. Merchants don't degrade and > simplify customers -- > customers do that to themselves.
If Miller really believes that the merchant is above any moral code, would he sell real dope just because some people want it? Perhaps he draws the line at what is legal or not. Maybe that's ok. You can't deny a person buying a length of rope just because he may hang himself with it, or worse, hang another. Nevertheless, questions regarding access to goods and how they are valued lies at the heart of any democratic system. Who decides what's best for the common good balanced against individual desires? However, I do find it strange that Miller defends the right to provide (legal) goods to any customer at his shop when at the same time he argues for restrictions of aesthetic values and the goods evoking them. Or do I misunderstand his many comments aimed against the free play of art ideas and objects? But I do agree that in its broad context junk is the stuff that is no longer valued for its supposed primary uses. Someone may put it to new purpose and make it more useful and valuable than before. In fiction who can forget Quixote's use of an old pot for a helmet? In art, just one example would be Rauschenberg's "combines" that sent generations of young artists scurring off to dumps and junkstores looking for their next artwork. And what precocious kid hasn't made use of some household discard for imaginative play? The real value of words like "junk" is that they can be attached to several different subjects while always retaining a tie to their most common referent. Thus junk as denoting rusty old pots and pans or dope or even semen, or what else? This word re-branding is a common thing in "street culture". WC
