democracy at work at jc penney

I don't usually get too involved in politics, at least not directly. Yeah, I'm opinionated as hell and I'll run my mouth like any other fool. I'll vote in almost every election but a yard sign is about as close as I get to violent revolution. Especially if whatever campaign the yard sign is hyping expects a cash contribution from me for naming rights to my front yard. Isn't it supposed to work the other way around? If it did, maybe I'd get more involved.

But we bucked the normal state of the body politic at home and Miz Susan and I took it to the streets last night. We made the slog north on Snelling Avenue to Rosedale and specifically the JC Penney store. Miz Susan had been intrigued by the new-look Sunday ad supplement last week and then this firestorm(?) of controversy boiled over after some lunatic fringe internet presence calling itself OneMillionMoms advocated a boycott against the retail giant. All because Penney's has hired Ellen DeGeneres as one of its advertising mouthpieces.

I've always loved what little I've seen of Ellen DeGeneres. She's smart and funny and self-effacing and she's got those amazing blue eyes. I have no idea how putting her on the JCP payroll is going to boost the Worthington and Stafford and Arizona Jeans brands but she's a heck of a lot more palatable than Martha Stewart. Good gracious, what were those K-Mart advertising geniuses thinking?

I'm sure that there are a bunch of people out there for whom the OneMillionMom crap resonates. But I'd guess that very few of them are card-carrying, dues-paying OMMers. And if even Bill O'Reilly is calling the Moms latter-day McCarthy-era witch hunters, these creeps are probably already slithering back to the shady areas under the rocks where they came from.

There didn't seem to be much sign of a boycott at Penney's last night unless that little miniature choo-choo train that chugged past the mall entrance to the store every once in awhile had a political significance I didn't catch. I ended up dropping 104 bucks in the men's department while Susan was running around the rest of the mall doing God alone knows what. I could have gotten along without almost any of the things I bought but I'll wear 'em and probably ask myself each time I do, "Is this is a great country or what?"

I'd thought that maybe I'd step it up a notch beyond letting my money talk. That I'd tell the clerk that I was there specifically to support Ellen's employment and to ask that he or she pass the word up the chain of command. Here was one consumer who wasn't going to be intimidated by a lame-ass call for a boycott from some shadowy group of haters. But I kept my mouth shut since the kid who waited on me had an annoying goatee and was wearing an orange bow tie which clashed terribly, even to my usually insensitive eye, with his reddish plaid shirt. Maybe there was a political significance to the outfit which I'm just not hip enough to pick up on. The mere fact that i was at JC Penney on a Saturday night in February is probably a sign that I'm not hip enough to pick up on anything at all.