Apple and Walmart have no business casting stones
He is not read as much these days as he should be, and certainly not at all as much as he was in his prime. I am speaking of a man whom the Reverend Sydney Smith — an Oscar Wilde under a cleric’s gown — described as a “book in britches” and of whom on another occasion he remarked: “His enemies might perhaps have said before ... that he talks rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful.”
The magnet for such reflections was one whose name alone, Thomas Babington Macaulay, almost indexes his character. Baron Macaulay, as he became in his latter days, was one of those prodigies of 19th-century Britain who combined vast intelligence, sublime self-confidence and near preternatural intellectual industry. At the age when most children are still struggling through the first half of the alphabet, an incident occurred when a nurse spilt some hot tea on the his precocious lap. She was shocked, alarmed and inquired of her young charge how he was feeling.
He calmed her with this pearl: “Thank you, Madam. The agony is abated.” Macaulay was then four, or nearly four.
Of him it could be said, as earlier it was of Samuel Johnson, that “he devoured whole libraries.”
His collected essays were once on every home library shelf. From the schoolhouse to the Commons, Macaulay’s works were a presence. Winston Churchill’s panoramic style, the very sweep of his imagination, owes much to Macaulay. For amplitude of effect, and vividness of specific fact, detail and anecdote, he is still very much unsurpassed. And as with all great narrative writers he had a gift for the compressed observation — and one of his remarks sits ever so pertinently today. Always the bitter enemy of Cant — the ostentatious and public trumpeting of hollow, unfelt pieties — he once wrote: I know nothing so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Oh, Mac au l a y, thou shouldn’t be living at this hour. I think of that observation when I read over the past few days about our new Vatican — Apple Inc. — and its guardian conscience, that of CEO Tim Cook, declaring the moral bankruptcy of the State of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act. Apparently that legislation might provide some sort of a defence against the charge of bigotry if the bakers and florists of that innocent state refuse, on religious grounds, to bake a cake for, or fluoresce, a gay wedding.
A Twitter war (see Clausewitz; das TwitterKrieg) on this heinous possibility has blighted the republic to the south, which is no surprise, short bursts of illogic and foul temper on social media being the chosen form and venue for all modern-day cant.
To this combustion the greatest capitalist organization on the face of the planet has added its tendentious and bleating voice. Apple Inc., the Forest Lawn of consumer geekitude, its sterile white mall stores, churches of the latter day hipster, is a mega- corporation that has placed its shiny gewgaws in the hands of near billions, and is itself now worth something close to a trillion dollars. Some of those swollen profits come from outsourcing the manufacture of its gleamy smooth gadgets to China, and the labour of unknown, impoverished and most importantly underpaid — by any Western standard — men and woman. Only the real Lord knows what miseries that involves.
Nonetheless the St. Peter of Apple, Mr. Timothy Cook, the late Steve Jobs (Bluetooth be upon him) being the Messiah, has seen fit to vent on the law, how outrageous it is, and to alert the worldwide congregation of Apple to Indiana’s backward and evil regime.
In this he has improbable, defiantly unlikely ecumenical support. He has been joined by another evangelist of the age’s new moralism, none other than the Chairman of Walmart, Doug McMillon. Walmart, besides being world famous for its social justice impulses, is now offering a whole new line of really cheap sermons. It’s a twofer. Buy a $6 toaster and you can clear your conscience for less than a dime at Walmart. The reverend Mr. McMillon, like Mr. Cook, has hopped on the cant bandwagon to objurgate, berate and anathemize Indiana and all that state’s works and pomps.
Walmart and Apple — it is a conjunction I had not thought to see. It has me wondering if the end days are upon us, when the iPhone lies down with the No-Brand discount widescreen TV. When Apple and Walmart are on the same page, I’d recommend throwing away the book. The whole thing is of course a charade, a full hot air blimp of the purest cant — an effort to ingratiate with the secular progressive worldview by an ostentatious fit of public moralizing: cant in its undiluted and quintessential state.
There will be no blockade of gay weddings in Indiana. There will be no shortage of cakes and flowers when wanted or needed. And before Walmart and Apple get to hyping secular dogmatism — for this is what it is — they should attend their own and graver flaws. If the great injunction of the real Messiah has any force these days, the one who spoke of he who is without sin throwing the first stone, then the reigning plutocrats of Apple and Walmart might want to check their mirrors and their consciences before reaching for rocks to heave at Indiana and its citizens.
I think now what Macaulay would have written on Pharisees and white sepulchres, of motes and beams and the eyes that house them. The cant of corporate indignation to spur sales — we are in the deepest valley of hypocrisy. Spare your sermons till you deal with the very poor who make your products.
Next time I pass an Apple store, I will say a prayer, and the next time I pass a Walmart I will remember it is Apple’s twin, and say another. But pass them both I will.