As India, Thailand and Nigeria Explode, America Wages War At The Strip Mall

In Mumbai, nearly 200 people are slaughtered by terrorists. In Bangkok, thousands of travelers are stranded while anti-government protesters are bloodied by grenades thrown into the protesting crowds. In Nigeria, hundreds have been killed this weekend in riots over the usual money and resource wars usually disguised as religious or political battles.

And here in America, the home of the debt-ridden consumer with the third-grade education, we had the Great Thanksgiving Wars. A mob of bargain-crazed cretins smashed down the glass doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart and stomped the life out of a gentle man hired by a temporary agency to mind the store. Across the country in a Palm Desert strip mall, a bloody fistfight between two charming young women ended with two men dead, after a gunfight in the aisles of Toys R Us.

Tonight, at least, I'll take America over India, Thailand or Nigeria.

The American atrocities of Black Friday -- ha, that is what we call the big Christmas shopping day in this country -- were so very American. They weren't about race or religion or anything serious. They were about discount shopping, in Long Island, and about dumb monsters carrying loaded handguns into a children's toy store, on the day after Thanksgiving. And at least one of these dead thugs was a father, a father who brought his child to this cheap, awful, fatal gunfight at Toys R Us.

Once it had ended, [a witness] said he walked out and saw a small child near the body of one of the men.

He said he heard the child say: "Daddy, wake up."

Ugh.

(And please, Riverside County family services staffers, get this poor kid to a safe foster home before the next gunfight between his relatives and their "acquaintances.")

But still, I'll take America over these outrages in Mumbai and Bangkok and the overpopulated oil serfdom of Nigeria. I'll take America over the nightly slaughters and hideous drug-war atrocities of Mexico. I'll take America over the journalist-murdering minority-deporting Kremlin, and the dumb petrol-fat regime of Saudi Arabia.

As a nation, here in the United States, we are not so smart. We are, in fact, fat and dumb and addicted to idiotic teevee shows and computer porn and terrible, terrible music. We have no savings, no ideals, no ideas. Just 1% of our people control vast riches, and just the top 10% control most of this nation's vast wealth and resources.

Still, things aren't so desperate that political and religious losers routinely storm our government buildings or tourist hotels or religious temples to murder anybody wealthy or foreign enough to be at those places. Our crippled national infrastructure and national government may have dramatically failed during Hurricane Katrina, but it's just barely strong enough and competent enough to deal with California fires and Iowa floods and 9/11. Maybe it will get better, starting next year. Maybe.

After a historically divisive presidential election, the losers didn't march on Washington or Chicago or whatever with their tremendous supply of personal firearms. They just stayed at home, watching football games on the teevee and maybe leaving ALL CAPS ignorant illiterate comments on various news websites. They failed, majestically.

Where are we going, with our vast lower- and working-class Americans? Probably to apathetic well-fed drunkenness, like we see in England or Germany, with occasional and easily-controlled riots. If the Obama Administration is truly serious about providing health care and basic jobs and other safety-net programs for the 80% of Americans who will never achieve prosperity on their own, we shall hopefully never disintegrate into Mumbai-style bloodbaths.

Ken Layne is managing editor of Wonkette, a political website about Hope.