The Maul, er, Mall of America

Recently, Karen and I paid a rare visit to The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, located not far from our airport and nearly as big as. The Mall of America is celebrating its tenth anniversary which, according to those who are paid to invent meaningless declarations, is a Big Deal.

If you like a great big shopping mall with every national chain you can find in separate malls in other and more sensible parts of the country. If you must buy your shirts from a start with a 1957 Buick halfway through the show window, then by golly, the Mall of America is the place for you. If you watch Entertainment Tonight, believe Las Vegas to be one of the great places to pass more than about six hours, then you should hitch up your britches and move your tush in the direction of – yup – The Mall of America.

Or if you think that an indoor roller coaster is the cat’s meow, then point your roadster toward The Mall of America.

What I can’t figure out is this: If you are a beautiful person, the Mall of America cannot do a thing for you. If you are not a beautiful person, all the gewgaws and gimcracks which you might acquire by ripping your credit card through a card reader at warp speed ain’t gonna help.

I understand that for some shopping is therapy, entertainment, a chance to get together and waste time with people you like. It is also a delusion – surrounding yourself with stuff is not the freeway to bliss.

If you’re going to look at stuff, you’d be better off looking at great paintings, sculpture, or furniture at a local museum. That visit won’t cost you very much, and in the process you might find your spirit uplifted by the beauty and creative vitality which surrounds you.

I used to wonder why my father always wore clothes which were thirty years out of date and shoes which were half a century old. It took me a while to discover that he was not much for fashion (although he was interested in style), and his shoes were handmade in London, cost him a fortune, but he amortized that expense over a lifetime of comfort, so they were cheap in the long run (And yes, I wear them now, so they’re now in their eighth decade of active use. )

Clothes do not make the man, and an active intelligence is never out of date – unless it falls into desuetude (God, I love using that word!), through lack of use. Maybe you learn that only after your fourth decade on the planet.

Watching the shoppers at the Mall of America, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, made me sad – sad about the impact marketing has on our lives, sad about anybody believing they were acquiring some harbinger of happiness in such a place, sad about the fact that our government is trying to sell us on a war on Iraq with the same flimsy propositions and lack of evidence used to sell us on the latest model of (fill in the blank here).