The Bentonville Miracle

Odds are I'll be too busy next Thursday tripping balls on tryptophan to vomit out anything coherent in this space, so I thought I'd take the time now to solemnly consider the things we usually consider on the Thanksgiving holiday, namely: how can I get my hands on $17 billion?

I'm sure that's not exactly what our beloved Pilgrim fathers were considering on the very first Thanksgiving. If their cultural legacy is any indicator, I'm guessing what they were mostly thinking how our Pilgrim mothers were wearing the fuck out of even that heavy-ass black wool ground-length burqa-esque ensemble we made them cover up in, and how just the fact of their attractiveness made them slutty whores in league with Ole Scratch.

Really what they were thinking about was living a biblical life in a land away from the oppression of an Old World already carved up by graspy polities and their pet, bespoke dogmas stillborn in the pollution of ancient, worldly grudges and jealousies. And open land not just unclaimed but unimagined by the entrenched and perpetual families whose only call to worthiness was some unwholesome and conspicuous service to some unwholesome king a forgotten generation ago. Self-reliance, self-determination and nothing more than the opportunity to survive, to provide, to flourish, over the breadth of a whole continent in potentia.* And I think, if we round it up, all that comes out to a value of about $17 billion. You know, if we convert it to 2013 dollars.

I'm interested in lots of money in general, so it doesn't have to be $17 billion specifically I suppose. But from what I gather, that seems to be about how much money one needs to generate in a year to be able to safely live outside the bounds of decency, propriety and the base-level assumptions of human social interdependability. That's how much Walmart pulled down last year in profits, about $17 billion. And still it has to run food drives for its own employees because of the joy and enthusiasm the corporation takes in financially sodomizing them in just about every way they can. It seems sweet to run a holiday food drive for your employees. But unlike paying a living wage, with food drives a) you only have to do it once, instead of every two weeks on pay day and b) it's donated food, so it don't cost you shit.** This is the kind of social and financial sensitivity you'd expect from a family who originally made their fortune foreclosing on farms during the Great Depression.

And to be sure, it does cost you a little bit in some negative publicity. But can you still get a flat-panel 50-inch TV there for like $480? Probably! So the stores will still open at well before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving and we'll all come charging in, dragging our game-hunted bargain carcasses onto the checkout counters to be scanned and bagged by a workforce not allowed to sleep and still hungry from the night before.

But maybe these Wal-Mart employees aren't getting enough credit. They say what they want is a base-level salary of $25,000 to guarantee at least that they won't starve to death, but maybe that's just a ruse. Maybe that's to cover the story of this food donation thing in the first place. Maybe they understand that every dollar counts and the path to $17 billion and true socio-economic independence comes in not paying for the gross extravagance of America's festival of gluttony and familial passive-aggression. Maybe they've done the math and figured out that you can't get to $17 billion without starting with the first $0.89.

So how do I get my hands on $17 billion? The answer is: one can of French-cut green beans at a time.

Happy turkey, everyone.

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*Although probably not with that Latin-y bit at the end. If they wanted Pope-loving foreigners, they'd have stayed in Europe.

**Remember the Waltons are Arkansans.