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
