by Special Correspondent T.S. DeHaviland
As the Christmas spending season draws to a close, I encourage all of you to continue to do your patriotic duty and shop, just like the president told you to back in the latter part of 2001. We can’t have this administration’s otherwise stellar legacy be besmirched by a late-term recession, after all. Even the von Maur store that got all shot up at that mall in Omaha is again open for business. Commerce, the American way, shall not be deterred by such trivialities as a few hundred bullet holes or the mere passing of the seasons.
For it wasn’t what the kid who shot up the von Maur did that was the problem; it was who he did it to. He was, after all, just following the same set of principles our Dear Leader did when he ordered the hit on Baghdad: they both wanted to be famous. And if the same shooter as did the deed in Omaha had done the same thing in a mallful of “our enemies,” whoever they are this week, he would have been posthumously awarded a medal for valor. Never mind that both acts would require an armed person shooting unarmed ones: honor is a measure of body count, not the courage required to enact the combat. Never mind as well that the act of killing the unarmed in the name of one’s cause is exactly what our arch nemesis, Osama bin Laden, did to raise our ire to begin with. Again, such distinctions are trivial, bordering on nuance and therefore suspect because they smack of being French.
And anyway, the consumers at von Maur were merely exercising their democratic liberties which amount to consumer choice. As my students will tell you when I compel them to define “freedom,” it’s shopping at Wal-Mart at 2:00 a.m. and being able to choose from 60 different brands of disposable razors that makes America great. And they write this entirely without irony, with the sort of earnestness of a convert exploring the glories of a new faith, but this One True Religion they have been steeped in their entire lives.
Jesus, of course (remember him?) had hard words for the wealthy, for those who lived for stuff—harder ones, certainly, than for homosexuals, whom he mentions nearly not at all. But one can’t actually expect a nominally Christian nation to live the way that Jesus said. Indeed, that would be bad for business.