(From "The Things We Carry" by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June 2001, Harper's Magazine) In the house I grew up in, a blue plastic mat covered our bathtub, It had dozens of suction cups on the bottom that, when lifted from the porcelain, told their own peculiar story. A few years ago I visited home and found the tub bare. My mom had thrown the mat away. It was old arid soiled, she said. She seemed bewildered that I could he so angry. For as long as I con remember, I have had faith in old things. I have brethren in this faith, and we have our own television show. On the Antiques Roadshow two men stand before an 1853 map of the United States. One says he bought it for two dollars at a library sale. Then the other tells stories about it�about pioneers and immigrants, in land offices and taverns, looking for the routes that peeled off the Oregon Trail, or checking the Negro population, free and slave, of Missouri. This data had to be accurate, the storyteller said, because the maps were used by people. And because they were used, pawed over, weathered, and stained, few survive in such good condition. "Now you paid two dollars for it," he says. (Why is the storyteller talking about money?) "I assume you think it�s worth more. Do you have an idea of what it�s worth ?" "No idea whatsoever." (This can�t be true. Why did you buy it? Why do you like it?) "Well," says the appraiser, "a map like this, with such beautiful color and really remarkably good condition for this kind of thing�I would say a map like this would sell for between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars." A treasure chest, announced by the sound of pixie dust, passes across the bottom of the screen, leaving in its wake the words "1850s map, $ 1,200-1,500." The segment ends and another begins. "Tell me where you got this," says the storyteller-appraiser to the owner, and again out pour miracles of material history. Objects, with the Antiques Roadshow experts as their mediums, are made to breathe and speak. They become portals to the people who made, used, or owned them. The storytellers, before they appraise, read with astonishing depth. They can tell that a porcelain doll that passed through a family for generations was made in Germany sometime between 1840 and 1860. They can tell this from the flat-heel shoes. They can tell that a chair bought in Toronto was made in New York before the American Revolution and probably went to Canada with a Tory family fleeing the rebellion. If something has been in your family "forever," they can tell you just how long. But the sugar in this oatmeal, the opium in this tea�the sweet and addictive quality of the Antiques Roadshow�is the transition from story to price. The segments begin with the particular, the idiosyncratic, and the obscure but within minutes yield to the impersonal, the immediate. Whatever tension and wonder have been evoked by the distance of those pioneers and immigrants collapse into a number, a precise point on the map of everything that is possible, a tag instructing how lost time, people, or feelings can be owned. The burdens of history float away, replaced by treasure chests. Watching this, I thought of my Grandma Shenk, my dad�s mother�the Wolfs are my mom�s side�at her house in Florida. My uncle had just returned from a trip, and he had brought her a box of chocolate truffles. He told her that they were the most expensive chocolates in the world. I watched as she took them, beaming, and began to circulate among her guests with the box, offering pieces and repeating to each person, "These are the most expensive chocolates in the world." Whets she came to me I took a piece, and then I looked at my uncle. He shrugged. "I actually don�t know they�re the most expensive." "Money is the absolute means," writes Georg Simrnel in The Philosophy of Money, "that, on that very account, acquires the psychological significance of an absolute goal." In other words, people who exchange money for food, shelter, medicine, power�in our age, the list has no real end�often imbue the currency itself with the qualities of what it can purchase. And so it is that words such as "most expensive" can make a grown woman beam. My paternal grandmother is the child of Jews who fled Minsk for their lives. She grew up poor in Columbus, Ohio, where she met and married my grandfather, who grew tip even poorer. His parents had also fled Minsk, and settled in Toledo. His father died young, and his mother later took her own life. My grandfather told his younger brother and sisters that they should never speak of what happened. He took them to Columbus, where he worked for his uncle in a junkyard. He began to sell rebuilt carburetors. With his wife, he built a small house and then a larger one. He did business, and she made home, cooking the sweet, fatty foods of their ancestors. He went bankrupt, started over�first with auto parts and then with whatever else he could sell for more than he paid. They did well and eventually retired to Florida, where they took their grandchildren to eat stone crabs for dinner, and pointed to the larger houses, and told them how much the people who lived there were worth. They suffered for this life, and if later their youngest son chips off a piece of the sweet, fat life and gives it to her in a box, will you sneer at her, will you cry for her, will you stand its awe at this moment? This is an essentially American moment, is it has to do with the essential American faith: that the material world will provide, that hard work will produce wealth, and that wealth will correspond to happiness. I remember learning in grade school that Thomas Jefferson died penniless and being jarred by this fact as I would by a minor chord that did not resolve in a tonic. The grandchild of a salesman, I was raised to believe that great stories should resolve in great fortune, that true value should be recognized and rewarded with dollars. I grew to question this belief. I grew to sneer and toss my horns at "the market" and the cruelties done in its name, at the way people and things become commodities. Before the Industrial Revolution, for instance, people hid relationships to their land. Then land became "real estate" -- the word "real" used in its legal sense of pertaining to property and in its mathematical sense of "pertaining to quantities." This idea of "real" can smother the other�that which is authentic, genuine. Today, price tags hang on human eggs, on pain and suffering, on spiritual practice. "What price liberty?" Sotheby�s asked when auctioning a copy of the Declaration of Independence. (The answer: $8.14 million.) Some companies even hang price tags on their customers� lives (assigning "lifetime value" to their projected purchases, minus projected marketing costs). In such a world, The Market has become a kind of divine force� determining all that is real. The grandchild of a rabbi, I believe there is value more enduring, and also more elusive, than that which can be stamped with digits. I am caught in the thicket between two belief systems�the belief in things that can be touched and counted and passed among us (and given a price that corresponds to the desire for them) and the belief in feelings that can be evoked by those things but not counted, transferred, or even, finally, represented. Upon first glance, the Antiques Roadshow promises to resolve this inexorable tension. The show pays homage to memory and ancestry�to the felt, sacred ties that bind us. It seems to tether these spiritual values to the material world, through the magic of old things. During a show filmed in San Francisco, an old man brought the beer mug in which his grandmother kept her string. He learned that the mug was a rare piece from 1880 worth up to $4,000. "Oh, go on," he said, and then tears broke from his eyes and his voice choked. "Oh, I don�t believe it," he said. "Yes," the appraiser said, "you have a real, real treasure here." "Two to four thousand?" the man asked, his voice cracking and hard to hear. Watching this, I felt that he had been afforded a small, precious vision of his grandmother�s hands tossing string into that mug, of her lasting value. To the same show, in San Francisco, Carole Gray brought a book that had been given to her great-grandfather by the French government. As California�s first secretary of agriculture, he devised a way to control foot-and-mouth disease and later helped the French with their own outbreak. They thanked him with a thick volume that detailed the Empress Josephine�s gardens, one of about a hundred printed, lavishly illustrated with signed lithograph plates by Pierre Joseph Redout�. "Do you have any opinion as to what this book might be worth?" Jerry Patterson of William Doyle Galleries asked Gray. "Have you ever been told?" And then he told her: $75,000. I called Gray to ask her what had happened after the appraisal. Her first thought, she told me, was that she would need to get the book insured. This is a common reaction among viewers at home�who believe their heirloom is "just like" what is on screen�and insurance is now a necessity for most everyone who is taped at the Chubb�s Antiques Roadshow. Although PBS custom doesn�t allow the name for broadcast, the taping events are named for the show�s principal sponsor, the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies. (Oh, the hated insurance men, who can "value" anything. We believe no one can tell us what true value is. Then we cup our ears to hear.) Carole Gray earns a good living as an attorney in Mann County. The book was the one thing she requested from her grandmother�s estate. Even though everyone in the family referred to it as "the damn book," she loved it for the simple reason that it had meant so much to her grandma. She can�t imagine selling it, she told me. But, I asked, has your view of it changed, now that you know the price? "Not at all," she said. "I already knew in my mind that it was a valuable thing." Then, after a pause, she added, "It does fill me with a lot more pride now. At that time, it was a very nice gift and worth something, and now it�s worth much more, so that�s in correlation with the work my great-grandfather did." I tried to ask Gray just what she meant by "valuable" and "worth." Did she mean intrinsic or external worth? Moral or market value? I soon gave up in a fit of verbal exhaustion. These distinctions I could not articulate. They had, for practical purposes, been erased. And so I could not ask the crucial question: What is value? Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
