increased power as the only reason you should buy a new computer. But somebody like me doesn't need a more powerful computer. The upside of that, from my point of view as a consumer, is that I don't need to replace my computer that often. That's a downside if you're a manufacturer. But when I do decide to replace my computer, I'm going to pay proportionately more attention to how it looks and feels, as opposed to just the raw power and memory and various other things that have traditionally characterized the latest and greatest new computer.

The genius of consumerism is the psychological conversion of wants into needs. That and built-in obsolescence.

Turns out she has a weblog.