I shop comfortably, mindlessly, compulsively; sometimes purposefully; often in a daze. I scrutinize merchandise with the privilege and prejudice of a Westerner. Consumption is my cultural responsibility and patriotic duty. This cornucopia is my birthright and I understand it well. Shopping synchronizes my heartbeat with the rhythms of industry. It teaches me my place in the social hierarchy. It initiates me into my many temporary tribes. Watching television is shopping just as reading the news is shopping. Meeting people is shopping. Travel is shopping. Shopping is choosing a momentary self out of a ceaseless catalog of disposable identities.
To not shop is to not pay attention.
If I had been born in Eastern Europe in the middle of the 20th Century I might have read these windows more pragmatically; perhaps even critically. But in the dying days of the Cold War I saw a vast, ad hoc museum of a great failing utopia. The Socialist dream had been made fragile by a simple but terminal misreading of human desire. Suddenly in 1990 this museum closed without fanfare or notice. History rightly marks that moment by what was born rather than by what fell away... but what did fall away?.