We have been discovering various silver linings around the dark clouds of the Pandemic, such as the apparent fact that it’s not really necessary to go to the office to do office work, so to speak. Who knew? (Negative findings are also appreciated. You really do have to go to school to go to school. I knew.) One silver lining involves household detritus. The single-stream recycling system in force in our area allows, in fact seems to encourage you to throw all recyclable materials promiscuously into the same bin. One result of this, at least in my neighborhood, has been a certain amount of rain-sodden, catsup-stained newspaper advertisements blowing around the streets after windy, wet recycling days. In my opinion the best way of minimizing the potential mess is to enclose the paper materials in a cardboard box sealed without tape by the “organic” spiraled flap technique. My system works very well indeed, but of course it does depend upon the availability of suitably sized cardboard boxes. That has proved to be no problem at all since I became a regular Amazon customer.
But I am more than an Amazon customer. I am an Amazon fan, and that is a second-degree felony in the awokening circles in which I travel. Or used to—traveling having been abolished for the same reason that I became an Amazon customer. Though one must be impressed by entrepreneurial daring and success on such a vast scale, I have no particular admiration for Mr. Bezos; and I do believe there is often truth in the phrase “filthy rich”. Our current gilded age seems not much of an improvement, in terms of its ethical tone, over the one in the late nineteenth century. I do not like trusts, cartels, or de facto monopolies. On the other hand I do not hold it against Bezos—as many of my more politically alert neighbors seem to do—that he offers employment to a million and a half of our fellow citizens who need and want productive work in a segment of the labor market not universally characterized by decent wages or working conditions. A telling evidence that some prominent politicians in one of our major political parties might be losing the “ordinary working Americans” plot could be detected about two years ago in the olympian tone with which they put the kibosh on an Amazon “mega-center” proposed for the borough of Queens in New York City. I also have to note the dramatic contrasts, so far as speed, efficiency, and competence are concerned, between my dealings with Amazon and those involving any branch of federal, state, or local government.
I keep reading about the damage I am doing to “Main Street” and to “Mom and Pop stores” by heavy dependence upon the behemoth of Amazon. I know all about Mom and Pop stores. For a long time I lived way out in the country where the nearest store—though not very near—was the Shady Grove Gas and Gro. (Gro would have been “Grocery” had there been more space on the sign.) There one could find (in addition to most forms of junk food known to man) an inadequate selection of some staples at elevated prices, with the rip-off softened by the rustic bonhomie of Mom or Pop and their clientele of soda-swilling regulars who hung out there during most opening hours. The same was true of the mini-mart “alimentaries” in little places in France and Italy that I have loved and frequented in years gone by. Like the romantic medievalists of the nineteenth century, like Minever Cheevey, like any self-respecting reactionary, I can yearn for the Mass-and-Maypole world of a gentler, simpler time. The truth is, however, just at the moment the Mom and Pop I am most worried about are a couple of less than athletic octogenarians admonished by authority figures from Dr. Fauci to their juvenile grandchildren to stay at home, avoid all venues of normal social life, indeed avoid if possible all human contact and probably that of cats and dogs just to be extra safe. Amazon has done wonders for this couple, which is to say for us.
I am not an entirely satisfied customer. I do wish that Amazon had another name. Presumably you know that the possibly folk etymology of “Amazon” is “with one boob amputated”—such a body modification being helpful for purposes of martial archery. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that Amazons were female and they were bellicose. Neither of these Amazonian characteristics is of particular relevance to Amazon.com, whereas gigantism is. When it was operating out of Bezos’s garage as a bookstore, “Amazon” was actually pretty cheeky and aspirational. But what it has become is certainly an epic enterprise, and all epic enterprises require monsters and giants. Homer had his Harpies and his Cyclops, Vergil his Cerberus and his Cacus. Dante, harvesting his gleanings from the tradition of both poets, became probably the most prolific recycler and inventor of monsters and giants in all of our literature.
But the greatest of all literary monster/giants, in my view, is Adamastor, even though one less familiar to readers than he might be. He was one of the Titans, a god-giant from the dawn of time. In my view, Amazon.com should by rights be called Adamastor.com. As a poetic personification Adamastor is the sixteenth-century brain-child of Luis de Camões in his great mytho-historical treatment of the eastern navigation undertaken by Vasco da Gama in 1497, his epic poem the Lusiads. The meaning of “Lusiads” is something like “the feats of the heirs of Lusus (i.e., the Portuguese)”. To get to India from Portugal Vasco da Gama had to sail south along the vast length of the whole of the western coasts of Africa, round the southern Cape, and then turn northeast through the channel between the African mainland and Madagascar into the Indian Ocean and toward the southwestern tip of the Subcontinent and Calicut (Calcutta). The storm-tossed seas off the Cape of Good Hope were the most ferocious the mariners had to face.
It requires only a bit of poetic imagination to see in the cartographic tips of both southern Africa and southern India a huge human head with a pointed beard. The crews on the endangered Portuguese ships are terrified by the sight of a furious giant rising out of the sea. This Adamastor is the gigantic and threatening anthropomorphic manifestation of the Cape’s geography and meteorology. “I am that vast cape,” the monster bellows in his tremendous voice, “locked in secrecy, that Cape of Hurricanes your people call…I round out Africa’s extremity in my hid headland, where the shore lines fall away, toward the Antarctic Pole prolonged, which your audacity has deeply wronged.”* The actual name Adamastor could be based in philological error or it could be pseudo-Greek for “uncontrollable.” The goal of the Portuguese mariners in the Lusiads is the establishment of commercial trade on a previously unimaginable scale. It would be difficult to come up with an industrial mascot more fitting for an international commercial empire so voracious, ruthless, and terrifying. For I fully admit that Amazon.com is “problematical,” to invoke a journalistic term of art useful when one wants to complain without being exactly clear what he is complaining about. One of the big problems it causes me is the surfeit of cardboard boxes.
*V, 50, translation by Leonard Bacon, The Lusiads (N.Y.: Hispanic Society of America, 1950), p. 187.
