And now for something a bit lighter: The great Garfinkel's caper

If this were a perfect world, to be a boy and 17-years-old would be banned, or somehow made illegal, anyway.  I say this from experience, some of which is outlined in this story.

It was the early winter of 1964 in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. when I and three friends, who were all long on energy and short on some essential brain cells, decided it would be a fantastic idea to pull off the greatest shoplifting caper in our young lives.  We had been engaging in that time-honored practice of youth and lack of good sense for several months by December of that year.  Looking back with the benefit of decades of hindsight, I have no idea whatsoever why we had been rampaging through the department stores of downtown Washington D.C. and its suburbs shoplifting stuff like men’s cologne – English Leather and Canoe were favorites – and madras shirts and men’s rep ties, although just by reviewing the targets of our crimes, I suspect enhancing our ability to attract the attention of girls played a major role.

We had a favorite method:  Because Christmas was approaching, and our targets were department stores like Garfinkel’s, Hecht’s and Woodward &  Lothrop, we knew that there would be copious numbers of shoppers carrying presents which the department stores would have kindly wrapped in colorful paper and ribbon for their customers.  I’m pretty sure it was me who came up with the idea of taking small boxes – mine was a shoebox, as I recall – covered in Christmasy wrapping paper, an “X” cut into the bottom of the box with a razor through which we could quickly stuff the booty we sought. 

It worked perfectly.  We would enter a store, and with at least one of us carrying such a box, with the others making a show of looking over some nearby merchandise, the designated shoplifter would slip his box over a bottle of cologne, or stuff a madras shirt through the “X” on the bottom of the box and turn quickly and leave the area while the decoys kept the salespeople distracted.  We would then meet up on the street or in a parking lot and beat it the hell out of there in one of our parents’ cars, moving on to the next store and an identical caper.

We made off with enough cologne to drown a small animal in the stuff, and enough madras shirts to clothe a platoon of infantry.  The problem, it turned out, was that our methodology worked too perfectly.  After a couple of criminal outings, there wasn’t enough risk to excite the synapses of our budding brains.  Then came the day one of us – we nicknamed him “Hainder-hainder-Lill” for some reason I have long forgotten – had the idea of stepping up our game with a raid on the jewelry counter of the Garfinkel’s store in the 7 Corners Shopping Mall in Arlington, Virginia. 

I should stop here and note who we’re talking about.  Two of the thieves, upon graduating from high school the next year, were on their way to West Point; another was headed for Georgetown University; the fourth would attend the University of Virginia.  All of us knew this, of course.  We were good students who had good grades from good families, so of course we had, as a group, decided to engage in behavior that would cancel each of our acceptances to those good colleges, not to mention making us immediately eligible for the draft, with its concomitant invitation to “see the world” in sunny Vietnam, where a war had just begun to rage, uncontrollably, it would turn out.

So, the four of us attired ourselves in coats and (stolen) ties and headed for the 7 Corners Shopping Center, the first such “mall” that existed in suburban Virginia.  The Garfinkel’s store anchored the place at one end, and the whole structure was surrounded by a massive parking lot.  As implied by its name, 7 Corners was a regional intersection of multiple streets, two of them being major thoroughfares:  Arlington Boulevard, part of U.S. Route 50 which was one of the first roads that crossed the whole country, and Leesburg Pike, Route 7, that ran west to Leesburg and Winchester, where it met Route 50 and became part of that cross-country highway.  The other streets that crossed at 7 Corners, Wilson Boulevard and Sleepy Hollow Road, made it an ideal spot from which to get away, with the shopping center right at the dead center of all of them.

We entered Garfinkel’s separately so as not to attract attention.  Hainder-Hainder-Lill had scoped out the place, having made several reconnoitering missions of our target.  As I recall, the jewelry counters were arranged on the first floor just past the cosmetics counters and before you reached the displays of women’s clothing.  Our compatriot was correct that the counters were surprisingly sparsely attended.  The day being a Saturday not long before Christmas, the place was packed with shoppers.  Still, the whole thing looked too risky.  After arriving in the store and checking out the jewelry department, we met in another department and three of us voted against making the hit.  For one, most of the customers in the jewelry department were women.  It would look weird for four teenage boys to suddenly take an interest in women’s jewelry, wouldn’t it? 

So, we decided to scrap the mission and headed for the exit.  Just as we were passing the last of the jewelry counters, I looked around and found that Hainder-Hainder-Lill wasn’t among us.  Oh, no, I strategically thought.  I turned my head just in time to see him throw himself bodily across the top of one of the glass counters and scoop up a handful of jewelry and bolt for the exit.  He was a smart guy – he would go on to a career involving higher mathematics and exotic research of some sort – so instead of sprinting straight for the exit we were heading for, he turned, slowed down, and slipped into the dense forest of women’s clothes hanging closely together on display racks. 

The rest of us continued to saunter toward the exit, taking our time, perusing women’s perfume and body lotions and the like.  When we reached the car – I think we were using my parents’ green and white 1955 Plymouth station wagon, which got about 9 miles to the gallon and had a top speed of 70 downhill on a windless day, there sat Hainder-Hainder-Lill in the back seat, the pockets of his dress pants stuffed full of women’s jewelry.

I jumped in the driver’s seat, the other two geniuses took their places, and with the windows rolled up, we drove screaming with excitement and delight to a submarine sandwich shop on Wilson Boulevard to celebrate our victorious criminal enterprise with steak subs.

I can’t recall at this point what kinds of jewelry Hainder-Hainder-Lill had managed to grab, other than it was shiny and some if it was festooned with jewels that could have been diamonds but given the fact that the jewelry counters were in a lightly-defended department store, probably weren’t.  A decision was made not to attempt to “fence” the goods later at the 1789 Bar on 36ths Street in the heart of Georgetown, where our fake-ID’s had enabled us to continue our celebration over illegally-gotten draught beers.

After the Garfinkel’s Caper, our shoplifting spree sputtered and then died.  Success as jewel thieves made lifting a few bottles of Canoe look like small potatoes.  I think a few rep ties were still stolen – they slipped so easily from tie-displays they practically invited being shoplifted – but even stealing ties, too, lost its alure in the shadow of actual jewel theft.  Eventually, it dawned on someone among us that as actual admission to college got more near, risking our college careers on minor theft didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Somehow, human evolution had connected enough synapses in our dimly-lit teenage male minds that the future had become sufficiently illuminated that even the four of us could make out its outlines, and we retired from our lives as criminals.

The reason I have recounted this tale of teenage criminal decision making, or rather, the lack thereof, is because of something I heard at a dinner party over the weekend.  A very smart woman asked if I had read Marc Andreesen’s Substack essay, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”  “You should,” she suggested.

So, I did.  Marc Andreesen is one of the inventors of the web browser and from that spectacular leap into our digital future, he made zillions of dollars and became, as Ezra Klein called him in today’s New York Times, “the chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” who include such Galt-like figures as Elon Musk, Peter Theil, Larry Ellison, and Jack Abraham, who have collaborated in various mixes of personnel and money in such ventures as Planatir, the Theil Foundation, Uber, Reddit, and Airbnb, not to mention reaching into right-wing politics by supporting the likes of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.

Sounding like a latter-day Neitzsche – he even quotes the great master of the Ubermensch and the champion of the “will to power” – Andreesen’s manifesto goes well beyond pushing the inevitability and dominance of the techno-ideal into the fight-or-die concepts of the human condition pushed by the early Greeks.  Andreesen writes that “Techno optimists believe that societies, like sharks, grow or die.”  “We are not victims,” Andreesen assures us.  “We are conquerors.”  “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”

I could go on, but you get the picture.  Ezra Klein pulls from the Andreesen rant this gem from Nietzsche: “If you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.”  In other words, don’t be a loser; be one of us, who gaze into the stars and see a future dominated by those with “intelligence” and “energy,” two words that appear again and again in Andreesen’s paean to what Klein calls “reactionary futurism.”  Get on the train, or you will be left behind with the rest of the losers, the Übermensch of Silicon Valley commands us.

When I got to the section on what Andreesen calls “Technological Values,” I couldn’t help but conclude that what he was really writing about are his values and the values of other blathering right-wing heroes he celebrates.  Listen to this; it’s written in bullet-points, because the whole thing is written in bullet points, Twitter, or rather X-like in appearance and affect:

“We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness – strength.

We believe in merit and achievement.

We believe in bravery, in courage.

We believe in pride, confidence, and self respect – when earned.”

I read that, and I thought to myself, that’s what I believed when I was a 17-year-old shoplifter.  We put on our privilege like cologne and rushed into the future.  We believed in the superiority of who we were, with our lives and our intelligence and our comfort, and we had deluded ourselves, as junior Ubermenschs, into also believing that we had earned it, even what we stole from Garfinkel’s and Hecht’s and Woodward & Lothrop’s.