Ikea and the Re-emergence of Western Europe

If you don't know what Grranimals are you are not a child born in the late 60's - early 70's... Although technically speaking you might have been born before this period and know what I am talking about, but since this would make you a selfish boomer I am simply disempowering you from being a part of this dialougue while you go out and cut down the tree you were hugging... In the late 60's... When we were born... Are you seeing the circle of life? But I digress.

Grranimals were a clothing line for kids in the late 70's - early 80's where the shirts and shorts and pants and hats and whatever it may be had a cute little cartoon animal on them. They corresponded with the same animal on another piece of clothing. So let's say you bought a shirt and it had a cute, yet wiley spotted salamander on the tag, all you had to do was find a bottom, let's say pants, with a cute, yet wiley spotted salamander on it and - BAM! - instant match. You were guaranteed to be color coordinated. It took the guesswork out of sending your kids to public school so they could be beat up by chicks in Gloria Vanderbilt jeans for wearing stupid clothes with animals. Granted, they were cute anthropomorphic animals, but for those proto-mean girls in tight jeans it didn't matter. They also didn't appreciate the irony of beating up kids while wearing jeans with embroidered swans on them. But you could rest assured that your kid would appreciate this irony as they nursed their wounds both physical and emotional because they would grow up to be ironic and probably sport grranimals in a hip, yet ironic, fashion someday.

But this is America, home to rugged individualism. The idea of a proleteriat class matching endagered species is not something a red-blooded, Jesus-promoting, old growth forest chopping, imperialist would cotton to. Which makes you wonder... Who would have foisted this upon our society? Our mostly perfect society.

I'm sure I thought about this in the moment. In the seventies. When I was a child and I was worried about these things. Or even in the eighties, when I was in high school and we were all so noble and high-minded. Because I most certainly was not obsessing over the fact that I was fat and girlfriend-less and looking like I was cruising to an institutionalized virginity like a priest but without the training. And I am sure, that this haunted my sub-conscience through the nineties as communism fell, Bill Clinton took office, the dot com bubble began its inflation and the european union started to take shape... Anyways, you get the idea. It might have bugged me had I had the time to focus on it and not other, more pressing concerns.

Which leads to Ikea. I've been to Ikea no less than 800 times. I have even been to it's anticedent Stor. Yes Stor. This is not a misspelling. There is no "e" in store and "o" had a slash through it. A nordic slash. Maybe not a swedish slash, but definitely something that adorned a viking longboat at some point. In fact, I am certain that boats festened with o's with slashes on them would send the peaceful residents of ancient Sweden... subsistence farmers really, fishing with organic nets and living a self-substanable existence... screaming to their thatched villages. "The boats with o's with slashes!" they would scream, "we must hide our unfinished pine armoirs and our women."

I think Stor originated in Denmark and was soon gobbled by it's big brother to the north, Ikea. Again another irony.

There are little known facts about Ikea. I am sure that you have heard about Ikea being started by a group of swedish expatriate swingers as a way of streamlining the interior design of their houses for their "lifestyle" parties. They figured clean lines meant clean girl-on-girl action. That story is true and a little known fact. Another little known fact is that Ikea has a mascot. That right. A mascot. A moose to be exact. I didn't know this either until I was called upon to don the colors, so to speak, of the Ikea juggernaut. One hot August day in Houston, Texas was spent dressed in a moose suit using my then ninja like reflexes to ward off pre-pubescent punches to my pelvic region as I watched the ice packs that were supposed to keep me cool instantly vaporize in the mid-day sun. Luckily I survived and that episode was lost to the haze of time.

Until last weekend. As I was wandering Ikea with a friend I was drawn to the pre-fab kitchen area. I looked at the cabinets, aptly named Kabinett or some other euro-utilitarian notion, and it all came together. It really was a moment of clarity. Like a flash. Like the realization that that's a man baby. Very profound. I am not sure why it never occured to me that a company, founded in Sweden... A country known for it's embracing of socialist values and bright, yet airy design notions... Who has a moose, which we all recognize to be an animal, as a mascot... Had mostly likely started out as a company that probably manufactured clothing only to switch to furniture.

There it was. Plain as day. Ikea, aka Grranimals, had started on a course of world domination by indoctrinating us to the idea of easily matched furniture by starting us on easily matched clothing... And that my friends is socialism. And as Europe congeals into a superstate to rival the power of the United States, we may not be wearing clothes with little cute critters on them, but our living rooms do have a lot of items with names that have Umlauts, and that does not include your Motley Crue albums. And that is how it starts, like the Soviets using commercial flights to invade the US in the ABC mini-series Amerika, the socialist Swedes had used our propensity to consume against us and now we are suddenly primed to accept central planning and socialized medicine. And as I thought about this with my arms loaded with cool picture frames, I realized that maybe I should think a little less about me and a little more about America. So I took one of those frames back and with money in hand, I went home to squirrel it away for my promised health care savings account... So that we could save out health care system and offer care to everyone... Like those dastardly Euros.

And that Irony was not lost on me... and that is what I learned today.