Comatose sleepwalking Americans

High Cynicism

Read this article:

http://www.lsj.com/news/business/030717_wal-mart_1a-4a.html

Wal-Mart, the world's biggest proprietor of shit, opened in Okemos, Michigan the other day. It took them a good five years.
The objection in the community was that a Wal-Mart was not consistent with the "upscale" nature of Okemos, a suburb of
East Lansing which (rumor has it) is a blissland of middle class white people. Apparently what they consider "upscale" are things
like the vast Meridian Mall (my sister, in her naive days of early childhood when things like sprawl were apparent to her
in the most true and fundamental ways--sans the politics, that is--used to call the mall "graytown" with remarkable insight)
and its parking lot the size of Siena, strip malls, artery-suffocating grease quarries, gas stations up the whazoo, Holiday Inn
Expresses and enough CO2 hanging in the air to wipe out Rhode Island. Wal-Mart carried with it the stigma of fat white
trash trodding and waddling through the aisles in search of the latest "Home of the Brave, Land of the Free" t-shirt with an
air-brushed eagle's head superimposed on an Old Glory flapping in the sweet breeze. They were right, of course. The
Okemos store will attract people from all over:


"Until now, to go to Wal-Mart, it was a 50-mile round trip," said shopper Shirley White of Mason, who typically went to the Delta
store on Saginaw Highway. "I can come to this one every day if I want."


I don't know what sort of vacuous life Ol' Shirl lies comatose in, but the fact that she ponders the possibility of going to
Wal-Mart every single day [if she WANTED TO!] with excitement and geographic assessement makes me think it's pretty
friggin' lame. By the way,


White was so excited about the store opening she got up at 4:30 a.m.


Give me a frickin' break. Here's a charming description of Okemos for accountant housewife soccer moms:


[the Okemos 'commercial district'] has been growing to support a nearly 10 percent population surge during the 1990s in Meridian
Township, which now has 39,116 people. Retailers have turned the strips along Marsh Road and Central Park Drive into retailing meccas.
A Culver's family restaurant and a Kohl's department store may soon open in the area as well.


They tore up acres and acres of wetlands--some of the last in the township--to build this Wal-Mart, and it's a GOOD thing they did
because now Kohl's and Culver's are moving in next door and it'll be like a REAL TOWN! In fact, the Wal-Mart might as well just be
a real town unto itself: look at what's contained inside--


The new Wal-Mart, 5110 Times Square Drive, employs 260 people and has a Tire & Lube Express, snack bar, vision center, portrait studio,
one-hour photo lab, pharmacy and family fun center.


Folks, what this sentence describes is an entire downtown commercial district streamlined into a single warehouse that lines the
pockets of executives around the pickle barrel way down yonder in 'Bama. Essentially, such a black hole-like market requires a 17-acre
parking lot to suck the life out of any community, while giving nothing back--at all, with exception to tax revenue that will be used to
upgrade or build new roads and utilities to benefit more sprawl to line the pockets of executives around the pickle barrel way down
yonder in 'Bama, and more money spent at the array of gasoline depots across the strip because you're hopeless and un-American
and just plain inadequate if you don't have a car in a place like Okemos (UPSCALE!).


MEANWHILE, check out this load of crap: http://www.freep.com/news/religion/crumm16_20030716.htm
It's bad enough that we come to cherish places like Wal-Mart and look forward to the zombie-like and surreal dimension it stokes us
into, but things like that are possible because of things like this (read the article--just the headline and the first paragraph is enough).
In this individualistic, relativistic, pluralistic, secular society, we can make all things better by creating our own heavens. That's right, folks--
whenever you face a moral decision or are just feeling down, just imagine your own paradise! This is the same lack of coherence in
values that make people apathetic to things like the degradation of community, earning something (Americans always want something
for nothing), car dependency, sprawl wastelands and pseudo-patriotism. On a global scale, it's the same lack of coherence in values
that make Americans apathetic to the damn madness in the world out there: genocide, environmental destruction, slavery, racism of
every known variety (that don't mean Whitey vs. The World, you crazy liberal), etc, etc, etc. Right, right--those are all clinch-words but
you get the point, I hope.


Katie Hawkins, 10, of Mt. Clemens busily sketched rows of tiny bungalows. "In heaven, everybody has a home. There's room for everyone," she said.


This is so symptomatic of American culture today: when you realize how traumatizing and miserable the degraded public realm you live
in is, you can just pretend your way out of it. It's safer to just accept everything than to believe singularly. Again: it's safer to just
accept everything than to believe singularly. And we're teaching our children this. You know, there's a point where that's good, when
children are finding out that they have the wonderful capacity to feel hope and a sincere sense of optimistic fate. Where it gets to be
ridiculous is when grown adults like David Crumm subscribe it all as mere charm and maudlin gush. And he called his own bluff--
in pretending to believe the singularity of pluralism (the broader term to describe 'making your own heaven') he's contradicted the very
pluralism he believes in. This is fundamental, folks. But the real-world consequence from a guy like David Crumm and so many other
Americans today is a neglect of a coherent system of values, which allows things like Wal-Mart and other sprawl junk to occur. Now this
isn't just about sprawl--but I'm trying to make a connection with the previous segment of this entry. In fact, the total danger of teaching
ourselves that we can make our own heavens in the face of pain, degredation and dysfunction is in the apathy to those things in the
first place, as I described above.

The American Parade rolls on, forgetting its history, ignoring its tenets, and pretending that all's good and well in the Land of the Free,
Home of the Brave, while suffering the delusion that when America feels good, the world does too.


Chanson du jour: Bob Dylan, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, just to show that I'm not bitter, only melancholic.