Sign O' the Times

It's wrong to look for metaphors in contemporary events, but the novelist in me can't help but notice when episodes seem to take on lives of their own. In the midst of the financial crisis, I've been aware of those news items which stick out as being almost too perfectly symbolic - those events encapsulating more than just tumbling stock prices or crumbled businesses or cut jobs. The kind of event that, were it to appear in the narrative of an Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck work, would be sneered at as too heavy-handed, too obvious, too outrageous.

The trampling to death of 34-year-old temporary worker Jdimytai Damour by 2,000 Wal-Mart customers stampeding for Plasma HDTVs sums up the moral rot and consumer addiction that now partly defines our culture. In a time of war, job loss and deep uncertainty, the mantra that shopping is patriotic has become an undisputed trope, and while the lines for the aptly named Black Friday deals were smaller than last year's, they proved no less frenzied. The incident has only heightened my disdain for Wal-Mart and other discount-retail operations, but it also heightens my disdain for both the marketing forces dictated by a nation dependent on consumer spending (currently 70% of GDP) and the citizens who respond so willingly to the call. Any tightening of the belts or movement away from overconsumption this holiday season will unfortunately be overshadowed, at least in my mind, by the gruesome events of last week. Unfairly or not, the trampling of Jdimytai Damour will serve as an apt symbol of America circa 2008.

Yet I'm not sure if the Wal-Mart stampede alone can sum up the confused response to economic troubles. If the events of 2008 were unfolding within the satirical pages of a Tom Wolfe novel, his descriptions of working-class folks breaking down the doors at 5 AM to grab oversized television sets would no doubt be balanced with a reflecting-pool nod to the leisure class. And while examples abound across the landscape, a small and relatively unimportant news item caught my eye yesterday as particularly appropriate. Copia, the ambitious and oh-so-refined food/wine/art museum (or, as they've labeled it, "The American Center for Wine, Food and the Arts," in that order, please) in the Napa Valley, shut its doors suddenly on November 21st, locking employees out and cancelling upcoming corporate events. Yesterday, it filed for bankruptcy protection. Costing an estimated $55 million to start up, the center had lost upwards of $4 million per fiscal year since opening in late 2001.

I'm not sure who or what the target audience for Copia originally was. One suspects there was a hope to draw in the wine-slurping limo crowd, who'd gladly plunk down $25 for admission and an additional $50 for a "how wine is made" demonstration if they thought it might be useful for their portfolio. Or maybe they hoped to suck in the rubes stumbling around Napa who don't know the difference between a Ravenswood and a Joseph Phelps, and might be suitably awed by the pretensions on display and an ability to indulge in a little Veblenesque conspicuous consumption? Or the Fortune 500 crowd, always on the lookout for a suitable backdrop for corporate getaways, and willing to invest the better part of a $50 bill for a pretzel stick dipped into local mustard (a detail gleaned from the comments section of this NYTimes article)?

In the end, what's most striking about the quick failure of this pricey monument to refined food and wine (and the linking of both to high art) is how wrong-headed the venture was from its inception - namely, how it approached fundamental aspects of life and culture from the vantage point of observation and preservation. To remove food and wine from the living environments in which they both grow and should be enjoyed in is more than just a smug act of refinement. It is to declare the one product we shouldn't feel guilty about consuming - indeed, the only products capable of being consumed - a museum piece.

Observe and ponder the food and fermented grape. Consume the electronic gadgets and flat screens. And ask where the line between metaphor and life should be drawn.