At the very mention of Lululemon, my spell-check had a myocardial (which is better than urocardial) infarction.
It refers, in case you missed your last Yoga class, to the Canadian company Lululemon Athletica, a recent darling of post-spandex stretchable anti-toxin stress relief aficionados — and thus of Wall Street, as Lululemon sales topped $150 million.
Latest craze is the company’s VitaSea line of garments made with seaweed fiber which, on contact with moisture – and you know how much moisture there is in the sea — is said to release antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, hydrating and detoxifying natural chemicals.
As Billy Batson used to say, Holy Moley!
Even if it were all true, it turns out there isn’t any seaweed fiber in the fabric. The New York Times sent samples out for testing by two independent laboratories, neither of which could find any difference (except for a 300% price increase) between VitaSea fabric and ordinary cotton T-shirts.
That was published Wednesday, a day after Keith Olbermann reported that the war in Iraq, which the Bush Administration says has cost $800 billion dollars, has actually cost twice that — $1.6 TRILLION and still counting. That’s $20,000 per American family. It’s more than the oil industry paid to buy the government, and we never got the proceeds from that sale anyway. The Bushies ate it.
There was a saying when I was growing up: you get what you pay for. If an $80 T-shirt will keep you free of bacteria and toxins, well maybe it’s worth it. And if a 1,600 billion dollar war will keep you safe from terrorists, maybe it’s worth all the lies and deaths and the bankrupting of America.
Unless the truth is that there’s no seaweed in VitaSea and no anti-terrorism in the Iraq war. In the Bush/Cheney political and corporate ethos of 2007, they spend all our money and our children’s money and their children’s money and still leave us completely vulnerable to toxins and bacteria and terrorists — and eavesdroppers and exploding balloon payments and Katrina and corruption and disastrous shrinkage in healthcare and civil liberties and our good name in the world at large.
Then there’s the 36,000 young Americans killed or seriously wounded in Iraq.
You get what you pay for? No, but I’d be willing to give up even that golden rule if we could revert to another old standby – and Bush/Cheney & Co. would get exactly what they deserve.
Cross posted from The Horse You Rode In On