Deborah Tobola
Whatever the Market Will Bear

Translated from the Greek, it means "home pain"
and the only cure for nostalgia is the journey back home.
Say you've been gone for thirty years-gone to war, gone to college,
to the big city fast-track or teaching overseas. You return
to the sequestered suburbs, the run-down small town and find
the bulldozer of common culture has come
and flattened a swath, deleting the corner grocery, the shop
of the silly woman selling funky clothes, the romantic bookstore
with its literary couple calling with birth announcements,
new books. The prison on one end of town
and the crank lab on the other vie for consumer dollars,
working in a cooperative venture with local law enforcement
to keep the state afloat with a rasion d'etre.
Cut: school budgets, library hours, parks & rec, culture.
Your parents lock their doors at night, afraid the world could end
with a bang.  You step outside under starlight
and in a trick of physics, you are standing under stars before
The Wall in Washington, D.C., a solid black granite wave
that washes over you, names of men lost, men who did not
make the journey back.  "I'm still coming back," says the vet beside you
and you wonder, is it limb by limb, an awakening of the body
like anesthesia wearing off?  Is the heart released
like rifle action? You touch The Wall to find a name,
close your eyes and when you open them, The Wall is gone.
You are in a clean, well-lighted place in the heart of your town,
a place of order and meaning, where people with blue vests
smile and greet you.  You find yourself in Wal-Mart with your parents,
people cheerful about the bounty of bargains, oblivious to
the New Universe, where virtual strangers meet and marry
at an intimate distance, www-dot-cybersex-dot-com. You need not
go far from home to find what you're looking for.  Anything you can imagine
is for sale: aesthetics by Martha Stewart, philosophy-perhaps not
Victor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, but certainly Chicken Soup
For the Soul-and soup can magnets for the fridge-Andy Warhol was right,
everyone gets theirs.  Even poetry is for sale at Wal-Mart. A book full
of misspellings and mistakes in grammar, but who cares? The woman
has been paid $23 for every minute she's been alive so far. If she's that
expensive, she must be good.  Not much chance that Jewel's poetry
will move you to awe, to the apprehension of Kant's meaning
of the sublime-not like the Lalique Jewels, the world described
in a snake, a butterfly, beauty that makes you gasp.  But mere beauty
is edged out here by whatever the market will bear.  There are books
by survivors of airplane crashes, the federal raid on Waco and
failed liposuction. Here's Johnnie Cochran's ceremony of innocence
at half-price-again-but you can't find Sheryl Crow in Music:
she's in a million-dollar time-out for writing naughty lyrics about kids
with Wal-Mart guns.  In communist countries, you call this censorship-
and send your men to death and nostalgia over it.  Here in America,
it's capitalism, the bottom line. And if the American appetite is fed
by the cheap and numerous, make more. You are standing
on the clean, white floor of Wal-Mart, hunting through a rack
of Kathy Lee shorts on sale.  Half-a-world away, people are standing
on the ice at the edge of the Beaufort Sea, butchering a Bowhead whale.
Steam and singing rise from the pinkening ice
and The People pray over the soul of the whale,
feed each other in the natural light of the lengthening day-
no middleman, no broker, no manipulation of appetite. The bargain here
is beauty without price.  Close your eyes and time
collapses, Inupiat whaling songs fade into Muzak and you
are in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, where you are met
by a panhandler. Go to the light he whispers and you look behind you
at the illuminated marketplace, lost in the heart
of your town. You wish the panhandler would write a book-
something beyond the horizon of the corporation.
You walk away, into granite darkness, where the uncolonized moon
wavers above the end of the 20th century. The only cure for nostalgia
is the journey back home, an act of memory-or is it imagination?
Like the vet beside you at The Wall, you pray to awaken.
Copyright © 1999 Deborah Tobola All Rights Reserved