Wet Cleanup on Aisle 0

Neon Memes • The Associated Press and other news outlets just plated a truly ghoulish post-Thanksgiving dish: On Black Friday around 5 a.m. EST, sale-crazed shoppers stormed the entrance of a Long Island Wal-Mart and trampled to death Jdimytai Damour, a worker there. The 34-year-old Queens resident reportedly weighed 270 pounds―a milquetoast by no means. Yet before the frenzy of a mob of roughly 2,000 consumers seeking to score a sweet deal on a 50-inch HD plasma screen, he might as well have been a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. The day after his death, the AP quoted a witness: "When [authorities] were saying [shoppers] had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been on line since yesterday morning.' They kept shopping." Evil, of course, more often hews to a wretched banality than to Miltonian grandeur. Still, this instance of mercantile wilding sickens me nearly more than I can communicate. If I had not tacitly renounced Christianity almost four decades ago, I would pray that nothing this repugnant ever occurs in St. Louis―because Jdimytai Damour's death suggests that the season of giving, somehow or other, has perversely come to embrace taking human life. ―Bryan A. Hollerbach, Managing Editor