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.
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PS I should add that Trollope shares with W.S. Gilbert a horror of violent change in either direction. Both men advocated moderate reform but found feminism, socialism, scientism, utopianism repulsive while they found the pretensions of the Church and the nobility merely amusing. Both mellowed, also, on the Tories. If you follow his changing portrait of Archdeacon Grantly from rabid Tory with rotten kids in The Warden to the crusty partisan but loving father and husband in Barchester Towers, you will see my point. One of the sad things I have to contemplate is that I have read the best Trollope at least twice, the good Trollope at least once, and most of the OK Trollope. I had postponed the pleasure of reading The Three Clerks until a few months ago, and it was worth waiting for. I am consoling myself with the thinner pleasures of Wodehouse and finding even his least competent early stuff (Mike and Psmith, Psmith in the City) a great consolation in a weary world. Finally, let me recommend, if you all have not read him, Anthony Powell. Prof. Frank Brownlow has persuaded me that I have underrated his novels before Dance to the Music of Time--a work I found astonishingly deeper the second time around, when I could read it through rather than waiting for new volumes to appear. There is more political and social wisdom in Powell and Joyce Cary than you will find in virtually any political writers of the 20th century, and Powell is incomparably deeper than his schoolmate George Orwell.
There are a number of instances where the conservatives are more radical than the Whigs in the Palliser series. For instance, Trollope has his fictional Disraeli seek to disestablish the Anglican church in a manner with which even many Liberals aren't comfortable.
I'd like to read your thoughts on John Bold.
Without making any brief at all for libertarians, I think that calling today's "conservatives" a product of libertarianism, gives the "conservatives" more credit than they deserve. This suggests that the "conservatives" have a sincere and rational (though misguided) belief The great leaders of present-day "conservatism"---the Rev. Moon, Blackjack Bill Bennett, O'Reilly, Gingrich, Bush minor, ad nauseum, have no sincere and rational belief in aything except personal gratification.
Dr Wilson @53 "have no sincere and rational belief in aything except personal gratification."
Is lust for large sums of money and fame part of the lust for gratification, or should we add those as separate feral qualities of today's politician? As for me, I prefer the genuine article to the synthetic variety. The old italian families who worked for the organization at least admitted it was srictly business.
Speaking of freedom (liberty) and equality, I was doing a little organizing of my bookshelves and started leafing through Liberty or Equality by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. I have the 40th anniversary edition published in 1993 by Christendom Press with a Foreword by Russell Kirk and a new Preface and Retrospect by the author. It looks pretty interesting. In another book I've mentioned on this site, A Guide for the Perplexed, E.F. Schumacher notes that the issue of liberty (or freedom) and equality fall into the category of divergent problems, that is, issues that are opposites. Of course both authors mention the French Revolution.
Jacques Barzun has a good, though short, discussion of the French Revolution in his book From Dawn to Decadence. On page 426 he says:
The men who came to lead the factions or who gained power for a time lacked mature political talent. To govern well requires two distinct kinds of ability: political skills and the administrative mind. Both are very rare, either in combination or separately. The former depends on sensing what can be done, at what moment, and how to move others to want it. . . .To administer is to keep order in a situation that continually tends toward disorder.
Barzun identifies Mirabeau among all the leaders as the only statesman who may have been able to lead the way to lasting reforms, if his private financial dealings with Louis XVI had not made him appear to be venal and his driving energy had not been offensive.
Who is the last American statesman with the talent that Barzun describes? (Of course, someone with the necessary skills could lead us down the wrong path.)
#49
Yes, I agree with the idea that if people's priniciples are to reach back into the "past", they can't just be indefinite about how far back in the past.
I can think of every generation other than this one, and the wrongs and evils among people outnumber whatever was good. There is no ideal generation. Not in the 1980s, the 1970s, the 1960s. Not in the 1800s or the 1700s.
I was seeing the movie Persepolis, and for some people like the Iranians, there has never been any good time or a great generation. Today, Iranian government is repressive and does not allow people to have bad habits or too much blod thought. Yesterday, many Iranians lived lives of either partying and endless personal gratification or of empty meaningless political idealism.
The only thing history tells us is that man is imperfect. Some people, like journalist Alexander Coburn or historian Tony Judt, seem to think there was a golden era in the 1960s, an evil era in the 1920s, and so on. Always, it is a purely selective perspective.
#54. Vanity, greed, and lust.
Dr. Fleming said: "Finally, let me recommend, if you all have not read him, Anthony Powell."
I have greatly enjoyed Powell, and am currently making my way through the “Dance”. Just as good as his novels are his volumes of essays covering the works of many English and American writers and historians, and packed with fascinating and informative reviews and literary criticism. In his anthology “Miscellaneous Verdicts”, Powell gives faint praise to a couple of Disraeli’s novels but is far more enthusiastic about the father Isaac Disraeli’s work “Curiosities of Literature”, a book that is something of a model for Powell’s own collection. Chronicles folks would also be pleased to see that Powell has some understanding of the American Civil War, of the Confederacy, and of the history of the American presidency, especially for a Brit. This includes a skeptical view of Lincoln.
As for Powell's connection to George Orwell, some have suggested that Powell based the character Erridge, Lord Warminster from the "Dance to the Music of Time" upon Orwell (both of these electing a period of experimental poverty to study the class system). Dr. Fleming, I recall, once wondered whether Orwell was the basis for another of Powell's characters from "Dance", the writer X Trapnel. But I've not made it not that far into the series to say.
Powell was as right about old Isaac as I was wrong about X Trapnel, who is based on Julian McClaren Ross. In his memoirs, Powell does talk about some of his friends who served as models for his characters. Isaac Disraeli's conversion is a funny story. He lost out in some struggle in the synagogue, he marched out with his family and made them all get baptized. I used to read Curiosities in the Charleston County Library when I had finished looking up whatever it was I was researching. It is an absolute treasure trove of odd stories, though I have not looked at it for 40 years. I must see about getting a copy. By the way, the name Powell is pronounced the old way, as in Pole. The author was once mucking in his garden when a plumber he had called approached him, asking if he knew wheree Mr. Pow-el lived. "No one around here by that name." If you know anything about how difficult it is to get a workman of any kind in England, you will appreciate the sacrifice he made to family pride. I doubt that the priggish Warminster is based on Orwell, though who knows?
By the way again, though I have mentioned this before, Powell is one of the few writers to realize how fundamental a figure Aleister Crowley is to the 20th century. He begins with his Uncle Giles, a follower of a fictional Crowley, and ends with a hippie sect derived from Crowley. Sex, drugs, and the lord of this world one is better off not naming.
A profound thank you for this essay Dr. Flemming and the contributing
of the many comments still posting.
Everybody. Skip the awful television adaptation of "Dance to the Music of Time."
Speaking of Crowley, it's amusing how even he, a father of modern neopagan cultism, cant escape the 'racism' charge on Wikipedia. Heh, heh, heh!
Perhaps we should discuss jerks who pick apart even arcane and irrelevant corners of history, looking for the dreaded 'sin' of our time, and how no one, no matter how weird, or how irrelevant they are to modern politics, can escape the slanderous accusation, no matter how deeply they may be buried in the dark recesses of forgotten time. Even an ancient skeleton from a kurgan burial on the steps can reasonably be assumed to have been 'racist'.
Oh, the obsessions the left has with 'racism', and with 'Hitler'! Ahhhhh!
As for Crowley, influential though he was, when you look at pictures of him, look at his eyes, and you can see that there is really nothing to him at all. Like so many other guru types whom people seek out for 'guidance'.
"As for Crowley, influential though he was, when you look at pictures of him, look at his eyes, and you can see that there is really nothing to him at all. "
Mr. Wilson this is a vivid observation you have made. Many of these men who expermimented with the occult in the way of Non Serviam ended up committing suicide, or in that empty state of exhausted egos everywhere, what we would call today organic brain disorders or severe neurotics with differing forms of pyschosis. There is a book, The Way Down and Out, that was published by Cornell Press (now out of print) Amazon has it for $245.00 which is sinful. It can be obtained through most University Libraries and discusses this fascination with the occult when the way of Charity is either blocked or the passage made perilous. Yeats, Rimbau, Baudelaire and Eliot are a few poets of different talents who dabbled in it before discovering either the way up or the way down and out, with varying degress of success. Although nothing Tom Fleming says surprises me anymore, it is rather strange that anyone would notice how perceptive Powell was in noticing Crowley, and how perceptive you are in seeing the emptiness behind his eyes as he grew in the legion ways of decadence and nothingness.
Allen Wilson @23:
Maybe the authors of my daughter's text (Kagan, et al. The Western Heritage. 2010)that I've mentioned elsewhere are among those who you have in mind. In a highlight entitled "Coffeehouses and the Enlightenment," they describe how the philosophes like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot would meet with other writers in the European coffee houses. At the end of the section, they could not resist pointing out that:
Although they provided one of the chief locations for the public discussion of the ideas of the Enlightenment, which fostered greater liberty of thought in Europe, the coffee and sugar consumed in these establishments were cultivated by slave labor on plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. The coffeehouse was one of many institutions of European life that was connected to the transatlantic plantation slave economy.
Sorry. I meant "Allen Wilson @63:" in my previous post.
I think you're right, Mr Van Sant. The fact that the sugar and coffee came from plantantion slavery was quite irrelevant to the major story of the enlightenment, but they just had to point out that fact, as if it were just, oh, so, so relevant. Besides, what could Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot do about it at the time? Absolutely nothing.
I hear that some of the cheap junk on sale at Wal Mart is made by slave labour in China, but if that's true, what am I supposed to do about it? I can buy cheap junk elsewhere if I really need it, but then, what are the chances that it's also made by Chinese slaves? I cant escape the possibility no matter what I do. So should I bee excoriated by an idiot a hundred years hence, long after it's all over anyway? They should point their fingers at the NAFTA and GATT crowd instead, if they must search for someone to point their grubby fingers at.
But they must dig for 'racism' and 'antisemitism', etc., even at the bottom of the oldest long-closed garbage dump, the oldest archaeological site, in the bones of the longest-dead neanderthal, because that's just what self-righteous busybodies do. That's how crazy and deluded these people are.
I recently saw a rerun of King Of The Hill in which Peggy goes back to work as a cashier in the local grocery. Unfortunately, they have a difficult time staying in business because nobody wants good service any more, they only want low prices, which they get at Mega-Lo-Mart. Ukrops, a Richmond based grocery chain which provided excellent service, has sadly closed its doors.
I suppose we must pay a little extra for mundane things to keep jerkdom at bay. Chick-fil-a has become a personal favorite, partly because the sodomite lobby is calling for a boycott against them.
Allen Wilson @67: “I hear that some of the cheap junk on sale at Wal Mart is made by slave labour in China, but if that’s true, what am I supposed to do about it?”
The March issue of Wired has a story about 90 million iPhones manufactured in China by one million Chinese, 17 of whom have committed suicide in the past five years. The author, Joel Johnson, asks, “Is it our fault?” and answers, “yes. Just a little.” (The author says the suicide rate among American college students is four times higher, but doesn’t ask whose fault that is.)
There is another article in the same March issue of Wired by Brendan I. Koerner about smaller U.S. Companies bringing their manufacturing operations back to the U.S. because of quality problems and the length of the supply line when using Chinese factories. The rising cost of Chinese labor and oil are raising production and shipping costs. The trend may be short-lived and not benefit the U.S. worker, however. Those companies who are returning or staying in the U.S. are doing it by redesigning their products to reduce labor requirements and replacing human labor with robots.