The Christmas season of 2008 opened with a rush, specifically, the stampede of manic Wal-Mart shoppers planting their hooves into one of the unfortunate employees charged with opening the front doors at five AM on one of our great commercial holidays, Black Friday. Not only was this poor man trampled to death, but a woman in the crowd with a child said she ran as best she could in the other direction as the crowd rushed the door as she realized that both her life and that of her child's were in peril. The news media also made light of the fact that shoppers continued to prowl and claw for bargains even as they stepped over the limp body of the trampling victim. This is why our enemies should fear us. If we can be this fanatic about another five percent off on a big screen TV, imagine if we ever actually had a righteous cause to fight for.
Now I am perfectly sure that this unfortunate overture to the holiday season did little to cloud the experiences of the average family. Many went about their shopping, gifting, wrapping and partying with nary a thought of the poor tramplee. I merely highlight it here to juxtapose it with the other bookend, namely the Santa Shooting and Burning Down the House with Family In It episode. Yes, Christmas Day was another media bonanza, a recently jobless man, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, post-recent-.divorce destroys a covey of in-laws, shoots a little girl right in the face and manages not only to torch a two-story house on fire with his improvised accelerator, but also ignites his own Santa suit (psych!) and suffers third-degree burns while incinerating the structure and burning it to the ground. Can you believe this sucker thought he was going to Canada, eh? All of this fortunately led him to take his own life, sparing us the endless media circus of trials and psychological explanations over the course of many months. But of course he had to go to his brother's house first to do the self-annihilation, thus dragging in a more immediate part of the family when the brother stumbled upon the body. Left a big swath, did he.
It is true, neither of these events reduced the glow of my personal Christmas party one whit. It is only in taking the overview of our society that these things matter. But they do, and reflect rather poorly on the decisions we've chosen to make. Too much emphasis on material things. Too little control of weapons. Too much elevation and exultation of shopping as a substitute for . . . everything else. Too little psychological counseling and no attempt to weed out psychotics before they act. Too much striving for breaking into the black on Black Friday. Such deep, unfathomable blackness that black humor becomes inappropriate. The improbable becomes the norm.
So I say to you: Happy Holidays, and most of all, Happy New Year. Among the many memories I would just as soon discard after the final 24 hours of 2008, this pair of bookends will be the first in my mental trash. It's a Christmas I would just as soon forget.
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