At Christmastime, We Celebrate Mankind’s Inherent Dignity

Loading

Ed Driscoll:

How did we come to this point? In his latest Bleat, James Lileks has a photo of Beeswax “Lip S***” balm for sale at his local mall, about which he writes in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

I don’t care that they make it. I don’t care if the store puts it in the corner, like Spencer Gifts used to segregate the “adult” stuff back with the Cheryl Tiegs bikini posters and mugs shaped like a pair of breasts. I don’t care that it exists. It would be foolish nowadays to expect it didn’t.

Just don’t shove “Sh**” in my face at the checkout counter at Christmas time, OK?

However elegant your handbags, however lovely your locally produced jewelry, however tasteful your selection of plaques with life-embracing quotes, you’re just paving the way for the day you stand before a store window looking at Yukon Cornelius having an orgy with Rudolph in the manger, thinking, “My, how did we come to this point?”

The Mayans had it wrong. The old world doesn’t end all at once: It just dies a little bit every day.

As I’ve written before, one of my local malls in San Jose isSantana Row (named after a longstanding nearby park, not the aging psychedelic guitarist), which is a mixed-use open-air project designed to look like a European street at the dawn of the 20th century. There are shops and restaurants on the ground floor, and three or four stories of condos above them. It’s sort of a retail version of Disney World — or perhaps The Village from Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner TV series.

No, that’s not fair — the staff running the asylum in McGoohan’s cult 1967 TV series were much more urbane and civilized, as a pair of examples from 2012 highlight. First up, a photo of the storefront window of Lululemon Athletica, a self-described purveyor of “yoga clothes and running accessories for sweaty workouts.” Their Website’s About Us page proudly boasts that “Quality is at the heart of everything we do, from the technical features we (sometimes literally) weave into our products, to the people we work with and relationships we build.” Just as long as you don’t mind the occasional implied F-word in their storefront windows:

Read more

0 0 votes
Article Rating
Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments