This is funny, but it also plays into another point I want to make about Wal-Mart:
After a long day searching houses in suffocating Iraqi heat, Lance Corporal Mike Wilson of Princeton, Kentucky recalls seeing relief in the distance.
Wilson said that looking through the haze he thought he saw a Wal-Mart and was ready to get some cold water for his men when he discovered it was an illusion.
(It’s getting up around 125F in Iraq. Why are we there again?)
This average kid, plucked out of Kentucky, wandering through the desert heat … what does he see when he hallucinates? Wal-Mart.
The store is deeply, deeply embedded in the fabric of middle America. It is totemic. Iconic. Paradigmatic. Archetypal. All that stuff. To a great many people, it represents home, the place where they see their neighbors, the place where their friends work, the place that enables them to buy stuff they could never buy before, to partake in middle-class luxuries that were once beyond their reach.
Progressives heap derision and scorn on Wal-Mart. There are legitimate reasons to do so, of course, but people tend to go well beyond those. The scorn is also heaped on Wal-Mart shoppers, depicted as obese, dim-witted, herd-like hicks.
Here’s a notion: It is impossible to build a successful political movement when you view the great majority of your fellow citizens with barely disguised contempt.
