Of consumer cathedrals and Catholic capitalists

Can you love capitalism and hate the forms of commerce that the world's most capitalist economy creates? You can if you're Catholic and acculturated to cathedrals. Like Andrew Sullivan:

The striking paintings of Wal-Marts we featured this morning are not alone. Michelle Muldrow targets, among other supermarkets, Target. She calls these photographs paintings “Cathedrals of Desire.” Cathedrals used to function as a way to transcend desire into love, the worldly into the unworldly. Now these new consumer cathedrals make the worldly sacred and turn desire into a virtue.

I have to say that Target in particular engenders in me an instant version of what some hyper-lefty Germans called Konsumterrorismus: a total panic caused by the option of limitless shopping. (The definition is not undisputed). In my case, this phobia is compounded by the lighting – especially in Target. Aaron took me there once and I could not really get past the doorway. It was just horrifying. If I go to Hell, I will not have my ankles licked by fire. And I will not be lit from below. I will be subjected to giant, constant, overhead fluorescent lighting – what Michael Cunningham once called less lighting than the “banishment of all darkness.”

That gets it right, I think. All darkness must be banished to promote and encourage the purchase of things. This is what a huge amount of our culture now rests upon: the purchase of things. I guess you have to banish the literal darkness to disguise the shallow yet impenetrable darkness our shopping civilization represents.

Serendipity!  Yesterday, Andrew linked to an excellent review (by John Gray) of what sounds like an excellent biography of Karl Marx (by Jonathan Sperber). While unsparing about the harm wrought by Marx's "incoherent mishmash of idealist philosophy, dubious evolutionary speculation, and a positivistic view of history," Gray also credits Marx with an insight into the dynamics of capitalism to which the right is generally blind:

Perry's historiography, Newt's 'compassion'

A couple of notes on tonight's GOP foreign policy debate:

1. Perry, good fundamentalist or imitation thereof,  trusts to God to destroy countries he regards as accursed. Asked to name a major threat to the country, he named China, and said that it is destined for the ash heap of history because it is "not a country of virtue." Exhibit A: the millions of abortions the government countenances or encourages. He thus revealed a historiography akin to that of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was infamously reported to have said (citing Ayatollah Khomeini) that Israel should be wiped off the map.  Literally, Ahmadinejad said, "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." That was part of a broader recollection that Khomeini predicted the destruction of four regimes, three of which have in fact "vanished": the Shah's, the Soviet Union, and Saddam's.  Countries that are not "of virtue" get wiped off  the record -- i.e., end up in the ash heap.  Of course, that last image belongs to Marx, another theologian certain in his forecasts regarding history's inevitable course.