Popular Culture
This headline caught my eye:
“Man in Wal-Mart smashes 27 flat screen TVs with baseball bat!”
This raises questions and makes me wonder
if he walked into the store – bat in hand –
intent on wreaking a very specific kind of havoc – or
was he just shopping for a baseball bat
and spontaneously decided to test it out
on 27 flat screen televisions – or
he may have been shopping for a television
and was so frustrated that he smashed 27 of them
with a baseball bat because there was nothing
worth watching.
In any case, it’s food for thought.
While we’re on the subject,
let’s talk about the Wal-Mart shoppers’ dress code.
Take, for example, a male fashion combo I saw recently –
mullet hairstyle on over-weight male
dressed in skin tight, see-through wife-beater t-shirt,
lime green spandex bicycle shorts,
white, knee length tube socks and ankle-high,
black patent leather basketball shoes,
laces untied and flapping on the floor as he walked.
Now there’s a fashion statement, a walking time capsule,
snippets of style come and gone.
Let’s pretend you are dropped into Wal-Mart from another planet,
say – from somewhere in the Pleiades star system –
what conclusions might be drawn about the human race
and our civilization from observations about these things … and
our sagging pants, tattoos, piercings, conspicuous consumption, gigantic shopping carts on ramming speed, botox, reality TV, our heroes and pop icons, obsession with cell phones, fast food, super sized everything, our need for instant gratification, beer commercials, sex, what we read, how we treat each other in line, behave in traffic, what we think is important, urgent and on fire, how we speak and use language?
It’s food for thought….
I’m just sayin’
Your Own Back Yard - Michael Gillan Maxwell 