The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, December 23, 2024

Notebook: Walking around Volusia Mall recently–an oddly appealing, sadly serene place that silently echoes unsung blues–I saw a man of  girth worthy of Grover Cleveland sitting on a bench, his elbows resting on his knees, with an expression of complete and utter, imperious indifference. It would not have been unusual in a mall. This is what we often do when we sit in a mall. We have to be indifferent to the surroundings, otherwise we would become too aware of the surroundings’ indifference. A mall’s enclosure against the universe puts us in our existentially insignificant place, at least as consumers. Except that the girthy man  wasn’t being indifferent to the mall, but to the child next to him. The child was crying, begging for his care. The child rose no higher than the man’s knee, and looked no bigger. His cries were tiny staccatos, annoying and grating. He was desperate. If he wasn’t in pain, anyone walking by and seeing him in that state would be, and would then be doubled up in fury at the man’s–the child’s father’s, it was obvious–indifference. It wasn’t a tired indifference. It wasn’t the indifference of a man who looked as if he’d worked all day and was just now spending a little time with his child, a man who’d been up since dawn and just couldn’t take it anymore. This man was putting effort into his indifference. He had the means, the energy to be indifferent. It was a studied, intentional, self-aware indifference. He would at times look at his child, look through his child as if to make him, his own son, see how indifferent he was (is this how Abraham looked at his son before he readied to stab him?), how he would not do the simplest gesture required at a moment like this–picking up the child, comforting him, hugging him. The man would not do that. He would look at his child as if to say: I am more powerful than you, and you will not move me. I am teaching you a lesson. I am reminding you of your place. (If only the man knew his place in the universe, or in this mall.) It’s the sort of indifference that parents of a certain child-rearing ideology. The ideology is studded in the lead of medieval torture implements. It’s the ideology that thinks letting a child “cry it out” is a good thing, that comforting a child encourages sissiness, that a simple gesture of love breeds weakness. Where else do we know of this kind of depravity these days? (We have just elected it.) For all I know the big man, or rather the man who thought himself big, was a liberal anti-Dr. Spock. Whatever he was, he was the picture of cruelty. Cheryl and I couldn’t very well have picked up the child and rocked him for a minute. We’d have been shot and dragged around the mall, roped to the man’s F-150, though this man was no Achilles. He was just a heel. The saddest thing yet was that not a long distance down the mall’s empty alley was the mall’s Santa and his photographing elves, sitting there alone in their enclosure decorated for no one, without a single customer, a single child, a single indulgent parent.

—P.T.