I Went to the Sewage Treatment Plant

     Actually, it was just a shopping mall, and the sewage wasn't being treated, just being put up for sale.  I hadn't been to a shopping mall in a long time, but we had to pick up something from the phone company's office, and that was in the mall, so after church on Sunday to the mall we went.  It was a strange experience. 

     Now the weather was really splendid for this time of year, and my son and I took advantage of it later in the afternoon, riding our bikes a couple of miles into what passes for the "country" here in Rhode Island.  The snow had melted and the brooks were in full spate.  We stopped on a dirt road at a pond that the state stocks with trout, for kids to fish.  It's a small "park," actually on the property of the man who happened to pull up alongside us in his truck.  He says that the herons and a couple of beavers get most of the fish, and that the kids show up only on the special days the parks commission announces.  Otherwise, nobody comes around; it's just the pond and the waterfall.  "But the kids have nothing to do," he said.  "Look at all the woods they've taken away," -- and he motioned towards some housing subdivisions that have sprouted up in recent years, where they used to plant corn.  "And then people wonder why the kids throw rocks through windows."  I didn't have the heart to tell him that he could uproot all the subdivisions he wanted and replace them with farmland and woods and streams and rocks, and the kids would still not go there, being all of them allergic to something or other to be found outdoors, peanuts or gluten or wasps or fresh air, and that if I did see a kid doing something as ambitious and imaginative as throwing a rock through a window, I'd consider it a fine day indeed.

     But, as I said, that was later.  The shopping mall was pretty crowded for noon on a Sunday -- I was surprised by that.  A lot of things surprised me, in no particular order.  I was struck by how much expense, intelligence, creativity of a sort, and sheer energy is required to make something like a shopping mall as ugly as it is.  I know, from where I grew up in Pennsylvania, that there's ugly, and there's ugly.  A tremendous heap of coal dust, called "culm," stacked a couple of hundred feet high like a pustule on the mountainside, is ugly.  The little scrub birches that somehow manage to grow in a film of topsoil that catches in the mound's ripples only make matters worse, as do the s's of dirt bikes trailing down the sides.  But it's an honest sort of ugly.  It's the ugly remains of hard work.  A lot of the factories where I grew up were ugly in that ungainly sweaty kind of way, when they were humming with machines; and then, when they were abandoned, and boarded over or sealed with iron grillwork, and had their windows smashed or their walls scrawled with announcements from the local boys as to certain passions older than the factories themselves, they were ugly in a sad way, as expressing the mutability of all things earthly.  But neither a culm dump nor a factory with its sign dangling from one bolt is ugly in that brassy, determined way that a shopping mall is ugly.  And that's not to get into the soft and not-so-soft porn everywhere (why do they call it "Victoria's Secret," when everything is out in the open?), and the absurdly overpriced clothes that don't even look good, and the franchise food, and the bells and whistles, the glamour and empty promises.

     So the bike ride cleared my head a bit.  Then later that night, as I'm sure many of you did, I watched the Super Bowl -- since football is, after all, the second greatest game ever invented.  I was rooting for the Patriots, just because I've taken to enjoying the local enthusiasm here, but was pleased well enough to see Eli Manning gain some redemption.  But aside from the football -- that sport which possesses two of the three prime features of a Great Game -- I had to watch the commercials, and noticed with some surprise that a Super Bowl Ad had come to command as much attention as a Super Bowl Team, with polls for Best Ad and offers for DVD's containing all the ads, in case you missed any.  That would be like leaving the sewage treatment plant with sample bottles.  Mostly I pressed the "mute" button on the zappatore, as we call it, but even at that it was hard not to notice the unrelieved ugliness of it all.  People are presented as stupid, bratty, slovenly, sluttish, coarse, obnoxious, and fat -- as in a weird Hobbesian state of nature, when there's too much for everyone, and nobody has anything really meaningful to do.  And yet those commercials must appeal to the viewers -- the ad men know quite well what they are doing.

     In the middle ages, where we are now in my course in western civilization, a lot of places had trouble getting rid of sewage.  But aside from that, what was really ugly about a medieval town?  The walls?  The civic buildings?  The rough-and-tumble lives of pigs and chickens and dogs?  The soaring cathedral?  The farmland without?  The open skies?  The bells tolling the hours?  The peddlers crying up their wares?  The dresses and trousers?  What does it do to people, eventually, to live among so much expensive and glaring and plastic ugliness -- as if a great red CVS sign glowered over your bed every night?  And to pay handsomely for it, too.