Just before I run off to the eye doctor, I thought I’d post something that has been getting on my nerves for a while now, and which recently culminated in a comment from Whimsical:

Forgot to mention your luddite old-man, “Get off my virtual lawn.” schtick is getting old and tired. The Internet is here to stay- adjust your business model to it, or deservedly die.

Get over it already.

A couple of days ago, I was browsing the DailyKos website, and I ran into a perfect example of a phenomenon I have been trying to articulate for a long time. Unfortunately, it involves Nazis.

The original post is about a recent ad by Joe the Plumber and quotes Joe saying, “In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917 one-point-five million Armenians, unable to defend themselves were exterminated … In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated.”

Here’s where I go out on a limb and confess my limitations. Because it’s Joe the Plumber, I was suspicious. The righter-than-right wing of the Republican Party has a particular knack for lunatic statements. But, honest to God, I can’t come up with a counter-argument that I’m satisfied with. I was pretty sure there was one – that JtP had left out some crucial details – but that’s not really good enough: “Oh, he’s wrong because I’m sure of it, but I can’t articulate why!” doesn’t pass the smell test.

Part of the problem is that I try to grasp the “almost” points made by people in arguments. Is JtP arguing a direct causal link or is he trying for something more nuanced in the limiting format of a 30-second ad? I usually try to take a step back and look at the more general case of the argument: Is he saying that people who are armed can resist on an individual level, thus tying up so much of a police-state government’s resources that it would be practically impossible to institute “round up the usual suspect” sorts of policies on the entire population?

I don’t know every single nuance of the Armenian or the Jewish holocausts, and the diary was quite short, so I went to the comments, mainly because I was dying to read the simple, elegant refutation of JtP’s thesis. Of 151 comments, only eight actually say anything about the issue raised. Most of the comments run to the following:

“Don’t know what to say but ‘wow.’” (Great. But why do you have nothing to say but wow?)
“As I understand Talmudic law, the ADL’s Abraham Foxman … is now required … to … kick him in the testicles.”
“I dare the people of this asshole’s district to vote for this lump of shit for brains.”
“Totally gross looking hands we have to look at for half the commercial. Same with his head. Looks like he’s got leprosy or some skin disease.”
“He doesn’t know jack shite about the Armenian or WWII or any other holocaust.”
“I couldn’t find the words to say this very thing. This cretin’s ignorance is staggering.”

The first comment to actually discuss the main point raised is number 44:

“Most of the Jews murdered by the Nazis did not even live in Germany. What do German gun control laws have to do with civilians in the Ukraine or Poland being machine gunned by Nazis?” There! There’s a starting point. A discussion can evolve from that. If JtP’s point is so risible, please, for the love of God, shoot it down. But no one does. The comments simply continue to be nothings.

Another comment (around number 80), says that “Nazi gun control was ineffective. Because of the many resistance movements throughout Europe. The nazis banned guns; it didn’t stop the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Nor the Warsaw uprising. Nor Tito’s partisans. Nor the other resistance movements in each and every country the nazis occupied. When people are truly desperate, they will always find a way to fight back.”

Again, something that adds to the discussion. But I kept thinking, “Doesn’t that sort of reinforce JtP’s point rather than negate it? The resistance movements used guns. That’s why they were considered resistant. If the Nazis, at the very beginning, had had to content with tens of thousands of Jews engaging in shootouts, would they ever have gotten out of Germany at all? Would the delay have given the rest of Europe’s Jews more warning or given the Germans a chance to wake up?”

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is the phenomenon I’ve been trying to put my finger on for years now. Someone on the Right makes a statement that many on the Left disagree with. Is there reasoned argument? No. Is there a simple, declarative explanation of the error? No. It’s just an instantaneous display of ad hominem atttacks, snark and whatnot, and the actual point being discussed falls by the wayside.

I still don’t know – precisely – what the error in JtP’s argument is. And I would really be grateful if someone could tell me.

(Sorry, the first version published defectively. I have no idea what happened. If I had been drinking when I hit “Publish” I’d just admit it. But the strongest thing I had that day was coffee. I removed some paragraphs that more or less repeated what I’d already written for this post. When I added material, I put it inside square brackets.)

So Ted’s latest project will not be forthcoming.

Recently, I had a fairly long back-and-forth about the Internet Model with some of the regular comment makers. I, playing the part of the cranky old man who simply doesn’t “get it,” was standing on the front porch screaming at the kids to get off my lawn while I refused to accept that the Internet Model made sense.

The Internet Model (according to its supporters) provides everyone a way to stick it to the corporations and their horrible products. Movie tickets are too expensive, concession stands charge way too much for popcorn, (and I’m the one who’s the old man?), so download for free. No one who doesn’t deserve it will get hurt.

A similar argument was made about music and the other main forms of media. The artists, if they’re making good music or good books, won’t lose because people who admire the artists’ works will buy things from the artists — T-shirts, credible default swaps, hair — and it will all, fiscally and karmically, balance out in the end.

Attempts to explain that a lot of other people besides the artist are necessary for the artist to produce the finished product were, similarly, just crazy old me not understanding how things work now. Sad old Alex the Tired. Time to send you to the old folks’ home, where the surly staff, making not enough to live on, will slap the sass out of you in no time flat. Don’t bother taking your iPod though, they’ll steal that within the first two days.

And now, in a particularly undesirable way, more evidence of how the Internet Model arguments simply don’t hold up comes along. Ted has a convincing record of writing worthwhile books. He’s been a cartoonist for years and years. Anyone who has gone through a bookstore can point to dozens and dozens of examples of less-worthy books that get published all the time. Why? Because it’s what people want to read. A paralogical evasion. Ted’s books occupy a niche that isn’t filled by a hundred different people. And they are on important matters. By any reasonable standard, Ted’s book ideas should be able to find a publisher [because they are not books that have plenty of other suppliers].

The publishers are scaling back, and the market for what Ted’s writing can’t compete, sizewise, with, say, dog memoirs or cookbooks. Newspapers, magazines, books, you name it, the information creators are still cutting back, and as they contract, each Internet [author or website keeps taking the final product and putting it out for free. Thus, the newspapers, magazines, etc., have to keep cutting.] If a million people buy the latest Dog Whisperer piece of crap, about 10,000 will probably buy the sort of book Ted would write. Mathematically, it’s almost a foregone conclusion.

The point is that Ted (and writers, editors, factcheckers, photographers, etc. — pretty much everyone who used to work at a print daily or weekly, a monthly magazine, or even a publishing house) are up against an opponent that can’t be stopped. [And that Ted can’t get funding for a project is a pretty disturbing trend.]

Today’s somewhat-reported story is the one coming out of Cleveland. Five men have been arrested by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and will be appearing in court in Cleveland today, Tuesday, May 1, 2012.

A few things seem to have not been declared in the reporting so far. For instance, according to the FBI’s press release, the men were arrested on the evening of April 30 after setting remote-control “dummy” charges that the men thought were legitimate explosives on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge.

The bridge in question is a four-lane structure. I don’t claim to have any engineering experience whatsoever, but two C-4 bombs do not seem like sufficient explosive force to take down a bridge that large. The explosions would have shut the bridge down, probably for days, as every square inch would have had to have been checked for more explosives. But the idea that the bridge would have come tumbling down seems a lot like police press conference hype. As is usually the case, the authorities have captured the dullest knives in the drawer (Blowing up a bridge? You’ve been watching too many episodes of Hogan’s Heroes).

A look at these men’s arrest photos reveals a group that, really, does not look all that bright. I know, looks are deceiving. But I don’t think that smart people would have come up with such a lame-brain plot in the first place. This brings me to anther thing that hasn’t been mentioned, even in the stories where the men’s photos are not shown: they all look white, and they all have white-sounding names: Connor C. Stevens, Brandon L. Baxter, Joshua S. Stafford, Douglas L. Wright, and Anthony Hayne. List of terrorist suspects or the next five appointments for a dentist in Manhattan?

I see at least a thousand people like those five every day in New York, either riding the subway, walking on the sidewalk, sitting at the coffee shop, eating an ice cream from Mister Softee, or shopping in a grocery store. It was the same thought I had when Tim McVeigh’s picture was plastered across everything: these guys look a little rough around the edges (a booking photo is rarely a time that you get a chance to look your best), but still, indistinguishable from the teeming masses.

The issue of home-grown terrorists is one the media avoids with a single-minded intensity. Why? Because any article about how, golly gee, all the terrorists lately seem to be distinctly not Middle Eastern, would have to address why a batch of good old American boys would be plotting to blow up bridges. And that’s one conversation the media doesn’t want to honestly address because doing so would certainly ruin the reporters’ chances of getting invited to the next White House Press Corps Dinner.

A significant problem I’ve been having is understanding the mindset of the people who still stand behind Obama. From no metric I can conceive of has his presidency been exceptional. On the core progressive issues, his has been a remarkably unimpressive (at best) outing. The defenses I have run into for his term boil down to a single major premise: He’s the best we’ve got, and unless you pick him, even though he’s the lesser of two evils, you will ruin this country because of your selfishness.

I was going to write that such an argument is false. But I had a brain wave last night.

The argument isn’t false. It’s wrong, but it isn’t wrong because of an intention to deceive or because the person advancing the argument is stupid. The issue simply isn’t being framed correctly. So here goes.

Everyone who has ever known a drug addict — if you ever knew someone who couldn’t put down the vicodin, the scotch bottle, the needle, or the scratch tickets — put your hand up. (No one can see you, so put your hand back down.)

Most people who have been pulled into an addict’s life know what happens. Things start to disappear. Even if you own very little, you can have a lot of things disappear before you come to the moment where you start doing an inventory and discover a whole lot of stuff has evaporated. If you’re lucky, you catch the addict in the act. You tail them to the race track, you walk in on them in the bathroom having a drink from the bottle in the toilet tank, etc. And, if you’re able to, you hand the addict an ultimatum: It stops today, right now. If you ever see them doing it again, no matter what excuse they present, you will leave, you will kick them out, you will drive to the police station and fill out a report. And then, you do it.

By all the accounts I’ve read, this is a profoundly difficult thing to do. That’s why there are so many instances of addicts conning their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc., over and over. It is hard to amputate a significant portion of your life, just like that.

The politicians who have been getting elected are, for the most part, just like addicts. They get elected, and re-elected, by the voters having a lesser of two evils moment of weakness. Having an addict in the house or kicking him out and watching his whole life go to hell on him? Well, maybe he will change this time, and I wasn’t all that attached to grandma’s silver, anyway. I mean, sure, she handed it to me on her deathbed, but, well, my addict really means to change this time. And if I kick him out, then I’m being a bad person, I’m being unreasonable (wait for it), I’m not being bipartisan about all this. I should reach across the aisle, you know. Because it would be the height of folly to pull the rug out from under him now, when he’s so close to cleaning up and flying right.

The politicians are not, if we keep picking the lesser of two evils, going to eventually one day produce a miracle of statesmanship for us, just like most addicts don’t suddenly stop drinking, gambling, whatevering, just because someone told them they had to. After the uncontrolled binge of secret prisons, unlawful detentions, murders-by-drone, stop and frisks, etc., if some politician came forward and tried to argue that the past 20 years had all been a mistake, he’d be dismissed as a dreamer or a lunatic. Pedantic lectures would commence about how the candidate simply doesn’t understand about politics. He’s naive. And so forth.

One thing I run into in the narratives from reformed addicts is a simple enough statement: They almost always say something about how they wish they’d gotten sorted out sooner. How they wish they hadn’t had to spent three years or 30 years slowly losing everything before they finally were able to put themselves together. And that’s the point I’ve reached, because that’s the point the country has reached. Why drag out the remaining descent any longer? Because we’re super-duper hoping someone will leap in, putting right what once went wrong (and hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap home)?

We all know that each “settled for the lesser” only brings us closer to the bottom, and along the way, there has been decades of misery and hardship. Let’s finally take the handbrake off and let the maniacs ruin everything once and for all. At least we can limit the amount of time we all spend suffering.

I was on my way to Forbidden Planet — one of the few delights that continues to always be a delight — the other day, and I got off the subway at the Union Square stop in Manhattan. And the OWSers were there.

I noticed one thing of particular interest. One young person was holding a small cardboard sign with a hand-lettered message about how the police are one layoff away from becoming part of the 99%.

First, OWS, take a look through the photo archives. The Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, any number of Klan rallies. There’s one unifying thing. The signs are almost always professionally printed. You live in the 21st century, in an age where the capacity to make a professional-looking sign is no further than your own personal printer. The blacks, the gays, the white supremacists of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, they all had to pay through the nose for professional-quality signs. You can crank them out for pennies. Does not one of you comprehend the notion of presentation?

Second, the person with the sign about how the cops are part of the 99% is wrong. The last layoffs in the NYPD were in the 1970s, weren’t they? A cop who was in his early 20s in 1975 would now be, well, first, he’d be out of the department having served his 20 years. But if he stayed, he’d now be, 37 years later, in his late 50s. With seniority and all the rest, his likelihood of being laid off is precisely, hold on, I want to look it up. Here it is: 0.00000. None of the NYPD officers accept that they will be laid off mainly because the likelihood is, for all intents and purposes, zero. In our post-9/11 world, where we need police to stop and frisk innocent black teenagers and guard Wall Street statues, we simply can’t take that risk. Close the schools, the hospitals, the libraries, but take away the police? Are you mad?

Take a look at the following, from the NYPD site, about pay and benefits for a police officer:

• $34,970 Starting salary (including holiday pay, uniform pay and night differential)
• Excellent Promotional Opportunities
• A choice of paid medical and dental programs
• 20 paid vacation days
• 27 paid vacation days after 5 years
• Unlimited sick leave with full pay
• Annuity Fund
• Optional Retirement at one half salary after 20 years of service

Wikipedia gives a higher starting pay. “The contract, which runs from August 1, 2006 to July 31, 2010, gives police officers a 17 percent pay raise over its four-year life, and raises starting pay from $35,881 to $41,975, and top pay from $65,382 to approximately $76,000 annually. With longevity pay, holiday pay, night shift differential and other non-guaranteed additions, the total annual compensation for officers receiving top pay will be approximately $90,829.”

Paid medical and dental programs. 20 paid vacation days. Unlimited sick leave with full pay. Optional retirement at 50% salary after 20 years.

Layoffs? Political suicide. Why? Because the police understand the power of a union. They might still prevent murders in a post-layoff situation. If someone staggered up with a knife in his back, I’d like to think that even the post-layoff police would get that guy to a hospital as fast as possible. But a smash-and-grab from an electronics store at 2 a.m.? “Yeah, dispatch, we didn’t make it in time to stop those three perps we didn’t see loading several dozen widescreen televisions into a 2009 white Ford panel van with Jersey plates. Yeah. You’d think we could have covered six city streets in less than 45 minutes, especially with our sirens and all. But, well, we are undermanned since the layoffs.”

The police might start off, right at the beginning, as part of the 99%, but once they get through the initial shakedown, they’re part of the 20-year plan. Job security, a pension, four weeks of vacation (do you get four weeks of vacation?). There’s a bumper sticker out there somewhere that says that there’s nothing worse than a crooked cop and nothing better than an honest one. And I genuinely believe that. I also believe the NYPD has cops that run the whole gamut: thieving bastards to selfless aw-shucks heroes. But even aw-shucks heroes are not going to say, “Well, maybe I shouldn’t get a pension after 20 years of work.”

The police didn’t get all their power just from their guns. In 200 years, something like 800 NYPD officers have died in the line of duty. That’s about four a year. Commercial fishing comes in at 116 per 100,000 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Four per 34,500 would be about 12 per 100,000 for the NYPD. So it’s about 10 times more dangerous being a commercial fisherman. When was the last time the news led with the story of the death of a fisherman?

OWS needs to start learning faster. They are simply taking too long to figure things out.

I’ve been running into Indians a lot lately. Not subcontinent Indians, the American ones. Not actual American Indians, either. Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago, I was going through a roll of nickels, and I found one of the old-timey Indian head variety. The date on that particular coin is completely obliterated, which happened a lot due to the coin design being prone to erosion.

Also recently, due to various TV commercials and promos for programs, I ended up, in a one-week period, explaining to the same person, on three different occasions, about:

1. the significance of the “Keep America Clean” commercials that ended with a silent Indian with a silent tear running down his face as he saw how despoiled the land had become.

2. the smothering scene at the end of the movie based on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

3. an explanation (and assembly) of the ridiculously juvenile dirty joke that is available to anyone with a box of Land O’ Lakes butter, a pair of scissors, and the mindset of a 12-year-old boy. The, uh, novelty involves the package design of Land O’ Lakes butter: an infinite loop, each iteration at a smaller scale, of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter with an image of an Indian woman holding a box of Land O’ Lakes butter … .)

These three items were enough Indian-themed material to trigger that little thing in my brain that usually jams a song lyric into my head. I am amazed at the number of Indian-themed items that have been coming to mind for no reason: the Shawmut Bank logo, Go-Go Gophers, the Hekawi from F Troop, Apache Chief from the Superfriends, John Redcorn from King of the Hill, Chakotay from Star Trek: Voyager, the episode of Alice where Larry Hovis (Carter from Hogan’s Heroes) is playing Vera’s boyfriend and mentions that he is part American Indian, the Mazzola Corn Goodness Woman (“My people call it maize.”), all the Indian references in the Nicholson-Duvall version of The Shining, that episode of Star Trek where Kirk loses his memory on the planet populated by various Indian tribes.

Finally, it all came to a head. Last week, AMC wrapped up the current season of Hell on Wheels. The show is one of those great ensemble dramas AMC cranks out with frightening regularity. (A complete aside: Christopher Heyerdahl’s absolutely flawless performance is the finest supporting role this year. You’ll never look at a Norwegian the same way again.) The overarching plot of the series is the arrival of the railroad to the American West right after the Civil War.

Buried in with the various subplots is one about the end of the American Indians as a dominant culture. As a piece of drama, the subplot unfolds with a superbly just-right touch. It’s not too heavy, it’s not too marginal. Not too preachy, not too casual. And for the audience, it’s an odd bit of time travel. We all know what’s coming, and it’s such a sad thing to contemplate. Not so much for the individual Indians in the story because they could (possibly) survive, but their culture is ending. The railroad dragged the Indians to the end of the line, at least as a dominant set of cultures in America.

About 10 minutes from the end of the episode, the penny (the nickel?) finally dropped, and the thing my subconscious was trying to point out clawed its way to center stage: The Middle Class is now in the position the Indians were in 150 years ago. The end is coming for us, just as it came for the Indians. A small number of the Middle Class will survive, but the culture, all the things that made the Middle Class what it was will be swept away.

The question has frequently been raised: What will happen with the OWSers? How will the movement resolve? Will it succeed? You need go no further than how the American Indians were treated by the politicians.

One and a half centuries later isn’t that long. I can picture a 90-year-old Indian, sitting in a rocking chair, with a group of children. The old person was a child of 10 back in 1860 and would have lived through it all, arriving at 1940 at the age of 90. That old man or woman could have had ample time to tell the whole story to those children, some of whom would have been 10 years old themselves. Those theoretical children would now be 82. I wonder what sort of stories they could tell, if they would cast their memories back to their childhoods. It’s going to be the same sort of thing for the Middle Class. In a few decades, those few of us who make it to 90 will gesture the children over to us, and we’ll tell them stories. “When I was your age, I already knew that I would go to college. Back then, many people, not just the rich, went to college. And there were national immunization programs. No one got polio when I was a boy. And we had supermarkets, those are places where people would walk in, and there would be thousands, no, honestly, thousands of kinds of foods. Cookies, and ice cream, and fresh fruits and vegetables. I know, you all think I’ve lost my marbles but most people in the Middle Class could go to the dentist. People kept their teeth a long, long time.”

Wikipedia has a jim-dandy entry (none of which I can vouch for the veracity of, but it’s free, and almost no one got paid for it, so what’s not to like?) that applies:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz

If you still can’t figure out how it’s going to end for the Middle Class if we don’t wake up, that should help you connect the dots. I wonder what the nickels will look like in 150 years. Perhaps Ted can draw us all a picture.

I saw one of those “personal pleas” for a donation the other day on Wikipedia. The one that particularly vexed me was from one of their programmers: “I work at the Wikimedia Foundation because everything in my soul tells me it’s the right thing to do.” It goes on from there, but you get the drift.

I love it when people talk about their souls and what’s “right.” History’s full of these people and their versions of that feeling: manifest destiny, the Lord’s work, White man’s burden. They all thought they were on the side of the angels. That’s easy when you don’t count the bodies at the foundation of the structure.

The Internet types are just as sickening as the Wall Street goons. Stop telling me about your soul. Stop putting your sanctimonious left hand in my pocket to lift my nearly empty wallet while your holier-than-thou right hand slides the knife betwixt two of my ribs. Your organizations that leverage slave labor into profit for a coterie of top-tier executives while destroying wage-paying positions in the process have already taken tens of thousands of dollars in lost wages and missed opportunities out of my pocket. I really don’t have any more to give so that you can pat yourselves on the back about how vital and important and soul-fulfilling your work is while you impoverish me a little more with each passing year. So have enough decency to not complain about how small the portion on your plate is while I’m digging through a trash can looking for some leftovers.

Just cut the crap.

Now, before some Internet moran starts lecturing me about how this is simply “the nature of the beast,” and how the Internet is creating jobs, just knock it off. The Internet eliminates whole lateral chunks of the employment pyramid, especially at the bottom. The only way a web site has “tens of thousands” of employees is if you count the peons. Amazon? I have no idea how many people it employs, but if it’s tens of thousands without counting all the hourly workers who toil in factories filling orders, I’ll eat a cardboard shipping box. Facebook employs something like 1,600 people. Internet companies do not have larger staffs than their real-world counterparts. They can’t, except in a very few instances. A buggywhip factory will have a smaller IT staff than the New York Times, yes, but as a general case, the Internet eliminates jobs or exchanges them for positions that pay less.

The Internet taps into a lot of people who don’t have the economic sense to realize that slave labor drives out wage labor. We’re now at a point where technology and idiocy (always a bad combination) have united to turn the middle class into a self-consuming entity. And who’s helping to shove the tail of the snake into its own mouth? The people at Wikipedia, the Internet morans, and the corporate executives who see how much of a short-term gain they can make by hacking wages to zero.

And now that all the low-hanging fruit has been claimed, the effect is spreading. Lawyers are discovering their work is being outsourced with greater frequency. X-rays are now examined overseas by physicians who’ll do it for less. Ask ANY doctor about that. It’s a bad practice. It’s only going to get worse, everyone.

So, Wikipedia, stop crying poor-mouth at me. I’m not interested in rewarding you for what your ilk did. I’ve had to watch co-workers in their late 50s crying uncontrollably as they were made to pack their things and leave. An entire lifetime of playing by the rules culminating in a kick in the pants so that some clever programmer could feel like he was helping to usher in a new age. Well, here’s the brave new world. The lumpen masses are now so conditioned to being handed the final, finished fruits of so many forms of labor for free that those of us who still want to be paid a living wage for what we do are simply side-stepped by “some kid” (or some Wikipedia programmer) who doesn’t understand that doing it for free is never going to end up in a full-time job. Starry-eyed “volunteers” race to be one of the many who hand in “research” for free. And where do they get that research? Oh, they very carefully document that they lifted it from one of the few traditional sources that still pay for labor. The whole thing reminds me of the ubiquitous assertion of innocence: “Hey, if I didn’t do it, someone else would.”

I wonder when all the Wikipedians, the HuffPosters, the Kossacks and the rest will arrive at the point where they realize that they can’t quite cover the bills anymore. When even the contract at-will employee positions start to disappear. Most of us, regrettably, won’t be there to see it.

For many people, DBA Day is a show of resistance and an attempt to get people to notice that we’ve become so consumerist in our society that we are losing hold of the better aspects of ourselves while we spend ourselves into economic slavery via our credit cards. The news had the report this Black Friday of the woman who maced 20 customers at a store in her pursuit of an Xbox.

The YouTube had a video of Walmart customers rioting over $2 waffle irons. One particularly memorable image—memorable like frame 313 of the Zapruder film—is of a woman, massive gut protruding from under her shirt and rolling over her pants, carrying off four or five of the waffle irons. If this had been an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the screen would have had giant flashing letters spelling our “GLUTTONY.”

On DBA Day, I went to the local Target. Target, Walmart, BestBuy, they’re all the same. I bought two gift cards for an online game that I like to play. I also picked up some Aleve (a pain in my side that will not go away, what I wouldn’t give for health insurance), a Coca-Cola (to wash down the Aleve), and a roll of Scotch tape (to tape some things). I also took a walk around the store. I came away with some conclusions.

The Black Friday shoppers are replacing/augmenting church. I don’t mean they derive a religious experience by picking up cheap plastic crap made in China by slave labor. I mean that going to Target and demonstrating that they have money to spend (or credit cards that haven’t been shut off) is the equivalent of going to church as a social behavior. They do it because, well, they’ve always done it, a form of auto-hypnosis that allows a chunk of the day to not be spent thinking to one’s self about why one’s life is going down the crapper.

Those Black Friday shoppers are not going to stop shopping because someone on the Internet told them to. You might as well try to reason with someone who believes in an End Times religion. They don’t care about analyzing or debating. Take a look at the faces of the people pushing their carts. It’s like the looks people have on their faces when they’re in line to use a bathroom. Weary resignation. Somewhere in the back of their minds is a voice screaming, “Your goal is to get a $39 set of cookware? Do you really think, at any level, it’s going to be any good? But it’s still the high point of the day, isn’t it? How do you not go home and blow your brains out? They sell guns in the sporting goods section, you know.”

Most shoppers, most of the time, aren’t thinking about Marxist concepts or the latest issue of Adbusters. Next time you’re at the supermarket, look in the other carts. Three-liter soda bottles. Jumbo bags of chips. Family-size microwave dinners for those who couldn’t stop themselves from breeding and really don’t care what their obligate burdens (aka families) shovel into their pie holes at the feeding trough. If supermarkets stocked IV bags of high-fructose corn syrup, these modern Sisyphuses would pile it hip-deep into the cart if the boys in marketing could put the right packaging around it.

But, let’s assume you pulled off a Thanksgiving Day miracle and got these people to buy nothing on DBA Day. So what? Do you think, for even a single second, that Target, Walmart or the rest of the box stores give a damn about one day’s numbers? Like a casino, the cash flow evens out over time. If the trend continued for enough years, the stores will simply use staying closed as a marketing ploy to show how much they “care.™”

DBA Day is never going to make a dent. Why? Because—and here (as opposed to all the rest of the piece) I sound elitist—most of these people are too far gone. It’s too late. The egg’s already been laid in them, and the parasite has invaded. Their lives are such hellstorms that there’s nothing that your little pep talk about thrift and self-determination can offer that will activate their pleasure centers as handily as an automatic ice crusher or a one-touch foot-massage bath for $19.99 (ask about our store credit card at the checkout).

So instead of a futile piece of agitprop, the next time someone urges you to participate in DBA Day, fine, Don’t Buy Anything. But go into a Walmart or a Target, bring a friend, and just wander the aisles, not Buying Anything, while you talk to each other. “Gee, can you believe people are falling for it again? Don’t they realize the prices will be lower in two weeks? That today’s called ‘Black Friday’ because it’s all about the store making enough money to get in the black?”

“And you’d think they’d realize that putting a $500 TV on a credit card means they’ll almost certainly be paying $600 for it by the time they make all the payments? And that’s assuming they don’t miss a single payment and get a late fee and an APR hike.”

You probably won’t make a difference then, either. But there’s a tiny chance that you’ll catch one person overhearing you who’ll have that moment of horrific clarity that is so often necessary for an addict to finally put down the booze, the needle, the knife and fork, or the little rectangle of plastic.

My Thanksgiving story.

Something a little more than a decade ago, for a couple years, I would ask people I worked with about their holiday plans each November and December. I didn’t keep absolute numbers on this whim of mine; I just wanted to get a general sense of what everyone did for the various holidays.

About 80% of the responses went like this: “Oh, I have to go to my wife’s family’s for Thanksgiving. I have a pile of work to get through, and her father is a complete prick. But what can you do? If I don’t want to slit my wrists, I have to fly halfway across the country.”

About 10% went like this: “Yeah, I’m going to see my sister and her husband and their three kids. Hell, it’s a free meal. The airport’s going to be a frickin’ nightmare, but I haven’t see them in a few years, so it’ll be good to catch up.”

And the remaining 10%? Their stories went like this one, told to me by a woman I worked with whose face, just like in the cliche, “lit up” when she told it: “My grandmother’s 93 years old, and we’re pretty sure she isn’t going to make it to 94, so we’re calling the whole family together. We all love her, and we want to have one last visit together.”

I think about that a lot, especially around the holidays, especially now. People running around like something horrific is chasing them, stabbing at keyboards while they walk, doing work on the subway as they head INTO work, talking to people at the office via the Borg implant in their heads while standing in line for something at Starbucks. And after all that hard work, all that take-home crap and stand-in-line stress, what do you get? A couple slices of turkey and some stuffing that you can’t even enjoy because you’ve become so conditioned to constantly be thinking about work that you don’t even recall having eaten the damned yams that were on your plate.

Make Thanksgiving the line in the sand. Make a real goddamn turkey (or tofurkey). Make some side dishes. Do you realize how simple it is to make cranberry sauce? Not that Jell-O/toothpaste cylinder that plops out of the can with a horribly Chthluian sound? Be adventurous, use butter. Live right on the frickin’ edge, people: make the mashed potatoes from potatoes, not from flakes in a pouch. Take back one day of enjoyment from the whole 24/7/365 cycle of constantly being “on” and scared witless of what’s coming around the corner to ruin your life a little more.

Have seconds on stuffing. Enjoy yourself. One day out of the year, enjoy yourself and forget about whatever horrible combination of disasters is breathing down your neck. All the grief will still be there come Friday morning.