• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 369 0

that they were not toys (as advertised) they lost interest. The same is true of the entire and astounding abundance of pleasure-goods that we buy. Foodstuffs are prolific, but few know how to cook. Building materials abound in both quantity and variety, yet most homes look as if they had been made by someone who had heard of a house but never seen one. Silks, linens, wools, and cottons are available in colors and patterns galore, and yet most men dress like divinity students or undertakers, while women are slaves to the fashion game with its basic rule, "I have conformed sooner than you." The market for artists and sculptors has thrived as never before in history, but the paintings look as if they had been made with excrement or scraps from billboards, and the sculptures like mangled typewriters or charred lumber from a burned-down outhouse.(2) We have untold stacks of recorded music from every age and culture, and the most superb means of playing it. But who actually listens? Maybe a few pot-smokers.

This is perhaps a Henry Millerish exaggeration. Nevertheless, it strikes me more and more that America's reputation for materialism is unfounded—that is, if a materialist is a person who thoroughly enjoys the physical world and loves material things. In this sense, we are superb materialists when it comes to the construction of jet aircraft, but when we decorate the inside of these magnificent monsters for the comfort of passengers it is nothing but frippery. High-heeled, narrow-hipped, doll-type girls serving imitation, warmed-over meals. For our pleasures are not material pleasures but symbols of pleasure—

attractively packaged but inferior in content.

The explanation is simple: most of our products are being made by people who do not enjoy making them, whether as owners or workers.

Their aim in the enterprise is not the product but money, and therefore every trick is used to cut the cost of production and hoodwink the buyer, by coloring and packaging chicanery, into the belief that the product is well and truly made. The only exceptions are those products which simply must be excellent for reasons of safety or high cost of purchase—aircraft, computers, space-rockets, scientific instruments, and so forth.

But the whole scheme is a vicious circle, for when you have made the money what will you buy with it? Other pretentious fakes made by other money-mad manufacturers. The few real luxuries on the market are imports from "backward" countries, where peasants and craftsmen still take pride in their work. For example, the state of Oaxaca in Mexico produces some of the finest blankets in the world, and American buyers have been trying to import them in huge quantities.

But no amount of money will give the relatively few craftsmen who weave them time to fill the order. If they want the order, they must begin to cheat and produce inferior blankets. The only solution would be to train hundreds of new craftsmen. But Oaxaca is just getting television and has, for some time, had public education, so what up-and-coming young person would want to waste his days weaving blankets?

The poets and sages have, indeed, been saying for centuries that success in this world is vanity. "The worldly hope men set their hearts upon turns ashes," or, as we might put it in a more up-to-date idiom, just when our mouth was watering for the ultimate goodie, it turns out to be a mixture of plaster-of-paris, papier-mâché, and plastic glue. Comes in any flavor. I have thought of putting this on the market as a universal substance, a prima materia, for making anything and everything—

houses, furniture, flowers, bread (they use it already), apples, and even people.

The world, they are saying, is a mirage. Everything is forever falling apart and there's no way of fixing it, and the more strenuously you grasp this airy nothingness, the more swiftly it collapses in your hands.

Western, technological civilization is, thus far, man's most desperate effort to beat the game—to understand, control, and fix this will-o'-the-wisp called life, and it may be that