|
Black Friday 11/26/04
The day after Thanksgiving, the two stories that dominated the mainstream news were the contested election in the Ukraine and the first official shopping day of Christmas. In the first story, tens of thousands of Ukrainians from all over the country stood outside in five-degree weather for days and nights to protest voting irregularities that reached a level of fraudulence that made the official results illegitimate in their and the world’s eyes. These irregularities are, in fact, the very same ones we in the US experienced on November 2, 2000 and 2004. Exit polls did not match outcomes, there were not enough voting machines, people had to stand in line for hours in order to cast a vote. Even the police walked away from their orders to stand against the protestors, and joined with them to demonstrate for a clean election.
In the second story, tens of thousands of Americans braved chilly temperatures in the dark of night to be the first in line for bargain prices. The images on the small screen were of overfed, boorish consumers charging over each other through the stores. On the day before, they of course did the patriotic thing and overindulged in Thanksgiving dinner and football. Election problems reaching the level of fraud, atrocities committed against civilian populations in Iraq, the systematic destruction of checks and balances in government, the remaking of our security apparatus into an agency with first loyalty to the illegitimate president—absolutely none of these things were on the radar. Only two people in the media, Keith Olberman of MSNBC and Randi Rhodes of Air America Radio, have taken up the cause of election fraud.
The news readers called the day “Black Friday”, the day that would put retailers in the black on their balance sheets and make up for lagging sales all the rest of the year. As my daughter and I watched these two stories unfold on BBC World News last night, her reaction to the first story was, “Go, Ukrainians!” To the second, in which people were being trampled in a store on their way to the toy department, “That’s just embarrassing.”
The story that really got my attention, though, was the one about the billboard on I-4, just outside Orlando. It’s a picture of W with only two words: Our Leader. Translated into German, they would read “Der Fuhrer”.
Black Friday, indeed.
|