American Blood Sport: 2014 Black Friday Carnage Begins Earlier than Ever

Don’t even bother with the formalities of the traditional family Thanksgiving dinner this year. Just grab a turkey sandwich on the way out the door to the earlier than ever Black Friday sales events. In an ongoing race to the bottom, American retailers have gradually shifted their "door buster" sales extravaganzas from midnight on Friday into turkey day itself. Perhaps I am too old fashioned in that I find it abhorrent that a cherished annual holiday is being poisoned by the now obvious flaws in the American character. It just seems like greed, sloth,  selfishness, the need for that narcotic hit of instant gratification and most of all the suffocating dumbness that is so prevalent in late 2014 just did not exist back in the ‘good old days’. 

Despite my contempt for many stupid national rituals I have always been a sucker for Thanksgiving and a day when eating like a pig for once has an excuse. Other than having to occasionally deal with obnoxious family members like a virulently racist stepfather, an overbearing Jewish narcissist of a mother in law and other quirky personalities it is usually a good day. Food, drink and plenty of football. I get it that the real pilgrims were religious zealots cast out of England for their insane ways and sent to early America to kill "injuns" but fuck it, I just love this one particular holiday. It has yet to be completely ruined in the way that Christmas has but it isn't for lack of trying on the behalf of the greedy bastards who have run this once great country into the ground. 

The big retailers were throwing their doors open to the rampaging hordes as early as 6 pm yesterday. This was just around halftime of the humiliating stomping administered to Jerry Jones’ Dallas Cowboys by the Philadelphia Eagles. One of the great joys of Thanksgiving day is when the Cowboys lose and seeing that lemon-sucking, plastic surgery enhanced face of Jones as his asshole puckers. Such was a day yesterday when former Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez rose like a phoenix from the ashes of the legendary, career killing “butt fumble” to batter America’s team. The brutality on the field at the gargantuan electronic hippodrome in Arlington was however no match for the now traditional spectacle of idiots pummeling each other over limited quantities of deeply discounted made in China crap.

The inevitable videos of in store violence have already been popping up with two women in a California Wal-Mart throwing down over a Barbie doll. A stocky dude in Indiana wearing a Chicago Bears jersey very aggressively going after a home entertainment component with more vigor than an actual member of the NFL team and a brawl between two women at a Kohl’s store in California. The madness has even spread across the pond where one of this year’s best early internet videos has a knock-down, drag-out fight over cheap panties in a Victoria’s Secret outlet in the UK. There were  also reports of Michael Brown supporters boycotting stores in Ferguson (no reports of looting) and the usual myriad of the scrums of desperate and stupid people behaving badly.

People who have a certain sick sense of humor revel in the reports of in store slugfests and a good share of them always seem to take place at Wal-Mart locations. In a sign that the mega-chain that ate America is developing some sensitivity over the Black Friday bloodbaths this year there was an emphasis on getting the word out that the sales would spread over a five day period.  Big Smiley just endured the indignity of having to yank an ad about “fat girl” Halloween costumes that inflamed the political correctness Nazis and seems to be grappling with an identity crisis. Not that I can understand why “fat girl” costumes would present an image problem considering the parade of human livestock that on any given day shops there, but there is more competition for fewer dollars in the economic wasteland of Obamastan these days.

I am sure that the reports of fighting at the Big Smiley mosh pits will continue to break as the day goes on and more eyewitnesses are able to upload their smartphone videos to You Tube. 

The Real War On Christmas

Christmas has been under assault for years here in America only not by those devilish forces that are so often conjured up by highly paid establishment talking heads seeking to mobilize their political bases by conjuring up as H.L. Mencken once put it "an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary". The terrible liberals were hellbent on 'taking the Christ out of Christmas' shrilly shrieked the attack dogs for the elite primarily from their Fox News studios. While the on the flip side an enormous amount time and money was wasted on some of those very liberals waging war against nativity scenes on government property. Much sound and fury expended over a stockingful of nothing that only served to poison what remains of the holiday spirit in this star spangled land of exceptionalism. What has always gone largely unsaid (most certainly by the millionaire talking heads whose jobs are to sow the seeds of disunity) is that the real war against Christmas has been waged by nothing more complicated than good old American greed and the need to exact maximum profit with no concern of the consequences.

Christmas in America is in and of itself the ultimate triumph of corporate propaganda as it is far more geared towards getting consumers out to the malls and big box stores to participate in the gross annual pagan festival of rampant consumerism that is the holiday shopping season than in celebrating any religious aspects. In America Jesus Christ was long ago banished to playing second banana to Santa Claus in a land where the ultimate holiday season currency is not frankincense and muir but Visa and Mastercard. Stress and spending overkill, maxing out the plastic and indulging the need for more bling bling and foreign made electronic gadgetry has become a seasonal ritual as the sheeple continue to contribute to their own demise, playing with their toys in steerage as the national ship of fools sets course towards the iceberg of collapse and increases speed. Big banks, already grossly subsidized by a clueless and corrupt central bank to the tune of 85 billion a month and likely more when Janet Yellen takes over the Fed are singing Joy to the World as they lavish themselves with holiday bonuses, the ill-gotten spoils from the crony capitalist winners of the class war. Christ has indeed been banished from Christmas but long before he was run out of the temple by the moneychangers. Perhaps this is a bit overly religious in nature and I am personally not a religious man but such analogies are needed for many to see the extent to which all that was once good about the holiday season has been squeezed out of it by the same greedy bastards who have strip-mined the national workforce with their plague of offshoring which is like crack cocaine to CEOs and their short term focus on profit above all.

I remember the days past when the holiday season truly was about family, togetherness, good tidings and the bonds that were once sacred in simpler times before all was hijacked by the pigs. Greed and systemic corruption have succeeded in tainting this as well, painfully made ever the more evident with spreading of the Black Friday virus into Thanksgiving Day itself like some particularly malignant form of herpes. It is a social ill though and as the simultaneously heartrending and gut wrenching reports from the front lines of retail store skirmishes continue to pour in, some sardonically amusing and others just plain tragic there is very little to be festive about as the darkest instincts of many Americans are laid bare for all to see in the age of the smartphone camera. It is the dark underbelly of the corruption of capitalism, a system that made this country great yet has been destroyed courtesy of the cheats, swindlers, liars and criminals who have rigged the game and now use the polluted government that has been purchased to ensure that it will always be that way until the day when it collapses under its own weight. Free enterprise has left the building, the same massive retailers who have this year defiled Thanksgiving with their disgusting "Door Buster" orgies of greed have broken the backs of the traditional small businessmen and women and turned the American Dream into a perverse feverish nightmare. Predictably it is all encouraged by a corrupt state-corporate media that hypes and contributes to the sense of frenzy by their seductive imagery as well as incessant advertising  just as it serves the establishment in selling ruinous and bankrupting wars.

None of it is going to end well nor should it given the relative ease that the forces of greed and corruption were able to successfully hijack this country used and the apathy and willful ignorance that allowed it to.