I received 112 "Mail delivery failures" returned to me on this one. What
happened?
Melanie Milanich wrote:
> The Globe and Mail, Saturday Sept. 25, 1999, p. D2
> Dreary as Ottawa was, it was in the end a better place than New York
> by Germaine Greer
> . . . .Which is the great thing about New York. Anything, but anything,
> can be had for money, from huge diamonds of the finest water, furs of
> lynx and sable, wines of vintages long said to have been exhausted,
> important works of art and rock cocaine, to toy boys of the most
> sponaneous, entertaining and beautifully made, of any sexual orientation
> and all colours. Every day, planes land at JFK freighted with orchids
> from Malaysia, roses from Istanbul, mangos gathered that morning from
> trees in Karnataka, passion fruit from Townsville, limes from Barbados,
> truffles from Perigord, lobsters bought live from the coldest seas on
> the planet. Wilthin 24 hours, all will have been put on sale and
> consumed. The huge prices are no deterrent. The New York elite likes
> to be seen to pay them with nonchalance, on the J.P. Morgan principle
> that if you need to know how much something costs, you can't afford it.
> Nobody looks at the tab; the platinum credit card is thrown down for the
> obsequiouis salesperson to do his worst with.
> This is what I don't like about New York. Below the thin upper
> crust of high rollers, there is a dense layer of struggling aspirants to
> elite status, and below them dead-end poverty, which no longer aspires,
> if it ever did. The vast mass of urban New Yorkers are struggling to
> get by, in conditions that are truly unbearable, from the helots who
> open the hair salongs at 6 in the morning and lock them up at 89 at
> night to the dry cleaners who have worked 12 hours a day in the steam
> and fumes ever since they stepped off the boat from Europe 60 or 70
> years ago.
> It's great that I can get my hair washed at any hour of day or night
> and my clothes altered or invisibly mended within four hours of dropping
> them off, but it is also terrible.If I ask these people about their
> working lives, they display no rancour. They tell me they cannot afford
> to retire and are amused at my consternation. They would rather keep on
> working, they say. What else would they do? The pain in the
> hairdresser's feet and back, the listlessness and pallor of the dry
> cleaner, can't be complained of, Everbody has to be up.
> The power of positive thinking is to convince people that the
> nararative of their grim existence is a success story. Though New
> Yorkers have been tellling themselves that story for so long that they
> have stopped believing it, they cannot permit themselves to stop
> telling it.
> Everywhere in New York, wizened ancients are drudging. The elevator
> operator who takes me up to my hotel room looks 90, if a day. Her bird
> body balanced on groosly distorted feet; the hands in her white goves
> are knobbly with arthritis; her skeletal face is gailly painted and her
> few remaining hairs coloured bight auburn and brushed up into a
> transparent crest. She opens and shuts the doors of her elevator as if
> her only ambition had been to do just that. I want to howl with rage on
> her behalf.
> Though I love New York, I disapprove of it. Dreary as Ottawa was, it
> was in the end a better place than New York. Canadians believe that
> happiness is living in a just society; they will not sing the Yankee
> song that capitalism is happiness, capitalism is freedom. Canadians have
> a lively sense of decency and human dignity. Though no Canadian can
> afford freshly squeezed orange juice, every Canddian can have juice made
> from concentrate. Thae lack of luxury is meant to coincide with the
> absence of misery. It doesn't work altogether, but the idea is worth
> defending.
>
> **********
> It's flattering that Germaine Greer sees more dignity and social justice
> in Canadian society..but along comes the new right and the Harris
> government rushing blindly to push us into the same thing
