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?
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