A political dilemma of global proportions confronts me. No it doesn’t, you will say. But the personal is political, and so is Nordstrom boycott-shopping. This may be my only chance to have even the tiniest effect on the calamity that is the Trump Administration. Hear my tale.

My clothes dryer lost its heat so I set the load to 56 minutes of Icy Blast and ran it three times in a row. This sort of works, by the way, but it’s not sustainable. The repairman opened it up and revealed what it looked like internally: a burned-out knee-high grey ball of lint.

He said he could either fix it for $400 or reseal the huge fur-lined maw for $90. Apparently, you are supposed to pay someone to inspect your washer-dryer every five years. Like that is going to happen.

In the end, he closed it up — this was a bad idea as I suffer from night terrors — and I chose to buy a new one because it comes with a $400 discount, if you do the math my way.

That’s when my problem began enlarging. I would normally take the subway to the Bay, buy the item and have it delivered, possibly to live in the cardboard box it came in if Trump really messes things up. I have no interest in home appliances. Just do your job and call it a day, you thing.

But Trump then tweeted an attack on Nordstrom for having dropped his daughter Ivanka’s clothing line, which is an emoluments crime right there. Then civilized people called it a moral crime to not shop at Nordstrom. That’s two full crimes.

When Trump says not to, of course I will. If that makes me a fearless fighter for freedom, so be it.

But Toronto’s Nordstrom, which basically sells birthday gifts, doesn’t sell washer-dryers. Who sells them? Hudson’s Bay. But the Bay also sells Ivanka Trump apparel and is under Canadian #GrabYourWallet public pressure to stop.

I cannot fathom why they sell Ivanka’s line. It’s tragic.

The shoes are fine if you don’t like feet. The dresses are bagged-out sheaths that say, “You didn’t see me.” They look like condoms that don’t fit, like body bags in beige and grey. There’s one that used to be called flesh-toned before the racism got noticed. Honestly, it’s the colour of pus.

Then there’s Ivanka’s version of tea dresses, striped when they should be floral. You know who wore tea dresses? Eva Braun. Designers have been trying to rescue the tea dress ever since but no one fails like Ivanka.

Everything fits on a mannequin but not these. Club Monaco pins its clothes at the back to make them fit — I boycott it because it’s owned by Ralph Lauren who did Melania’s Inauguration dress — but the Bay person with pins clearly lost the will to live, a bridge too far, etc.

I took photos as the Bay staff laughed. I like the Bay.

“I’m going to just give it a free commercial here: go buy it today, everybody,” Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said of these dreary garments. “I own some of it.”

I bet you do, Kellyanne. She sounded like Rudy Giuliani after Sept. 11, telling Americans to get out there and shop, which is as depraved as those people clamouring to watch Superbowl ads. Consumers are slaves.

Not me. Do I wait for the Bay to do the decent thing and drop the Ivanka line? Or do I make a major purchase that damages a full-bore With Pulp Trump boycott?

I could go to Home Depot. Its co-founder offered a Trump endorsement but to be fair, he left the company in 2002.

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By the way, all these stores are American-owned, so there’s no Canadian nationalist angle except for Shopify for the discerning white supremacist.

Poor L.L. Bean seems to have got stuck in the middle because Trump got his Beans mixed up. I would boycott NewBalance — “the official shoes of white people,” neo-Nazis say — but who am I kidding, I don’t wear sneakers.

Trump loves and hates corporations, but never on a factual basis. When he makes it public on Twitter, the stock market no longer reacts the way it once did. Companies now assemble Twitter factoids about long-done deals in order to present them as new, should Trump attack them. I respect that, as I respect boycotts.

Boycotting used to be easy. After considering German history and then Chancellor Angela Merkel’s attempt at redress by accepting refugees, I finally bought a Miele dishwasher.

But I had been hypocritically buying their vacuum cleaners for years. Miele’s vacuums are best in show. If I had only thought to stick their crevice nozzle into my dryer vent, I’d be home-free.

So I could safely buy Miele washer-dryers but their shop is a long drive for a person with no moral backbone.

At this point, I shall hang wet laundry on the deck the way I do in the summer. In the icy wind they will form stiff shapes, like a Joseph Beuys felt suit sculpture, and the raccoons will befoul them at 3 a.m.

My artful Saturday plan is this. 1. Buy gift for Syrian refugees at Nordstrom. 2. Motor over the Bay’s priciest washer-dryers online and pointedly not click on Purchase, thus raising the alarm. 3. Buy washer-dryer at an echoing Home Depot in East York.

Do I overthink? Very well, I overthink. Hurry up, Hudson’s Bay. Do the right thing.

hmallick@thestar.ca

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