Staples Steeples And Shabby Proposals

R and I went to Staples to have a guy check out my printer. It was on the fritz. It would either fail to set up because – as the machine alerted me in the little menu box – the ink cartridges were empty, or there was a seemingly non-existent paper jam. I very rarely print anything anymore. I think the ink had just evaporated. I’d gone to Staples earlier following a dinner at Chinook’s overlooking the docks and fishing boats at Fisherman’s Terminal. We had hamburgers instead of our usual fish and chips, which are now $23.00. Nineteen dollars on Monday. But the portions have been getting smaller. I spent thirty bucks on a new black ink cartridge and inserted it into the machine. No go. I did manage to get it to run briefly, but the printing was bad; every other line was faded. So I had a dilemma: do I spend another thirty or forty dollars on color ink cartridges and see if the machine still works or just give up and take it to a shop that does recycling?

I called Staples and spoke with a young man who said he’d take a look at it for no charge, but they don’t do repairs on printers. So I brought it in on an unusually hot day in May and the young man took a look. He grabbed a packet of color cartridges off the shelf and inserted them and printed the cover of a brochure. It looked pretty good. A few sentences had lines running through them. He inserted some device that cleaned the machine and ran it again and the print job came out looking even better. The colors were vibrant and the text was legible. So I spent another forty bucks on the color cartridges and brought it home and printed out some documents. There were flaws at first but eventually everything printed fine.

The young man remarked that the machine was pretty old and may not have much life left in it. The machine was nine years old. We live in a such a funny world now. When things get to be five or six or seven years old and they cease working we don’t find that strange. Nor does anyone look to have them repaired. We just toss them into the landfill, or bring it to a recycling center if there’s one available. The waste is colossal. Is this capitalism? Is this what capitalism wants? Stupid question. No need to ask. Yes, of course this is what capitalism wants. Built-in obsolescence so that people are forced to spend more and more money and equipment that’s not designed to last more than a few years. It sucks. No one values much of anything anymore.

Saturday. 11:01 a.m. I look to see what’s going on with Notre Dame cathedral and discover the hideous plans for replacing the roof and spire that were destroyed in the fire of April 15th, 2019. One, from designer Mathieu Lehanneur, would be a “gleaming, 300-foot flame, made of carbon fiber and covered in gold leaf, that would be a permanent reminder of the tragedy.”

Yes, and a permanent reminder of how crass, vulgar, and imbecilic our age has become.

Another ridiculous proposal, from Alex Nerovnya, a lecturer at the Moscow Architectural Institute, suggested “a roof resembling a diamond around a rebuilt Gothic spire.” It looks more like a greenhouse, but at least the spire more closely resembles the graceful lines and Gothic embellishments of the original spire designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc which began construction in 1845 and was completed in 1865. It takes time to do a good job. Cathedrals evolve slowly. There’s a reason for that. They embody the more transcendent values of a culture and are consequently liberated from the usual pressures of finance. The emphasis is on beauty, not money. God, not Mammon.

Emmanuel Macron moves in the opposite direction: this is a guy obsessed with money. He wants the cathedral repairs to be done in five years, in time for the Summer Olympics in Paris scheduled for 2024. Given these restraints and pressures, the ultimate design will be based on speed and ease of construction. It will look like a cheesy piece of space-age junk at a garage sale.

R says she will divorce herself from Paris if these plans go through. I feel the same way. It’s deeply upsetting to see this remarkable building so abused by the greed and negligence that has come to characterize these times. Notre Dame cathedral is the heart of Paris. It represents the higher aspirations of the human experience, a move away from the drearily pragmatic toward the sublime, which is often vigorously and pointedly non-pragmatic. “Like other beautiful things in this world,” proclaimed John Ruskin, “its end (that of a shaft) is to be beautiful; and, in proportion to its beauty, it receives permission to be otherwise useless. We do not blame emeralds and rubies because we cannot make them into heads of hammers.”

Is there anyone resisting Macron’s impatience and these shabby proposals for Notre Dame’s restoration? 

Yes: a group of restoration experts published an open letter in Le Figaro to Emmanuel Macron urging him to be more prudent and reconsider his proposal to have the work done in five years, stating that “these choices must be made in respect of what Notre-Dame is, more than a cathedral among others, more than a historical monument among others, by observing a scrupulous and reflective approach, one of deontological ethics.”

Deontology is a term from moral philosophy meaning obligation or duty. It espouses the theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether the action itself is right or wrong rather than the consequences of the action.

Macron, however, is a man well-known for his arrogance and patrician attitudes. It has taken months of vigorous protest against a militarized police force by the yellow vest movement to get Macron to budge even a little in his neoliberal economics shifting wealth to the upper tiers and impoverishing the lives of the working class.

I don’t think there’s a way to stress just how coarse, barbaric, and loutish this current age is. Can there be anything more ominous than a cathedral fire to underscore just how pedestrian and stupid everyone has become?