Black Friday came this year, as it does every year, replete with the standard scenes of entire families of overfed porky-pies brawling — a sea of flabby flesh jiggling in chaotic gyrations — over doorbuster Victoria’s Secret lingerie and flat screen TV sales.
As a bonus, we also got at least one consumer-on-consumer mall shooting.
“Shots rang out at the Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Black Friday, leaving two people injured, police said in an update Friday evening…
Two people were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, including one with gunshot wounds, police said….
Police said the incident appears to have stemmed from a “disturbance” between two individuals, which escalated into gunfire.”
The All-American Black Friday chimp-outs over plastic bullshit are a longstanding national tradition, the documenting of which has only been made easier by a smartphone in every hand and ubiquitous social media.
I wish not to beat a dead horse, nor to moralize more than I have already, so I leave you with this rhetorical question: is such mindless consumerism — with a bit of the old ultra-violence sprinkled in here and there — the pinnacle of human civilization post-WWII, as we have been led to believe, or rather the death-rattle of a collapsing empire?
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” -H. L. Mencken
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
