03.27.05
ST: Shopping and Politics
Latest Sunday Times
Here’s a link to the ST and my latest article. Unfortunately you don’t get to see my photo that they put on the front of the News Review section. It’s quite funny. Almost as if I’m someone important. I thought: how my enemies will puke. By the way, I totally got over that previous depression and cycled to the village for the papers. I suspect I looked a bit cracked but didn’t care.
How to shop your politician
No doubt you saw the pictures of an ecstatic Shane McEntee being carried shoulder-high into Leinster House last week. McEntee beat the odds to win a seat for Fine Gael in the Meath by-election and was full of enthusiasm about his new job.
If you were one of the 75,000 people in Meath who didn’t vote in the election, you probably viewed this enthusiasm somewhat benignly or, if you’ve had no water supply for a few days, with a degree of bitterness. The low turnout caused much analysis of people’s connection with politics. However, I couldn’t help noticing that 75,000 was also the number of people who visited the Dundrum town centre on its recent opening day.
Our duty as consumers far outweighs our duty as citizens and we are willing to undergo many hardships to maintain spending. Indeed the hardships are so onerous, it makes a mystery of surveys that claim shopping is one of our favourite activities.
When we set off on shopping trips, it is certainly with an air of great optimism. The Buddha’s half-smile sneaks upon our faces as we dream of purchases that will make us feel like successful members of society.
Once you hit the tailback into the over-priced multi-storey car park, the delicate threads holding this dream together start to fray. It won’t be long before you find yourself crying in the changing rooms because your pre-menstrual bloated tummy has destroyed the silky lines of a wrap-around dress that would have allowed you to pretend that you were a member of the cast of Sex and the City. Your failure to look attractive in an A-line skirt sparks an identity crisis and soon you’ ll go home, wracked with depression, clutching another white blouse.
The misery created by our lust for shopping is so deep that one wonders why we persist. Surely there must be an upside? There is. Cosseted in the suburban shopping mall of your choice, you are assured of protection from politicians, canvassers, petitioners and other economically inactive citizens. Unlike proper towns, the town centres are private property in which the management get to create a whole new society. In the fake town centre of the 21st century, the customer is not only king, but sole occupant. There will be nobody rattling a tin, waving a leaflet or brandishing a pen, making you feel guilty about the poor, the environment, the deported or the imprisoned.
I had no idea politics was banned until the abortion referendum in 2002, when I was affiliated with the No campaign. Asking for a No meant you were either a screaming liberal or a nutty pro-lifer. I’ll leave you to figure out which one I was.
Full of enthusiasm, I set off one Saturday morning to Liffey Valley. Since our communities congregate in these commercial palaces, where better to conduct a campaign? I picked a spot at a crossroads and silently handed out leaflets explaining the issue.
I was approached by a security man who politely informed me leafleting was not permitted. Even more politely, I explained that my leaflets were not commercial in nature and thus no threat to the paying tenants. In slightly less polite terms, he clarified that the rules did not allow for any leafleting. In even less polite terms, I said my leafleting was in connection with a poll in which all citizens had a right to participate, so he had no business stopping me.
I lost the argument and stormed off towards the exit declaring my intention to continue leafleting in the car park. Mr Security soon arrived with a friend to tell me that since the car park was private property I couldn’t campaign there either. Subsequent enquiries confirmed a similar policy at other well-known shopping centres.
I also discovered that, in California in 1979, a group of high-school students was ejected from a shopping mall when they set up a table petitioning for support for the state of Israel. They took the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that “the public has the right to engage in free speech and petitioning on private property when that location has the characteristics of a public forum. If the commercial property becomes a place where citizens congregate, the owner’s property rights must yield to the public’s right to engage in expressive activityâ€Â.
Should the Supreme Court make a similar ruling here, it is questionable how this would be greeted by the shopping public. Perhaps you might like to bump into Shane McEntee on a Saturday afternoon so you can ask him to pursue the issue of rat-infestation at your children’s school? More likely, having failed to soothe yourself through the self-gratification of shopping, and instead convinced yourself that you are unattractive and downtrodden, you will be grateful to be spared the do-gooders and politicians.
Can it be that the most effective method of destroying western democracy is not through the deployment of the suicide bomber, but simply the construction of more shopping centres?