Black Friday has become permanently attached to the sick American psyche to the extent that is as much a cultural rite as it is a glimpse at the now thoroughly mutated form of capitalism that exists in this country today. Combining the needs for instant gratification, foreign manufactured electronic devices and shallowness of the current national character with the insatiable greed of retail giants seeking to hit it big on the biggest shopping day of the year at all costs the annual post-Thanksgiving melees are a window into the very soul of a collapsing empire. This year retailers escalated their assault on basic human decency and planted their flags in the middle of Thanksgiving itself with the majority throwing open their doors to bargain hunters looking for that holy grail of a deal at 8 pm about when the annual ritual of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys game was wrapping up. That was just when the doors opened, there are normally people who begin camping out in front of their big box stores at least the day before, often braving not only assault by their fellow losers and freaks but in some parts of the country with harsh weather conditions frostbite and hypothermia. Some I imagine imbibe of alcoholic beverages to deal with the boredom and take the edge off of the cold.
The biggest difference this year is that the traditional ugly stories began to pour in earlier than normal. I have to admit that one thing which really fascinates me is watching the You Tube videos of the in store carnage. The glimpses of wanton savagery span the country from a Wal-Mart in Fort Worth, Texas to Knoxville, Tennessee with a pack of obese women going after the Rachel Ray cookware to this throwdown from an undisclosed Target location. The poor Target “team members” should be eligible for hazardous duty pay. I wonder how long it is going to be until some lunatic gets so pissed off over being beaten to the door buster spectacular of the day pulls out a gun and just starts shooting people. There was a shooting last night at a Romeoville, Illinois Kohl’s location, this one by local police where a shoplifter was taken out while dragging a cop from a moving vehicle. There was also a Virginia man stabbed over a parking spot dispute and a Las Vegas man was shot by a thief to steal the television he had just purchased at his local Target and pepper spray was used on a man arguing with a Wal-Mart manager over a television in New Jersey. These are but a few of the grotesque tableaus this year. Big Blue Smiley apparently is reeling from negative publicity over their stores being ground zero for a good deal of the assaults, the poster of this You Tube video was allegedly kicked out for recording it. Notably today is the day when Wal-Mart workers are set to engage in a wave of protests against the heirs of the Walton family fortune and the slave labor conditions in their chain of plantations.
The mob scenes and early sales reports encouraged the parasitic looters on Wall Street with the markets already up this morning as the retail brutality contributed to the gambling spree further inflating the unsustainable stock bubble. I have a growing dread in the pit of my stomach that the day when the 85 billion dollar per month Federal Reserve subsidizing of the house of cards finally does collapse – which is inevitable – that the mentality that drives Black Friday will spill into the streets the day that the ATM’s no longer have cash and the debit and credit cards no longer work. The scenes from the big box retailers should scare the living hell out of anyone with the ability to think critically. It is one thing to stomp each other into pulp over a $98 HDTV doorbuster deal but it goes to the next level when the object is food. I would venture to bet that millions of Americans probably have no more than a day or two of food on hand and when the shit finally hits the fan the day that the rigged markets can no longer be preserved and the mother of all economic crashes hits not even the full might of the police state will be able to contain it. Think of The Road Warrior only with iPads.
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