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Door-buster Nation

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By Steve Klinger.

I am obviously not only a worrywart but a moron. Since about mid-September we’ve been staring into the economic abyss with our ankles wrapped around the last tree at the edge of the cliff, watching our less fortunate neighbors go whizzing by on their way to total ruination. I somehow thought that might be sobering to some folks. My dumb.

The country has lost over a million jobs this year. The stock market has lost a third of its value in the last two months. Home foreclosures continue to increase, along with homelessness, hunger and bankruptcies. Even optimistic experts say things will get worse before they get better. If they get better.

So what does America do? Go shopping on Black Friday, of course! And I don’t just mean stop by the big box store on the way to turkey leftovers with mom. I mean camping out. In a tent. All night. In a line outside Best Buy or Wal-Mart.  And not just a peaceful line where dutiful shoppers wait their turn to calmly roll up more credit card debt. I mean stampede, as in one Long Island Wal-Mart, where a crowd of 2,000 that had been building since 9 p.m. literally broke the door down at 5 a.m. and trampled a Wal-Mart worker to death. When we say door busters, we mean door busters.

Meanwhile, in Palm Desert, Calif. two men were shot dead in a Toys R Us store, though apparently the dispute that led to the shooting was personal and not over an Xbox. Cynic that I am, I have to suspect there was a shopping angle somehow. I mean, you don’t go to Toys R Us just to have witnesses.

Nationwide, revenues were up 3 percent over last year’s Black Friday, and the MSM spent every minute not devoted to burning buildings in Mumbai chronicling Americans loading up with the latest gifts and gadgets. The manager of a Las Cruces Wal-Mart says business was great, and one guy had five 32-inch HD TVs in his shopping cart. Recession, what recession?

No mainstream reporter or well-coiffed anchor eveb bothered to pause and reflect on this phenomenon, if only to ask, What is wrong with these people?

No, the operative approach remains a total state of denial, with the economy just one more annoying obstacle between regular folks at their big-screen TVs, like rainy weather, or maybe a flat tire. Dad lost his job, and we just applied for food stamps, so I guess we’ll have to get the 50-inch plasma instead of the 52-inch LCD, and we’ll have to wait on the Blue-Ray player till after the first of the month.

We don’t talk about the shopping addiction; the underlying behavior is as sacrosanct as apple pie. I can hear Sarah Palin right now, all the way from Wasilla, sayin’, “You betcha, we were out there by four at 25-below, just stockin’ up on those laptops and smart phones at those great pro-America prices that God gave us the opportunity to go out there and do that shoppin’ in our mighty, freedom-lovin’ nation that we give so many thanks for with all our great family values.”

If a lot of these people (Palin aside) voted for Barack Obama, it wasn’t to help him make the hard choices that just might set the country back on the right track. It wasn’t like they could even focus on choices, except for deciding between Samsung and Sanyo. What the hell, gas is back under $2 a gallon, so let’s fire up the Expedition and load it up with good deals. Obama will fix everything.

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