The emotional economy in Holland

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reflecting on Robbie Williams, Dutch journalist Jan Kuitenbrouwer has some
interesting backchat comments on the critique of the political economy of
consumption, in a recent issue of the middleclass "Hague Post/Time" magazine
(12 March 2004 issue, p. 90), of which I have translated this excerpt:

"I was at the Shoe Giant this week, with my daughter. Shoe Giant is a
chainstore in Holland for discount shoes.  You can quickly buy a knockoff
there of any shoe fashion trend, for a tenth of the price that you would pay
for the designer brand that started it a few months' earlier.

My poor daughter was pining for a special type of shoes that is now terribly
fashionable (a sort of haha-over-the-top whorepumps model - once upon a time
introduced as a kinky statement on a Parisian catwalk, but nowadays readily
available for All Ages in every shoe store). But since we refuse to buy them
for her, she wanted to buy them from her own pocket money, and that is how
we got there.

A bare hall, racks provisioned for battle, advertising everywhere in screamy
colours, and in the corner one of those "cashier castles" with the staff, a
couple of bored, uniformed teenage girls, on duty. There are so many shoes
there, assembled from so many inferior materials, that the chemical smell
alone is unbearable, never mind the depressing ugliness of what was on sale,
and how it was presented.

For the ceiling suddenly crackled, rather loudly, a radio station: two DJ's
were in dialogue, or rather, the diskjockey and his sidekick (a new
occupational group in the radio world, of which the representatives, I read,
are called "co-hosts"). They were talking about a singer, an Idols candidate
of whom nude images had been discovered and published in one of the gossip
glossies.

They explained in detail to each other what could be seen on those photo's:
yep, they were fucking, yep, he was in her, and in that take, she had him in
her mouth. I stood there, among that grotesquely ugly footwear, in that
terrible smell and the rancid conversation, and there was my daughter, with
one of those grotesque whore-shoes in her hand, dreamily staring in front of
her, as the teenagers hung about, boredly chewing chewing gum by their
cashiers' castle, in this Dutch Shoe Giant filial, one of the 200 where 22
million shoes are sold every year [Dutch population: 16.2 million - JB], and
the DJ and his co-host, who must have been earning 500,000 euro a year, kept
on talking about those porno pictures (was she a tasty morsel or not, and so
on).

For a short moment, just fleetingly, I had the feeling that I was in hell -
where there is no more dignity, no decorum, not even any skin. Just flesh
and bones."

Jurriaan