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February 15, 2012 at 3:37pm
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Right now a boy is examining a pink wool sweater in the basement of an Urban Outfitters. The Urban Outfitters used to be a factory well-known for employing small and in many cases infirm children; one of the children’s accidental incineration was the catalyst for a state-wise protest that led to at least one child labor opponent’s assassination, and perhaps if you’re a student of late-19th century activism you’re familiar with the poster of a gruesomely disembodied head being carted around by a small and unquestionably infirm child, the caption reading—“Do Not Be an Example—Rather, Be a Friend!” The boy is standing on the very spot where just a century or so earlier the young James Moberly would stand for fourteen hour stretches mending ladies’ gloves. The boy is tired—he has, after all, been walking around the mall for an hour—so he kicks back on a $4200 couch designed to look like a huge, friendly, dead bear and starts flipping through a book called “Oh My God—Sex!” Perhaps this boy, our hero, in whom the dreams of four American generations manifest and take glorious shape—his stellar GPA, his commitment to social justice (that he can put ‘treasurer of Gay-Straight Alliance’ on his college application is merely an afterthought, a perk, and while he’s heard secondhand from friends that Urban Outfitters donates to regressive causes he can’t be expected to wear Kohl’s khakis like the classmate who sits alone reading Forbes at lunch, soon enough he’ll be at NYU with a vast network of thrift stores at his disposal but until that inevitable day…)—perhaps this boy, as he briefly rests his book on the armchair-paw and thinks, “I am being watched,” is feeling the presence of the young Moberly who, so terrified of his table’s watchman, hid in a machinery closet and, standing on a stool, peeked out of the door’s transom at his laboring comrades, daring never again to exit.