After the long weekend away from the computer, I was tempted, this morning, to stretch the “long weekend” concept a bit, and to fold in a paragraph or two at the end of the preceding entry. But here I am, remembering the cherry blossoms that have long since scattered in the wind and rain. Another annual moment of extraordinary loveliness has come and gone. It was difficult to enjoy this year, because the sense of a regular, ordered world that their serried April blooms have signified in the past was this year, and not for the first, undermined by the upheaval of subway station construction outside our door. From the very start, the project has worn for me a sinister military air, as if the intersection were a checkpoint within a divided city. Civilian life does flow, largely unimpeded, all about the concrete stancheons and the fenced-in backhoes and the curious multistorey structures, and amidst the men in hard hats and orange vests, more and more of whom seem to be carrying paperwork. But, no doubt because I am old, the work is not exciting but only stressful. I am always wondering if I will live to see the end of it, not because the official completion date is so far away (what’s five years?), but because it’s hard to believe that such an extensive rupture of urban fabric can ever be repaired.

The weather is thick and gloomy. I slept badly, troubled by irritating dreams crowded with banal anxieties. (Wondering whether I had packed enough underwear recurred throughout the series.) Then there was the question, “What does George Borden do?” George Borden is something of an incubus at the moment. Yesterday, he didn’t even have a name. This morning, he not only got that but a wife named Alice. George and Alice raised two children in one of the suburbs, but moved into the city when the younger one was killed in a high-school graduation-party drunk-driving accident (how innocent a victim, I haven’t decided). Alice had always wanted to move back into the city when her children were out of school, but it was only several years after the move that she realized that George never did, and wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t wanted to leave the scene of the tragedy, which in his mind extended to anywhere dependent on automobiles; and so Alice feels a bizarre guilt, having benefited so conveniently from her child’s death. All of this came to me this morning. What will come of it? Probably nothing. Especially if I can’t think what it is that George Burden does for a living, because that is who he is. I do know that he does something that anyone who didn’t do it would find “boring.” I know that there are jillions of odd jobs out there, served out in anonymous buildings on the west side of midtown, but I don’t know anything about them. I’m tempted to make something up.  

***

If I’d been more alert this morning, I should have said something about the Walmex scandal, so brilliantly exposed by the Times in yesterday’s paper. First, I shall be very surprised if any government will take any action that will severely punish (damage) Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries. As I read David Barstow’s long but unusually lucid article, I could hear the pens of conservative scribes been sharpened against what will doubtless be dismissed as the “elitist” smear of an outstanding American enterprise that has done its level best to compete in foreign markets whose ways we ought not to presume to understand. (Even if former Wal-Mart attorney Maritza Munich did go to the trouble of pointing out that bribery is illegal in Mexico [period!].

The second thing that I want to suggest is Wal-Mart “deserves” protection because it is one of the most vital elements in American political life: surely it has led the way in removing the sting from vast income inequalities by providing an abundant amount of halfway stylish stuff to Americans of limited means. There really isn’t anything that the wealthiest Americans can own, in the ordinary of course, that their poorer countrymen can’t afford in some cheaper version. What the wealthy do uniquely command today is a combination of personal service and personal access, but service is invisible, and ordinary people would be tongue-tied over dinner with stars. What we expect from service and access is pretty idiosyncratic, as any waiter can tell you. But everyone expects a big-screen TV to hook up to ESPN. And almost everyone can afford a big-screen TV — or can acquire one, for better or worse credit-wise. This is not a world in which only the rich see the game in color.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2012 at 10:51 am.