Christmas Shopping for Mayor Riordan

“Can you believe this junk?”

Actually, I could, but you don’t cross Deputy Mayor Barbie when she’s in one of her moods. Her lips never move, her baby blues never blink, but she never fails to communicate. This time, fortunately, amusement tempered her anger.

Braving holiday crowds and possible bomb threats, we had entered the Glendale Galleria seeking a Christmas gift for Barbie’s boss, Mayor Riordan. Hizzoner, before he became Hizzoner, was a wheeler-dealer who helped save Mattel Inc. from bankruptcy. That’s when Riordan met Barbie, and now she’s his deputy mayor for damage control.

Barbie didn’t really need my help. When Riordan presented newly minted Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky with Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” everyone agreed it was the perfect gift. In fact, it was Barbie’s idea.

So we trolled the bookstores, searching for the right book for a multimillionaire who already has about 40,000 volumes in his personal library. Barbie nearly bought Peter F. Drucker’s “The Effective Executive” before deciding her boss might be offended.

It was then that Barbie discovered “this junk”--an entire shelf devoted to Barbiedom. There were no fewer than eight different titles. The deputy mayor opened “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll” and mockingly read the book jacket blurb aloud.

“Controversial cultural critic and investigative journalist M.G. Lord, herself a first-generation Barbie owner, positions the doll as an international marketing phenomenon, an early model of female independence, and . . . “

Barbie stopped and laughed. “Get this,” she said before reading on: “. . . and a Space Age recasting of a Neolithic fertility icon that empowers little girls through its links to a matriarchal, pre-Christian tradition.”

I love it when she talks dirty.

*

Barbie loves clothes, but she doesn’t buy into the Neolithic mumbo jumbo. That’s part of her charm. But the amount of Big Think devoted to Barbie all but proves she is history’s most influential doll, perhaps its most influential toy. Today, many of the girls who loved to play with Barbie have grown into women who love to loathe her.

We all know the story: A naive generation seized upon blond, bosomy, leggy Barbie as the feminine ideal. Times change, and feminists saw in Barbie a double agent from the patriarchy, an insidious tool that would brainwash little girls into a life of bimbosity.

She defended herself by pursuing dozens of careers; Marine Corps Barbie could kick the tar out of G.I. Joe. Yet pundits like Ellen Goodman and Anna Quindlen used Barbie as a verbal voodoo doll, blaming her for everything from eating disorders to girls who flunk math.

This is not without reason. For the most part, Lord defends Barbie against the usual barbs. Then again, on Page 189 of “Forever Barbie,” it’s duly noted that in 1992 a Talking Barbie infamously uttered the sentence: “Math class is tough.” What’s more, Lord adds, “Barbie had the voice of a Valley Girl, placing her socially somewhere between lower middle-class and high prole.” Fer shur!

The Barbie I know seldom indulges in Val-speak. “Gag me with a dialectic,” she deadpanned, browsing through more of the Barbie canon.

There was “Mondo Barbie,” “The Story of Barbie,” “The Art of Barbie” and “The Wonder of Barbie Doll Accessories.” She was lingering over “Barbie Fashions Volume I” when a thought occurred to me.

“The problem with buying the mayor a book is that there’s a good chance he already owns it,” I said. “But I bet he doesn’t have any Barbie books.”

She looked at me like I was a mess left by one of Riordan’s little yorkies. (Last year, Barbie got the mayor a pooper-scooper--and expensed it as “damage control.”)

“I hate these books!” she declared. “I’d get him ‘The Bell Curve’ before I’d buy him one of these!”

Strong words, but Barbie had a point. Few things could be worse than for Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas to walk into the mayor’s office and catch Riordan reading “The Bell Curve.” One possible exception would be for Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg to catch him engrossed in “Forever Barbie.”

*

“Hey,” I said, “here’s Bill Bennett’s ‘Book of Virtues.’ If your boss had read this, maybe he would have come out against Proposition 187, just like Bennett. Maybe he wouldn’t have been silent. Maybe he wouldn’t have been such a Ken doll, if you know what I mean.”

“Ho ho ho,” Deputy Mayor Barbie said. “Allow me to quote the words of Clarence Thomas and Marion Barry: Get over it. “

There’s no arguing with Barbie. Soon she was distracted. “Maybe I’ll just get him a bottle of Glenfiddich.”

Deputy Mayor Barbie gazed back at the Barbie section. “All those books, getting it all wrong,” she mused. “I wonder what Random House would bid for my diary.”