Hack journalists everywhere were given an early Christmas gift on Friday when a mob of early morning shoppers trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death on Long Island, and hours later two men had an old-timey duel in the aisles of a California Toys R Us.
Consumerism! Greed! America! The true meaning of Christmas! This is fertile metaphorical ground, and I expect it will be thoroughly plowed as this news cycle plays out. Keep an eye out for stories that look to wrap this all up in a pretty little thematic bow, and post them here as updates. Bonus points if they are from Bob Layton.
UPDATE: (12/01/08, above photo courtesy of AP)
“Dr.” Judith Rich at Huffington Post wildly gesticulates, “Competition is so endemic to our culture, consumption has become a competitive sport. We’ve become “guerilla” consumers, stalking our “prey,” engaging in strange rituals that commence in the wee hours of the morning on the day after Thanksgiving.”
The New York Times dazzles with its parallel high and low culture references, at once calling the event a modern day Guernica and comparing it to a piñata:
In a sense, the American economy has become a kind of piñata — lots of treats in there, but no guarantee that you will get any, making people prone to frenzy and sending some home bruised.
It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things they wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.
UPDATE: (12/02/08)
A columnist at the Washington Post exclaims that “We are buying ourselves to death. Literally.” I think what she meant to say was “We are buying ourselves to death. Figuratively. Literally, we are just trampling each other to death as usual.” I also strongly disagree with her assertion that “Nobody actually needs a 50-inch flat screen plasma TV. Nobody.”
Filed under: Uncategorized , Black Friday, Bob Layton, Consumerism, Tragicomedy, Zombies
