#252 Walpurge-nacht

So is it just me or is there absolutely no vestige of morality and honor left in this great land of ours? My biggest problem is not with the crimes. Everyone makes mistakes, person or corporation. It is the hypocrisy, my friend, that I deplore the most. First the corporation: Pundits on both sides of the fence extol its virtues and its faults. When this retailer moves in, mom and pop stores move out. Yet this store takes great pains to picture itself as just a little backwoods hometown store grown big. A vast repository of American values, the retail backbone of the land of amber waves and purple majesty. And the good ol’ red, white, and blue. It’s only a little unsettling that the largest retailer of American flags carries ones that say “made in china.” Or that their basic sales and labor strategy can be summed up with the phrase: “hire illegal immigrants to sell crap made in other countries.” I mean, America is about the melting pot. Who cares if the pot is imported from Korea or Columbia? What’s more insidious and dishonest is wal-splogging. Splog, as you know is the blogging equivalent of spam. Other people insert comments on your blog and the comments link you back to their blog. Which does two things, it screws up your blog with irrelevant garbage, and it makes their blog look more linked and therefore more likely to come up on search engines and get read more. So if their splog extols, say, the virtues of Sam’s gargantuan little store killer, then blogville take the hindmost. The big question of the internet, “what is truth,” is a bigger and more troubling question than ever. And if bloggermart then hires half of India—as it’s apparently done—to write blogs for pay then the handbasket has already arrived in hell.
The other hypocriticism I have is about an Administration appointee who recently retired. Shortly afterward, he was arrested on charges that he stole merchandise and then took it back for cash refunds. Claude Allen was the prez’s top domestic policy advisor before he resigned. Word has it (I’m not sure if it’s true because I got it on a blog) that Allen was an extremely conservative and religious person, who was on record as anti-gay and pro-abstinence, and presumably a champion of at least most the ten commandments. Shoplifting merchandise and bringing it back for a refund on your credit card is arguably somewhere between coveting your neighbors stuff and thou-shall-not-stealing but the big problem here is, it’s confusing to the youth of America. If you’re going to point morality with one of your fingers the other four of them shouldn’t be engaged in taking a five-finger discount. Criminal types yes, top domestic policy advisor, no. I mean, I hope he wasn’t giving advice that it’s good policy to shoplift from Walmart. Oh, the humanity...
America, ya gotta love it.