A rare moment to muse and amuse:

Did my snow day help me get ahead in school, or at the very least caught up? Nope. Jes and I watched Gladiator and then went out to St. Louis Mills. I’d never been to the mega mall in the flood plane and I was in the mood to walk far indoors. I’m not very familiar with the hall of mirrors that is the county which surrounds St. Louis, where all the people and the business look alike, but for small refractions of place and time. So, I’m not sure how we got there or back. I know we used cell phones to get her father’s advice on which of the highways intersected near the nightmare winding halls of mercantilism.

We didn’t buy anything. We don’t really need anything. We did browse the hell out of that place though. We even watched the St. Louis Blues Hockey Team practice unto pointlessness. The public viewing for the practice is one of the mega mall’s attractions. The only thing I almost bought was a pool cue. They were buy one get one free. We did spend a little cash on Japanese fast food noodle bowls (as the guys at Panda Express looked sullenly at as across the vast food court as we cast a ballot in an ancient culture war). I no longer buy things. I buy services, information, and percentage points. I do buy food, but if you think of that in terms of the energy units that fuel the ongoing chemical fire of my finite humanity, then you aren’t really talking about things in the same context as other, more decorative widgets. I did try to buy that frog ice sculpture mold off of ebay, but it never showed up.

You must admit that capitalism, while always one for sketchy ideas, has taken some odd turns of late. This past weekend we were invited to a loft tour where we could spend ten dollars apiece for tickets to people trying to sell us lofts. We were in Mikasa in the mall and the sales girl handed Jes a flyer while saying, “With our special promotion today, the more you spend, the more you save!” I understand and appreciate exponential discounting, but as Jes observed, “Obviously the more you spend, the more you spend.”

I had a teacher in high school who liked to talk about the shift in power that was evident in who built palaces for whom. From the hill fort to the medieval castle and on to the cathedral and the skyscraper, each shift in cultural power from farmer to soldier to king, emperor, bishop, pope, robber baron and mogul brought with it a shift in the real estate. Now we build palaces for the consumer, every food court aspires to be a Hanging Garden of Babylon with foliage and fountains galore. But we build our malls in the flood plane because planned obsolescence is part of every contemporary commercial venture. Douglas Adams was very comically astute in his Restaurant at the End of the Universe, eschatology sells and the end of a fashion and the fashion of the end is always drawing nigh. On the surface they say fashion is often a cult of youth, but what drives that lust for youth if not the fear of death. That’s a classic bait and switch.

Freedom and servitude have been running along those same lines of late, the current administration asks us to do our part to preserve freedom by continuing to consume, as if the debt culture that dominates so many American work to live lives weren’t just the latest version of the company store, where the boss pays you in access to the things he wants to sell you – it doesn’t take long to figure out that you won’t be paying off your passage to the land of opportunity anytime soon. Well, we may have not elected these monopolists in the first go round, but their reelection should hang heavy on more than a few hearts. That’s naïve America for you, more than willing to pay for the privilege of being sold a bill of goods if it comes in a package that they like. Just another Texas carpetbagger on the grandest grift there ever was.