Wal Mart

Bubblehead:

I am pleased to learn that you are so satisfied with your Wal Mart store. I confess I am not very pleased with their merchandise, mostly manufactured in China by cheap labor and not of a very good quality. I am also not pleased with their low wages and terrible benefits. The fact that many of their employees have to turn to food stamps, and the taxpayers have to foot the bill for many of their medical expenses also does not please me. If you think the term “losers” is too extreme I suggest you think of them as “winners.” At least they are not unemployed and eating in soup kitchens or begging on the streets of our fine society, as are so many at the moment. I am also not happy that the Wal Marts have driven so many others out of business. People here shop in Wal Mart for two main reasons (I think); they are either relatively poor and can’t afford anything else, or however wealthy they may be, they have to shop at Wal Mart because it is the only place they can find the items they need (Wal Mart having driven out their competition). If this makes me an elitist, so be it. I think it was great when we still had real butchers and bakers and candlestick makers, instead of mass-produced food wrapped in cellophane. But, then, I am just a foolish old man.

I am perfectly aware that Europeans and Middle Easterners occasionally have stampedes and injuries and deaths at their soccer matches and elsewhere. I fail to see what this has to do with anything I said about American shopping. If you believe that most other people are as obsessed with shopping as American are, I know you are wrong. Having lived in various cultures, including some European ones, as well as more technologically undeveloped ones, I think I have a reasonable grasp of things like shopping, greed, sharing, and how humans in general comport themselves around the world.

As far as “those who blame everything on the U.S.” goes, I was unaware that I had blamed anything in particular around the world on the U.S., being concerned mostly with our own internal obsession with shopping, greed, and whatever. The U.S. is a capitalistic, free-market, consumer-driven, materialistic nation that in general does not provide well for its citizens. These are “facts,” although you obviously do not want to accept them. That I recognize the U.S. has “faults,” should be obvious. How these may or may not affect the rest of the world was not an issue addressed by me. You seem to have swallowed the “exceptionalism” kool-aid, along with the rest of the “America-can-do-no-wrong” crowd. “My country right or wrong,” might be a fine slogan, but it doesn’t make for a very useful Foreign Policy. I confess I do not understand why you persist in your accusation that I blame all of the world’s ills on the U.S. But certainly Bush/Cheney and their gang of neocons cannot be said to have improved things around the world in the past eight years.

Frankly, I try not to shop at Wal Mart. But living here in Bonners Ferry it has now become almost a complete necessity. The fine hardware stores we had are gone. Our bakery is gone. Our Pet store is gone. Most other retail stores are gone.You cannot even buy something as ordinary as sheets for your bed or pots and pans for cooking without driving 30 miles to Wal Mart where they sell sheets I do not really want to buy. Of course I can always wait to go to Coeur d’Alene or Spokane where there are even more Wal Marts. I guess I am just biased but I am not happy with Wal Marts (or Home Depots or Costcos or the other cavernous giants that are monopolizing our retail trade). I do not believe this is a healthy development for our nation, just as I do not believe corporate farming is either desirable or necessary. I realize there is an economy of scale, but corporations do not have to grow as huge as they have to realize it.


There is a harmonyIn autumn, and a lustre in its sky,Which through the summer is not heard or seen,As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Percy Bysshe Shelley


TILT:
George W. Bush apparently believes he is going to be honored for liberating Iraq.