Thank Goodness it's still the 19th Century Somewhere!

Ok, I think I get it now- Somehow, all these unrelated scenes featuring glassy-eyed idiots singing some tuneless piece of crap of a "song" form together to create a commercial for everybody's favorite corporate vulture, Arkansas-based but China-dependent Walmart. It took a while, and a few viewings, but now I understand that the message is that a gigantic box store dropped smack in the middle of what was once a nice little cornfield or park is exactly what we all need to make our lives a little bit better. Maybe it's the lead-based toys and brand name electronics. Maybe it's the deep discount clothing. Maybe it's the- oh hell, Walmart sells everything, so what's the point?

Here's the point: Walmart efficiently brings the fine work of 10 million Asian minors to your neighborhood, where it can all be found under one convenient roof. Thanks to Walmart, the regrettable abolition of slavery in the United States doesn't have to mean high prices. Slavery, after all, wasn't really abolished- it was just exported. For people without an imagination, that might be an obstacle. But not for the wonderful people at Walmart. Shop as if downtown New York is still America's sweatshop district- just because you can't smell the stench or see the exhausted, starving, desperately poor and utterly out of hope workers, doesn't mean they aren't there, working for You to provide all those Little Things which put a song in your heart and a cheap phone in your cart.

So hooray for Walmart for allowing us to buy just a little bit more, at no real social cost- at least, not any that we can see. Makes you feel all warm inside, doesn't it?

Look- it's bad enough that most Americans couldn't give a damn where all this cheap crap comes from, or even how Walmart sucks the life's blood out of communities by driving small stores out of business and depressing wages. But damn it, do we really need ads featuring people SINGING about a corporate monster which feeds like a tapeworm on innocent, helpless kids on the other side of the planet? Have we no shame at all?