*
Monday morning the good weather persisted and O’Connelly left the women to their Christmas shopping and Liam to his business calls and messages.
It was another great day for Cornucopia. O’Connelly’s new book was progressing and evidence of his futuristic vision was at hand. Looking around, the word’s Henry Miller used to describe America in 1939, came back to him: nowhere in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete, the same description suited Cologne in Christmas 2015.
The contents of brilliantly light store windows were separated from shoppers by nothing more than a fine pane of glass, behind which were the objects that promised to transform prospective buyers into the alluring small screen images of their idols.
A flash of plastic and anything they desired within reason was theirs: fashions, sports wear, jewellery, watches, iPhones, gadgets, in brief just about anything! Kaufhof, Karstadt, Sportscheck, C&A, Saturn, Peek & Cloppenburg, as well as smaller outlets lined every street, vying with each other to attract customers. The centre of Cologne, like so many other cities, was a vast emporium, where for weary shoppers there were beer kellers, coffee shops, bakeries piled high with pastries, pretzels, schinken and käse brötchen, and of course the ubiquitous McDonald’s, not forgetting a multitude bars and stands at the various Weinachtsmarkts. And if all that was not enough to satisfy the desires of consumers, travel agents proposed ten days all inclusive on the beach in Phuket, Cuba or the Yucatán for prices the average shoppers grandparents could have never dreamed of.
The crowds in the Weihnachtsmarkts, the Bier Kellers, restaurants, shops and on the street’s, looked happy. Cornucopia was not a world of misery. The consumers: families with children, couples, young men and women, retirees, were all well fed, well dressed, warm and looking forward to the year-end’s festivities with the families and friends.
On the great day, the birth of Christ, they would exchange gifts. Then, after a celebratory feast, they would sit back to listen to their country’s leader speak of hope and happiness, some, in passing, would listen to the Pope’s year-end’s message, who in contrast to the world’s leaders, would remind his brethren of the world’s ills.
The Holy Father would spare a word for those huddled, somewhere beyond view of plenitude, in gymnasiums, halls, dormitories and camps on the outskirts of the Cornucopian cities of Germany and other European nations: a million or more Syrian asylum seekers and immigrants from benighted lands, who knew nothing of Weihnacht and Jesus, waiting patiently in the hope they could one day partake in the outpouring of Cornucopia.
Further away, much further, were the Chinese workers and those of the third world. They supplied the haves with their needs. In Shenzhen, the home of the iPhone, the average assembly worker earned three hundred euros a month. In Indonesia or the Philippines it was much less.
Somewhere in the pedestrian zone outside of Peek & Cloppenburg or Kaufhof, a well dressed young woman gave a beggar a lunch pack … a generous Christian act, but what would happen if everyone gave the poor fucker a lunch pack. They were unnegotiable! He could not buy a warm bed with a surplus of lunch packs!
Cornucopia Page 121
