Jerks on a Shopping Spree II
A Random Walk Through the Mall
The adventure begins as you drive into the parking lot. In the many states where traffic laws do not extend to private property, the lot should have a large sign: Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Malls are private property, and when some cowboy pulls out of a parking place and zooming up to forty runs into your car, he has probably broken no law. Even though his rampage may be caught on the mall's video system, the management can choose not to share the tape. The thousands of dollars worth of damage he has inflicted on your car will have to be paid for by your own insurance, which may not, depending on the type of policy you have, cover your hospital bills. This is caveat emptor with a vengeance.
Some estimates put parking lot crashes at one fifth of all accidents, but since so many of these accidents go unreported—in some places the police will not even take down the information—the figures may be higher.[i] Supposing you are lucky enough to avoid an accident, you still have a gauntlet to run: the situation is created by an obese shopper who doesn't not want risk losing an ounce of hard-earned fat by walking a few yards from a parking spot and has to be dropped off right in front of the entrance. This is a maneuver just slightly less time-consuming than docking the Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile, another shopper afraid of exercise is searching for the nearest parking spot but gets stuck behind the car unloading its immense cargo. Angry at having to wait, the lazy shopper pulls out and shoots through the pedestrian lane, almost taking out a troop of Brownie Scouts. He or she then spots an old woman about to pull out and pulls up behind, breathing fire and brimstone. But the elderly driver is not going to be rushed. She has gloves—where did I leave them—to put on, keys to find, makeup to apply, and perhaps a soft drink to finish. The lazy shopper, so focused in his hate for the old lady, is oblivious to the traffic jam that is building up behind him.
You find a parking place but by the time you get to the door, the obese shopper has only just got into a rascal and managed to block the door. You hold it open and wait, and receive a glower instead of a thank-you. Now you are in at last, and what a spectacle of Hell. If you are fond of Dante—and anyone going to the mall should prepare by reading his Inferno—you think immediately of his lines—"So many. I had not thought that death had undone so many." Most people at the mall are, in fact, civil and well-behaved, but these poor souls are sunk into the mass of the damned prowling the corridors in search of junk to fill the emptiness left by broken relationships. The ones who stand out are all doing something to attract attention. There is the Asian youth who insists on doing some kind of gymnastic dance to attract attention; a little ways on you see a man painting his face with women's make-up. There is something very disturbing about his appearance, and you would not be comforted to learn he is fondling a very large knife in his pocket.[ii] A gang of teenagers runs by, laughing and screaming as they "accidentally" push one of the kids into a quiet family.
You make your way into the electronics store where you need to buy a software package and some batteries. You cannot get to the batteries, because a scientific shopper has parked his cart in front of them and is checking out the per unit price of each and comparing it, on his iPhone, with what he can get on Amazon. Knowing that a polite, "I wonder if I just might….," will get you nowhere, you go looking for the software package. They don't have what you are looking for, so you go to the counter, where the one free clerk is talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone. The conversation is complicated and heated and concerns who dumped whom last night.
"Excuse me….," you begin shyly, and the clerk turns his back and whispers his secrets into the phone.
You clear your throat, and try a somewhat more forceful, "Excuse me, I need some help."
"I've got to call you back," he shouts, "Some impatient jerk is in a hurry." You explain what you want, but he is not listening, and makes you repeat the whole thing.
"That's not really what you want," he explains. It's outmoded. What you really need is the Crisco Systemics z62\flash. You ask if it will work on your Mac with OSX, and he rolls his eyes as if to say, "Why me? Why do I get all the feebes?"
"Of course it works," and before you can say "I'll check it out online," he has rung up the sale. Punching in the numbers, he peremptorily says, "Zip code." When you acknowledge there is such a thing as a zip code, he rolls his eyes again and demands, "Tell me your zip code." Thinking this has something to do with giving identity for a credit card or a check, you explain you're paying cash. "It doesn't matter. You have to give us your zip code, or I can't ring it up." Then you realize that it so that Radio Shack can do a marketing study that in point of fact you object to. "Look, Jack, I don't give a shit what your zip code is. Just make something up." But, when you give him your zip code, he wants your address. "You want to hear about our sales, don't you?" Actually not and you manage to win this round.
When you get it home, you discover that it is, as you suspected from the beginning, Windows only. In your haste to exit the store and the mall, you forgot to get the batteries.
Something There is that Doesn't Love a Mall
The shopping mall did not just happen: It was invented by one man. Yes, it is true, there have always been market areas and shopping districts, and it is also true that in the course of the 19th century architects, businessmen, and city planners designed new urban shopping spaces, most famously the lovely Galleria in Milan. And, while the development of new shopping centers was in part an evolutionary process that responded to social changes—urban decay, the invention of the automobile—the shopping mall was a conscious and intelligent attempt to create an alternative to a shopping world dominated by cars and bustle.
Victor Gruen is the one man most responsible for the modern mall. Viktor Grünberg, an Austrian Jewish architect, left Vienna after the Anschluss and, arriving in the United States, changed his name. Gruen was more than an architect. In Austria he had been a leading socialist, and he also ran a political cabaret that put on skits and plays. Like other leftist intellectuals, Gruen was dissatisfied with the results of the liberal capitalist revolution that had transformed Europe in the 19th century. Like Fourier and St. Simon, Gruen dreamed of simpler times when people did not rush out to buy necessities but strolled through the village, stopping to drink coffee and play chess with their friends and visiting a variety of shops. He saw the development of American suburbs as something more than the continued degradation of community; he saw the suburbs as an opportunity where the friendly atmosphere and leisurely way of life of village green and shops could be recreated.
In the early 1950's Gruen designed the open—air Northland Mall in Detroit, before going on to win fame as the designer of Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, the first fully enclosed shopping mall. Gruen originally envisioned an entire community, not just shops and restaurants but apartments, medical and educational facilities, a park with a lake. In fact, Gruen's dream was never to be realized, and the shopping mall became not a village community but a commercial facility to fulfill the consumer dreams of suburban drivers who wanted a place to park and an opportunity to buy all the things they saw advertised on television. Gruen, disappointed and disgusted, denounced the monsters he had created and returned to Vienna.
Gruen wrote many articles and books in which he sketched out his vision, but his last work was a dystopian novel, Ist Fortschritt ein Verbrechen. I am looking for a copy, but I did read, in an academic article, a brief sketch of the book in which he characterized America as "a clip-joint, where everybody is persuaded to buy what he doesn't need with money he doesn't own in order to impress people he actually can't stand." (I have also not read, though I have ordered it, Jeffrey Hardwick's biography, Mall Maker.)
It is hard not to sympathize with Victor Gruen. Like other brilliant leftists, he grasped a real problem, the decline and collapse of community and with it the disappearance of all the old verities that made for human civility. As my late friend Robert Nisbet pointed out, both in the Quest for Community and in The Sociological Tradition, the utopian left was virtually obsessed with their vision of the ancien régime, a social order based on kinship, the Church, and the Crown, whose collapse (during the French Revolution and its aftershocks) had left social ruin and anomie for the poor people condemned to live in the rubble. In the course of the 19th century, some would seek salvation in art (Wagner, Mallarmée), individualistic or political heroism (Nietzsche, Carlyle), mysticism, or communes (Fourier, Owen) or some mixture of these elements. None of it worked. Indeed, utopian experiments were breeding grounds for new waves of social, cultural, and moral insanity. Their instincts were more or less sound, but the attempt to recreate the life of the Medieval peasant, whether at Brook Farm or in a Hippie commune, was not only doomed to failure: Worse, it exacerbated the alienation and anomie and encouraged the delusion that democracy, freedom, and the markets were, after all, the only route to a happy life. If you know any ex-hippies who supported Reagan, you will know what I am talking about.
So it happened, then, that Victor Gruen's attempt to put Humpty together again, helped to further the disintegration of American society and to accelerate that process that some Marxists like to call commodification. The reality of American life today is quite simply this: If something has value, it can be bought and sold, and, while we may still sing "The best things in life are free," what we really believe is that anything that cannot be bought and sold has no value.
[i] http://www.insure.com/car-insurance/parking-lot-crashes.html
[ii] I picked these two incidents from an episode of Mall Cops, a program dedicated to the heroic activities of the police at the Mall of America.
Entries(RSS)
"Malls are private property, and when some cowboy pulls out of a parking place and zooming up to forty runs into your car, he has probably broken no law."
What does Lew Rockwell and his friends have for a solution. The private sector will always provide a solution, right?
The life of the mall and it's peculiar environment strikes a nerve with me. I really abhor these places and avoid when at all possible. My daughter works at two at an age when she should have moved on. Not surprisingly her and her husband have a season pass to Disneyworld. The Apple store, Starbucks, and Disney, I pray for them. Where did I go wrong?
One of the reasons for the growth of malls and big-box stores is that federal regulations and laws have become so complex that only large companies with hordes of lawyers, accountants, lobbyists and PR staffs can maneuver to build and run something. A small Mom and Pop store doesn't stand a chance, not just against Walmart or Kmart or Macys or Barnes & Noble, but against the federal regulators.
The Big Stores also are more adept at maneuvering around state and local laws and regulations by hiring local lawyers, lobbyists, etc. The Mom & Pops can't afford such experts.
And if the government imposes a massive fine, Walmart, etc. hardly feel it. But it could drive a Mom & Pop out of business, even get them jail time.
Great entry to the jerk series.
One other idea Dr Fleming, something I saw today: The jerk customer who tells employees serving him how to do their jobs.
@ David above, as much as I admire Lew Rockwell, although I'm no libertarian, he does allows some articles from the loony fringes of libertarianism on his site now and then. After some guy posted a laudatory piece about malls, I had several email exchanges with him about what, in my view, are the dehumanizing effects of the architecture of malls and box stores, the disruption in traffic they cause, and so on--the kind of incivility Dr. Fleming blasts, which I believe is psychologically induced by the inhuman scale, utilitarianism, and sheer ugliness.
Nikos Salingaros's Theory of Architecture has some great things to say about all this. It's short and thoroughly explodes the idea that modern, post-modern, or deconstructionist architecture has any aesthetic validity, it's pretenses to scientific justification, as well as exploring the highly negative effects such architecture unconsciously has on us. A trip to The Home Depot should be proof enough.
This libertarian guy, apparently trapped in the contradictions of his beliefs, was vicious in his defense of the ugliness, saying the convenience trumped any pathetic architectural ideals I had. That was his argument. This was one angry keyboard cowboy whose libertarianism, I'm sure, is more of a posture than reality, made possible by the anonymity of the Internet, while his empty bluster is defended by the nanny state he denounces.
Dan,
"This libertarian guy, apparently trapped in the contradictions of his beliefs, was vicious in his defense of the ugliness, saying the convenience trumped any pathetic architectural ideals I had. That was his argument. This was one angry keyboard cowboy whose libertarianism, I’m sure, is more of a posture than reality, made possible by the anonymity of the Internet, while his empty bluster is defended by the nanny state he denounces."
The Holy Spirit alone has revealed this to you. There is no cure for this current separation of freedom from virtue, body from the soul, truth from beauty, .... except in these here Chronicles.
I doubt that there is anyone commenting on this site who does not defend property rights. The issue, here, involves the line between public and private. Many states, for example, permit a landowner to drive at any speed on his own land and, I believe, to permit an underage driver to operate a vehicle. But no state permits him to commit murder or to rob and beat a nonviolent trespasser. So we cannot always do exactly as we would like on our own property. The libertarians are quite correct in wanting to reduce the size and scope of government in our lives, but they do not always appreciate the existence of communities that cannot be reduced to a random collection of individual hedonists, and, in principle, they often reject any human goal that takes precedence over personal whim. Thus beauty, goodness, virtue, and the taste of food are all subjective, and while you may like McDonald's and little boys, and I prefer my wife's fried chicken and loyalty, hey, that's what makes horse races. But this assumes that I either do not have a son or that I care nothing for him. It also assumes that in degrading yourself, you are not making yourself the carrier of moral and aesthetic diseases.
If we confine ourselves only to one human goal that libertarians do appreciate, liberty, then it should be possible, indeed, easy to show that the hedonism encouraged by consumer capitalism makes its victims servile in a moral and political sense. Look at any activity, for example, the rise of female participation in the workforce and the necessary decline in culinary skills, an increase in eating out, the transfer of child-rearing to strangers.
No one who looks at kids today, say, from the age of 6 to 25, would conclude that they enjoy more liberty than their parents or grandparents. If I am recalling correctly, a child entering school today can recognize 300 brand names with which he identifies. By the age of 8, a boy's favorite commercials are for beer, and he is consuming all sorts of violence and soft porn through TV and video games. He has no object in life but to acquire wealth (75% if teens say this) and/or celebrity (65 %), not by inventing something or mastering a skill. Wealth and celebrity are forms of mana, a magic power that visits some people but not others. Of loyalty and of the sacrifices required to maintain loyalty, he knows nothing. If he plays sports, he learns to admires the crybabies, showoffs, and cheaters who are celebrity athletes and who lack even the pretense of personal honor or integrity. Well, they won didn't they?
Such people cannot be free in any sense, and if we dissolved the government they would sell themselves to the first warlord who filled their belly or gave them women. The shopping mall, a private place that has replaced civic space, is the most vivid example I can think of to indicate how counter-productive the libertarian ideology--it is hardly a philosophy--really is. But let us not get distracted. My point in dragging in poor Victor Gruen was to show that well-intentioned leftism, like well-intentioned libertarianism, ends up subverting community and with the ruin of the community comes the ruin of character that produces the Great American Jerk.
I wish you had touched upon it more in Morality of Everyday Life (which I was fortunate enough to have been loaned), but it would be nice to see you lay out a vision of loving liberty without liberalism. I've seen too many right-thinking people say because libertarians can often be foul, liberty itself must also be foul, and thus can be discarded. I fear that is going overboard, and Id like to read a coherent vision.
I agree entirely with Daniel Maxwell on this point and over the years have written a number of essays tackling this subject, though I am not sure I ever nailed it with precision. I think I shall make it the subject of one of my Beyond the Revolution columns. There are two important aspects I have discussed: One, that by treating liberty is a natural absolute rather than as a desideratum of Western culture, liberals/libertarians have made it a transcendent goal and in so doing have turned liberty into an instrument of tyranny; and second, by refusing to consider--except for Hayek and him ineffectively--the necessary grounds for liberty, they pursue anarchic strategies that always invite a tyrannical crackdown. Rothbard and I once debated his more Simon-pure followers on the mistake of invoking higher authority--federal government or international authorities--to protect some imagined rights of local dopers or pornographers. Even in an audience half libertarian, Murray and I won hands down.
I should add that the language of natural rights is generally turned against all lower forms of social authority, the family, community, the province, and even the nation, which, once they are undermined or destroyed, expose the helpless individual to the predatory ruling class. An excellent example is the way in which the USSR destroyed extended kinship but kept up the nuclear family as a holding tank for future Communist citizens. Strong clans are far better able to resist government than a nuclear household, and even a nuclear family is stronger than an individual. In Morality--which you should by all means purchase--my primary concern was to show the counter-factual absurdity of both kinds of leftism, liberal and socialist.
A very close friend who has taught at a Libertarian school for the last twenty five years was invited to visit the Holy Grail of the Cato Institute provided he would deliver a talk on freedom. He modestly suggested that sometimes freedom is restricted by the common good.
What he discovered is two things. One is that any reference to authority, divine or human, is suspect and two (as a result of one) we conservatives just don't have much in common these days. Once upon a time most people wanted to drive slow in school zones, to bury their dead, respect their elders, mind their own business and worship God. Yet, as Marines often say about common sense becoming an uncommon virtue, the common good is becoming an uncommon consensus. Individuality, like readiness was to Hamlet, is all.
I appreciate Dr. Fleming's comments on Libertarians. I've never met one in real life but they are very prominent on the intertubes. I have no reason why, but I can speculate.
My *feeling* is that the internet tends to attract young males with a certain amount of intelligence, an affinity for science and technology and a lack of real life human contact. Everything is abstract for them, like a computer game, and accordingly they are attracted to Libertarianism. Hey, legal drugs and prostitutes and no taxes. What could better in the mind of a 25 year old computer nerd.
But forgive me for being so off-topic.
We have noted in the earlier jerks threads the ability of jerks in a mass to become murderous, such as in the case of the Wal Mart jerk mob which killed an employee by rushing through the door to get at all that wonderful cheap Chinese junk, and how they were heedless of what they had done.
Considering what Dr Fleming posted at #9 above, I would like to make a suggestion. Those liberals who first invented the notion that mankind originally existed in a 'state of nature' got it all backwards. We didn't start that way and then make contracts with each other to start cilivisation. Rather, the 'state of nature' (actually a misnomer since it's not a natural state)is not the original state of mankind, but rather the end result of liberalism itself. The violent mob is the other big result. They are actually the result of the death of civilisation. They are what happens when real society and community have been destroyed by liberalism.
Furthermore, contrary to the 'social compact' myth, civilisation will not rise again until extended families, clans, and tribes form from the atomised mass of 'individuals' and they then learn how to behave and live in community again.
I think there could be a genuine case for deliberate social engineering unintentionally leading to the existence of modern day malls. Just imagine back in 1905, several tens of thousands of Polish Jews are cramped into a single tiny area in New York - living in slums, because they find it thrifty. A municipal authority says that slums reduce to aesthetic appeal of New York, orders the slums demolished, and the existing residents to vacate and find some other place to stay. Then, later under 1960s Great Society, entire neighbourhoods are remodelled to make them more aesthetically pleasing with fewer people per square kilometer. Eventually, forced relocation and flattening of neighbourhoods across decades pushes suburban expansion further and further, until the easiest way to buy items are large malls.
Not that such a thing may have actually happened, but is a plausible speculation.
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You know, why do libertarians comprise so much discussion on the *comments* of Chronicles even when reasonable estimates have shown there to be only 200,000 libertarians in the United States?
As in, 0.06% of the American population and with no significant effect on any policy?
Neopagans, radical feminists, orthodox Marxists, or white supremacists are all equally marginal minorities, but more than one lengthy critical discussion has taken place on each one of them. Is a world of three million Wiccans flocking to elections really that close?
The one oft-brought notion is that the developments of capitalism must hold people like Messrs. Rockwell & Rothbard accountable, as if all this was their creation. Nobody by himself created capitalism. It just exists. To say capitalism is bad is to merely state that this world is bad or that people are bad - a tautology. Even if men like Rockwell never existed, some people wanting to buy junk from malls will still lead to malls existing, no?
Mr. Sanjay I'd have to disagree with you about the growth of the suburbs. In New York City, when a neighborhood was considered blighted in the 1960's, they were replaced with horrific housing projects. These building are 30 stories high and can house tens of thousands, not 3 stories high housing hundreds. The poor weren't the people who "settled" the suburbs, it was the middle class trying to escape a dying city.
The highways built by Robert Moses were far more responsible for suburban expansion. Suburban enclaves have now extended as far as the north eastern fork of Long Island, 90 miles east of Manhattan. Not because of condemned slums, but the highway.
"Their instincts were more or less sound... the delusion that democracy, freedom, and the markets were, after all, the only route to a happy life."
A few friends of mine, all in their first two years of college, believe the harder they root for republican candidates the closer we'll be to a happy land of free markets. I've tried to get them to understand the problem Victor Gruen, and most anyone who used to believe in utopian politics encountered.
One of them actually emailed me saying Mark Levine and the Tea Partiers are heroes of conservatism, and that this time, you just watch, the Republicans will fix the country! It's sad to see bright kids with good intentions waste their education on politics.
I confess I find much agreement with libertarians, especially over on the Lew Rockwell site. Dr. Fleming I believe has captured in his article and follow-on comments, however, why it is ultimately I land on the paleo-conservative side of things and not the anarcho-capitalist-libertarian one. Liberty, indeed, is not the ultimate virtue, but is rather derivative, a by-product. For us Christians, the more we are enslaved to Christ, the freer we are. This implies hierarchy, at least a delegated one from God to us.
In the American context, to divorce ourselves from the Christian underpinnings of the Declaration and the Constitution, again, places concepts like liberty as an exaggerated abstraction, good in and of itself, promising much. This is demonic. Certainly, a tyrannical authority over us is capable of all kinds of horrors, but the tyranny of our own lusts in the guise of "liberty" poses every bit as much terror from the bottom.
It looks to me that socialists and liberals as well as libertarians have profited from the momentum of virtue that our founders' original idea of responsible and ordered liberty inspired. Unfortunately, things are unraveling.
David Wright @1: "I really abhor these places and avoid when at all possible."
That is the motivation for the private mall owner to police his parking lots. He will if he thinks the jerks are driving away too much business.
The internet market place steals more business from the malls than the jerks. Here in Maryland we have passed an Amendment to our state constitution to allow slot machines in at least one of our malls. That should keep customers coming in. You should keep an eye on these developments Dr. Fleming. Bills to allow full casino gambling are sure to follow. Then you'll have a two-fer: jerks in the parking lots and jerks in gambling establishments.
Daniel Maxwell @3: "The jerk customer who tells employees serving him how to do their jobs."
Now you're hitting close to home, Mr. Maxwell. I try to avoid going to the supermarket because it is not a pleasant experience. When I do go, I usually fill my cart to the brim. Invariably at checkout, the person loading the stuff back into the cart, if left to his own devices, puts the light items in first and the heavier items on top. In addition, I'm always told that I need a second cart to get my stuff to my car. Why? I got it to the check out in one cart. I always have to pack the cart myself. If that makes me a jerk, so be it.
One line I wish to pursue in the future is the question of what one can do. I go to a small supermarket in our neighborhood many times a week, and the dear old old people--none all that old or possessed of a handicap sticker--park anywhere they like, sometimes creating dangerous situations. Years go by, and I do not complain to the manager who knows me by sight. They should either mark these dangerous spots as parking places or announce the license number of the violators over their loudspeaker.
I don't think Mr. Maxwell was referring to situations such as Andrew Van Sant is describing, but rather to people who stand over a repairman, for example, and offer expert advice. Perhaps Mr. Maxwell could give us some examples. One small annoyance is the way baggers are taught to put only a few items in a bag, making it far more difficult to carry the stuff out without a cart, which I always do.
I quite agree with David Smith's general point, but perhaps the time has gone to take a more jaundiced view of the Declaration and even of the Constitution. While I fully agree with my conservative friends who say that Jefferson meant very little by his windy political theory in the Declaration--and what little as Aristotelian as Lockean--it is very difficult to distinguish his natural rights from those advocated by Rousseau, Robespierre, and Lincoln. Besides, Locke was utterly and demonstrably wrong, so it does little good for us to twist his and his disciples' text into a Christian shape. At any rate, the March Chronicles contains a short piece from me trying to distinguish Locke's erroneous but not terribly malignant theory from later theories that use the same language.
I think Mr. Sanjay has rather missed the point of the frequent refutations of libertarian theory. These discussions occur not because the LP or its shills have any real influence, but because they are the reductio ad absurdum of an intellectual tendency that in two different forms, classical liberalism=American conservatism and Marxism=American liberalism dominate our political landscape. It is not enough--far from it--to debunk Marx, if one does not debunk Locke and Smith and Mill.
David Smith @16: "For us Christians, the more we are enslaved to Christ, the freer we are. This implies hierarchy, at least a delegated one from God to us."
My friend, Brian Patrick Mitchell writes on the subject of hierarchy. His latest contribution was "The Problem with Hierarchy: Ordered Relations in God and Man,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2010. His starting point is the hierarchy of the Trinity.
There is a new page on Wikipedia providing a short bio for him and description of his books.
What I was referring to was mainly in restaurants. The jerk demands special service, unique menu items made especially for him, ingredients that are not in stock, etc.
When I moved to Northern Virginia in the mid-70s, the mall of choice was Tysons Corner. It had an aviary court, a clock court, Hecht Co (now Macys), Woodward & Lothrop, Garfinkels, Richman Bros, a host of shoe stores, sit-down restaurants, a movie theater, loading docks in the basement, and a climate controlled interior. In short it was a nice place to go. The clientele was predominatly white and well-behaved. Springfield Mall was also pleasant but had Montgomery Ward and Penneys as the anchor stores. Seven Corners was smaller but did have good stores. Maryland was much the same way with Montgomery Mall and Landover Mall.
On my last visit to what is now Tysons One, gangs of Mexicans and negroes pushed aside hapless passersby without so much as a by-your-leave, while annoying drum and bass throbbed through the ubiquitous speakers. Women in veils left their screaming brats running around to do their own thing; I half expected the urchins to start begging. A food court has replaced the restaurants, Woodies has gone and taken good customer service with it. Macys is on par with Target and Walmart, and Sears (located elsewhere) now seems nice by comparison. The only redeeming part of the mall is Nordstroms, which plays piano music to keep the riff-raff at bay.
Landover Mall has been reduced to a Sears Automotive and an abortion clinic, and will soon be razed to make way for something even more horrible. Springfield Mall has become a no-go zone for white people. It's multi-level garages are the scene of innumerable carjackings. Seven Corners has become little Salvador/Korea/Vietnam. Eden Center across the street is Vietnam, and Annandale is East Korea.
I'm beginning to think I've tolerated diversity for too long. No wonder people shop on the internet.
Our local mall is now a ghost town. Aside from the usual Sears and JC Penny fair, nearly half of the 'slots' are empty. Even the strip mall across the street from it has had business vacate and nothing replace them for years, for example when Hills went under.
However, the next closest mall, while quiet inside now, seems to have gotten most of the other mall's business. Perhaps malls are going to start consolidating, Im not sure if that is a good or bad thing. Maybe if the first mall is demolished and the land returns to farmland I will start to think we're getting somewhere.
Contrary to Marx, economics does not determine the mind; rather, the mind determines economics. I very much fear that the mall is an accurate reflection of the American mind. As is the vanishing of manners, which is simply the vanishing of both self-respect and Christian charity. Lost at Appomattox. Until that is accepted there is no remedy.
The malls and the jerks who frequent them, not asserting that all or even the majority who make the made rush to a mall are jerks, are the unfruits of a an anti-cultural weed which has usurped the garden which we know as the West or Christendom, which itself is but a faint echo of the old Eden and at the same time a dim foreshadowing of that new Eden yet to come.
We no longer give therapy to the gods or in the Christian context come in humility and reverence to commune with the Living God in the sacrificial person of Jesus the Christ; we of the anti-culture have come to expect therapy to and for ourselves, would-be Promethean selves shaking out fist at the gods and thereby proclaiming ourselves to be gods; but we are not Promethean selves, even if such selves were worthy as the goal of a quest. We are, rather, estranged, alienated and shriveled selves. For the intimacy of communion - familial, ecclesiastical and institutionally - we have substituted the counterfeit of the collective, often baptizing this counterfeit with the label "communion." The mall is a place in which we seek the counterfeit, autonomous individuals seeking to maintain their autonomy while "hooking up," in all of the nuances of that expression. The anti-culture does not and cannot produce civilized people; it can only aid and abet our innate barbarism, hence "the jerk" in all of his idioms. The stress caused by the anti-culture in which we have our being and which is embedded in us brings us to attempt to cope with it through our addictions: anti-sex masquerading as sex, drugs, alcoholism, shopping compulsions, texting to "friends." (Was it not Aristotle who said that one who had many friends has no friends.)
As a Christian, the most dangerous manifestation of the jerk at the mall, is that the liturgy of the mall has slithered into the Church and the fruits thereof are jerks in the Church rather than men who humbly submit to their Lord and to one another for His glory and the coming of His Kingdom.
Thank you, Dr. Fleming, for teaching and leading this discussion.
We Baptist, to follow the theme of the liturgy of the mall and the jerks associated with it slithering into the Church, once had, in the Baptist context at least, an orthodox liturgy, although most Baptist would have never admitted it.
We entered a sanctuary, not an auditorium or a worship center. We entered in deference to our Lord our very best. For most of us, particularly the men and boys, it meant a suit. There were, as I recall, men who lacked those amenities; but they came in shined black shoes, well-pressed khakis, shaved and the hair combed. We entered quietly. There was a prelude of fine music done by the pianist and the organist. There was no band and, as my father later would lament, no "canned music." The pastor and choir entered. We stood as they entered and almost always sang the Doxology. The pastor then led us, still standing, in an eloquent prayer. The hymns which we sang were ancient, as least as far as Baptist were concerned, and were chosen in concert with the theme of the sermon which we were to receive. Today, there are laser shows, the ever-present-God-substituting screens, and the steady rumble of rather loud voices until about mid-way the pastor's prayer, with whispering continuing throughout the service and rising to near full voice while the offering is being taken. The jerks are those who enter the sanctuary on the Lord's Day with football jerseys on, who run around and glad-hand as if they were politicians. One could go on and on.
Satan is in the liturgy of the mall and in the liturgy of the rock concert. Satan enters the Church though his liturgy no matter how much Jesufying we do to it. How do we know that Satan is in the Church? Well, we behave like jerks, one of his hallmarks.
#18
Well, earlier you had remarked that the language of natural rights destroys smaller local communities and opens up the scope for authoritarian rule - I had assumed this was in reference to pure classical liberalism, but you now explain that this is more of a reference towards a *tendency* of American conservatives.
So are you saying that American conservatives have been responsible for destroying local community?
Dr. Fleming at #18, et al. I find that the jerks at the grocery store carelessly and thoughtlessly overload the bags so that they are bound to break, rather than underload them. Then, they are often talking over their shoulders to someone else when they hand out your change, and stab you with fingernails.
They don’t have what you are looking for, so you go to the counter, where the one free clerk is talking to his girlfriend on his cellphone
Fantastic. Something similar, only worse, happened to me and my Wife recently. She had a Sales Coupon for Khols in Wellington, Fl and after she picked-up an item we walked together to the nearest Cashier.
We were second in line and we waited for about five minutes as the female cashier, with an IPHONE next to her ear, talked to her friend about a recent date while the female customer talked with her husband on her Cell Phone as the yet-to-be-purchased items were left piled-up on the automatic scanner with no objective evidence that this had not been the situation since the store opened that day; and there was no evidence a transaction was about to occur.
The conversations simply continued while my Wife and I exchanged quizzical looks.
One can only imagine the combination of emotions I felt at being so cursed as to be in that particular place at that time. The level of Jerkdom was so intense and ineffable, while at the same time so absurd and so surreal, that at first I thought we were innocents who had stumbled smack-dab into some sort of artistic Dadaism.
But once I realised that this was just the Jerkdom of the New Dispensation, I began to laugh and so did my Wife.
I love my Wife beyond all measure but she knows I will never go into that store again. "I know, I know," she said, as we walked to the car, "you don't have to tell me; you'll never go there again."
Robert Peters at #25. I couldn't agree more with you. At times I felt like I could tolerate "contemporary" services,taking a halfhearted "well if that's what brings people to Christ" attitude. More and more, though, I can't help feeling that they are a disgrace. Call me elitist, but the music is downright cheesy. That stuff is okay in the car, or at an informal gathering, but not in the presence of the Holy Ghost.
But then again, I'm the kind of Baptist who thinks the King James Version is the only appropriate translation for church use, so I'm in the minority these days. Oh well. Whatever brings people to Christ.
"So are you saying that American conservatives have been responsible for destroying local community?"
Dear Mr. Sanjay: Dr. Fleming may not be saying that, but I shall. Throughout my nearly 63 years, American political conservatives have not lifted a finger against the commercial aggrandizement that eventuates in, among other things, malls. They have trumpeted individualism unceasingly, in the process producing, in the persons of their most venerated avatars--Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter, Hannity, etc.--perfect models for the jerks Dr. Fleming decries. And whether as Libertarians or the Religious Right, they have fought unceasingly to transform the church of Christ into the church of Satan. So, yes, American conservatives are responsible--much more than American left-liberals--for destroying local community.
#30 Ray,
Well said. I could not agree more. Being human has a scale as does being a horse or an elephant. Traveling fast on a bicycle down a steep hill is a different quality of human speed than traveling 80mph on the interstate in a enclosed vehicle. The difference between General Electric and the ordinary state which most of us live in, is that some states are more our size. The current debate about whether we should borrow money from three huge banks or one huge government, work for an international corporation or the peace corps, shop at the mall or for government commodities,; all this is really of significance to a very few and even then, it is more about the qauntity of life than the quality. And yes, it is about a principle of property and its relation to freedom and prosperity --- On a certain scale!!!
" A Random Walk Through the Mall" or "A Hillarious Walk in the American Forest". See Floyd Cramer.
"Something There is that Doesn't Love" or "Something Wicked the Way Cometh " No footnotes.
This isn’t shopping, and maybe you’ve covered this, but my main example of manners that are out of accord with good feeling is wedding customs. For one thing, renting tuxedos. How can one perform the most important human action of one’s life in rented clothing?! And generally weddings are more like musical comedy performances than anything else. And the array of useless gifts, when a young couple could much better use money to buy things they actually need. A large part of the blame goes to the wedding "industry" and wedding "consultants." It often seems to me that the less marriage comes to mean, the more elaborate the weddings.
Coming to a mall near you! I just read in the local news paper that an Illinois company is building massage chairs for malls and airports. The chair provides internet access so you can watch movies and play games. You can even "talk" to other chairs in the same mall or airport. And that is just "scratching the surface," according to company owner Shawn Beall. Now there will be jerks fighting for massage chairs, if they can out-fox the competition for a parking place.
#30. Well said, Ray! And only too sadly true.
Mr. Peters @ 25:
As a clergyman, I have gone back and forth over the years concerning the use of alternate formats in worship, from the Church Growth Movement of the '80s until now. And, to be fair, I've seen God graciously use much of this to His greater glory. BUT the big elephant in the room here is that you simply won't find anywhere in Scripture where the main purpose of the weekly gathering of the local Body of Christ is to be an evangelistic camp meeting. The one legitimate audience in our worship is God Himself. Period. Evangelism is largely to take place during the work-a-day in our diaspora beyond the church campus.
One very bright spot in the coming economic meltdown will be what I hope becomes a renaissance in the local community church. Love 'em or hate 'em, the mega church (along with shopping malls) is the product of a commuter culture and technologies that flourish with cheap oil and gas. When these commodities become increasingly more expensive, the "show" aspect of these huge churches will have to dry up.
There are tough times ahead. The opportunities for us in the local church to truly step up and be Christ's body to an empty, vulgar, rootless culture around us will increase. I pray we have the humility and wisdom to follow our Lord in the midst of all this.
#34
Did you find it creepy how close it sounds to the contraptions that held the humans in Wall-E?
Very briefly. What I said was what I always say: that the creed of American conservatism is largely the product of classical liberalism--individual liberty, free markets--though it is often contaminated by social or aesthetic conservatism. This contamination was treated as some kind of ultimate ideology, when Frank Meyer cobbled together NR's fusionism, but it was a mythical hybrid, a chimaera that never existed. What really happened is that "cultural conservatism" provided a figleaf for the naked greed actually proposed by way of policy.
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Piroska Haywood has struck a nerve, though I am not sure how I can use it. Weddings, having lost all sacramental or even religious sense, are now commercial occasions. They are a cross between a football gam, complete with program, and a night in Vegas. The clothes that the groom and groomsmen wear belong to a circus and not to any decent social occasion, and, as you note, a marriage that begins with rented clothes is not a marriage planned to last. I refused to wear formal clothes for my own wedding and bought a tuxedo. To not very rich young men who will not need a tuxedo for a long time, I always suggest a decent dark suit.
Alas, the degradation of the wedding is all to closely followed by the degradation of church services in general. At the extreme are the Assemblies and Free Church mob scenes with dancing, hooting and hollering that should not be tolerated at a Rotary meeting. For lack of dignity alone, this hysteria should be repudiated, and when one considers how much sexual excitement can be generated, well, the less said the better. But even without the dancing and drumsets, ad hoc services are a manifestation of the preachers' egomania: Look at me, look at me. Every week I can invent a new liturgy. For several years we attended a LCMS church. It was a dignified old church and the elderly pastor was a manly Herr Pastor, if not always the soundest of theologians. Then entered the snake, an effeminate smarmy young pastor with the cutest little mustache--a dead ringer for Ned Flanders, who has gone up into the LCMS hierarchy. Every week he cut and pasted together a new service.
We know too little about the services of the early church, say, in the first two centuries. What we do know indicates that the people gathered, the Lord's Supper was administered with dignity, prayers were made and hymns sung. By the time of Pope Gregory the Great, roughly 600 AD, the canon of the Mass was complete in the West, and in the East the liturgy of St. John was substantially worked out some centuries earlier. If we compare the earliest surviving services, we see nothing like the free-form camp meeting approach so common today. What began as a revolution against the Mass has now been fulfilled in a revolution against all order, tradition, restraint, reverence, dignity, and taste.
Since God is the author of our being, He can turn anything to His greater glory, including theft and murder. That does not condone the actions of thieves and murderers. I asked an Evangelical friend what they did at her Church. "Dance, mostly," was her response. She was an intelligent woman who proposed her own question to me: "Why do you people care so much about the Trinity? I'm not sure I even know what that is." I am not going to write a chapter on religious jerks, but those who destroy tradition and make themselves the authors of cults and founders of sects are perhaps the worst Jerks that can be imagined. Give me that old time religion.
PS I should make it clear that my point was not to defend the ancient liturgies of the Catholic West and Orthodox East. Anglicans and Lutherans, to name only the two most obvious groups, had respected and beautiful liturgical traditions that have been under attack for an entire generation.
Mr. Sanjay, I've never seen Wall-E.
My church has fallen so far since I was a youth. I can hardly stand the sermons of the current pastor, who is a "social-justice" type. In the last several weeks, he has quoted with reverence, Bono, Abraham Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The icing on the cake was two weeks ago when he quoted Whoopi Goldberg and went on about her faith in glowing terms. That nonsense, coupled with the loud-whisper intonation and crossing guard hand gestures, has me considering a new parish.
Oh sorry. In Wall-E, there were these chairs with holographic projection images in front of them. On those chairs sat obese people with little bone mass, almost becoming a singular blob of man-and-chair. With those chairs, they moved everywhere they needed to go.
These people spent all their time communicating by those projections, without ever looking at another person in the face physically, and had all their needs served onto them from the chair itself.
The redemption for this technologically advanced breed of mankind comes at the end of the movie when they vacate their chairs, walk on uncultivated soil of the earth, and decide to start all over again from the Stone Age.
Dr. Fleming, I agree with your comments about owning the clothes in which you are married. My wife and I were married in the Naval Academy Chapel by a Catholic Chaplin. Having been commissioned an Ensign in the Navy two days earlier, I wore my full dress blue uniform. We will celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary this June.
For those interested, here is a link to the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, used in Eastern Orthodox Churches, which is centered on the Eucharist and communion. On various feast days, the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is used, which is a little more elaborate.
http://www.ocf.org/OrthodoxPage/liturgy/liturgy.html
Sunday worship for Orthodox Christians begins with Great Vespers at sun down on Saturday. Sunday's Divine Liturgy is preceded by a Matins service.
Mr. Sanjay, thanks for the review. The story about the massage chair caught my eye because a number of years ago, before she was married and still lived at home, my older daughter was taking a course at Towson University and my wife had to drive her there. The distance was too far for my wife to return home, so while my daugter was in class, my wife went to a nearby mall where a store had a massage chair on display that customers could try out. As my wife has a long history of back problems, she would use the massage chair for about 20-30 minutes. She was always disappointed if someone else was using the chair when she got there.
I should have said full dress white uniform in my previous post. It was June. If you can access a copy of the 1969 "Lucky Bag" you can see my wife and I descending the chapel steps through an arch of swords after the wedding.
Dr. Fleming,
How is the jerk on a shopping spree different from a spoiled brat? It seems to me that the behaviors you describe are the result of people who are too used to having their way. This applies particuarly to younger people but I think it even effects many of the elderly these days.
I am interested in your Morality book. In particular, I am interested in the distinction you make between liberal-leftism and socialist-leftism and whether this roughly matches what Australian traditionalist conservative Mark Richardson calls "right-liberalism" and "left-liberalism." It sounds like it does.
In the first piece on this subject, which will go into the first chapter if only some publisher will buy it, I described the Jerk as the spoiled brat who refuses to grow up. This takes different forms, however, and when we through greed and the mob-mentality into the mix, we get certain forms of the Jerk as shopper.
It is, obviously, not easy to reduce an argument down to a phrase. I haven't read Richardson, so I cannot speak of his distinctions. Liberalism is a long tradition, and the cutting edge is usually pretty aggressive and the rear-guard pretty conservative. Thus, in the late 19th century there were Whig liberals in England who were content with constitutional monarchy, a system of law and contract that encouraged free enterprise and maintenance of property, and a social system rooted in distinctions between parent and child, male and female. They were aghast both at Marxism, which to liberate human beings destroys both society and individual liberties, but also disgusted by both utilitarianism and anarchism. Stephen's Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity is a brilliant conservative-liberal attack on JS Mill. HS Maine goes even deeper into some of these questions. But, here is the caveat, as much good as conservative liberals have done in stemming the tide of leftism, their basic principles are not sufficient, usually, to prevent the advance of leftism for very long. Their strength often comes not from their liberal philosophy but from deeper, often inarticulate conservative convictions. Sometimes they are entirely confused and the result is Acton, brilliant, learned but deeply flawed and fraught with contradictions.
Thank you for the reply. I wouldn't do Richardson's writings justice, but I've seen him talk of negative liberty types (right-liberals who call themselves "conservatives") vs positive liberty types (left-liberals who call themsleves "liberals" or "progressives" ). A distinction is that right-liberals believe in not having our freedoms impeded whereas left-liberals believe government should interfere to make us all EQUALLY free.
Following up on what Dr. Fleming writes, Anthony Trollope's Prime Minister is a fine example of a well-intentioned Liberal (Duke of Omnium) whose ideas of subtle reform and liberty catch up with him and eventually undermine institutions he holds dear. The novel illustrates now egalitarianism often follows not far behind the cult of liberty, something even the Duke himself acknowledges and seems to think is unavoidable. Interestingly, despite this problem, both the Duke (and Trollope) remain Liberals.
Trollope is somewhat of a traditionalist but so dislikes conservative politicians like Disraeli (whom, like Augustus Melmottet in The Way We Live Now, Trollope doesn't view as completely English) that he hitches his wagon to the Liberal cause. Regarding Trollope and foreigners, the Prime Minister also illustrates 19th-century upper-class English attitudes toward Spaniards and Portuguese; the English often suspected them to be Marranos. The "dusky Ferdinand Lopez" is an object of derision throughout the novel.
One other problem Trollope has with conservatives is that he believes them to possess an incoherent political philosophy -- one that privileges foregone ages but which ages? Fifty years ago? Two hundred years ago? Five hundred? Still, he seems to dislike radical change and often seems to adhere to a liberal-like Burkean philosophy.
All in all, Trollope is a delight to read. I've read the Palliser series and, taking Dr. Fleming's advice, recently started the Barsetshire series. I'm nearly finished with The Warden.
I'd take a liberal like Trollope anyday over a conservative like Jonah Goldberg or Ramesh Ponnuru.
The shift from a negative (freedom from coercion) to positive (freedom to fulfill yourself) conception of liberty is usually associated with people like Lecky and T.H. Green, writers who, on the one hand, possessed a deeper sense of community and the common good than pure liberals, but on the other were drifting rapidly into socialism.
Trollope describes, somewhere in the Palisers series, a cynical move that his fictional Disraeli made as a typical Conservative gesture aimed at destroying one of the fundamental institutions of his country. If Disraeli is a conservative, then it is a label to be eschewed at any cost. So far as I can determine, he was a man without firm convictions, religious, political, or moral. His fiction is disgusting, and his strategy of dishing the Whigs always meant he would sacrifice any good to the higher principle of party and power. Trollope was loyal to the Whigs and was something of a liberal, though his is a very complex case. He hated radical reform in any form. His portrayal of John Bold in The Warden is one of the few places where he was unguarded enough to let us see into his mind. Like most English writers, Trollope had no ideology or even anything like a philosophy, but he had an affection for good people muddling through that is more deeply conservative than anything in the American Conservative Movement. Perhaps we should do a brief discussion of the Warden as a means of introducing readers to one of the wisest writers in the English language.