Turkey Shoot in the Piranha Tank, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #198

November 29, 2010 Mike Gold 13 Comments

I’m penning this deathless prose a week early because, like a great many Americans, I’ll be out of town on Thanksgiving weekend. Therefore, I sure hope this one doesn’t wind up biting me on my ass.

This past weekend, as you read this, was the official start of the Christmas Shopping Season feeding frenzy. I’m told they call it Black Friday because that’s the day our nation’s retailers finally turn a profit for the year. If so, our economy has some serious problems that won’t be helped by bailouts.

As I write this, the media is obsessed with the potential death count. Big-box stores opened at midnight or 3 AM (which is actually more dangerous) or 6 AM, unleashing thousands of bloodthirsty bladder-challenged shoppers into an over-lit neon oven of capitalistic frenzy. At a Wal*Mart couple years ago a security guard got trampled to death and four others were injured, including a woman eight months pregnant who shouldn’t have been trampled but also shouldn’t have been there in the first place. So last year and this year, you can’t go through a teevee newscast without a story about all the enhanced safety training at the big boxes so you don’t have to be afraid to support the teevee station’s major advertisers.

You now know if anybody died this year. I sure hope not. But that hasn’t stopped Target and Wal*Mart and Best Buy and Toys’r’Us from once again promoting the event as the modern Oklahoma Land Run of 1889. If only crack dealers could adopt this practice.

Back in the mid-1950s, satirist Stan Freberg did a song called Green Chri$tma$. Yes, I will be playing it on Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind the week of December 19th.  Music historian Jeff Westover tells us “Green Chri$tma$ used the familiar story line of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol as the backdrop for a conversation between Mr. Scrooge, an advertising executive and Bob Crachit, a humble small business owner compelled to keep the season sacred:

“‘Do I have to tie my product into Christmas? Christmas has a significance, a meaning!’

“‘A sales curve!’ Mr. Scrooge responds. ‘Christmas has two s’s in it and they’re both dollar signs!’”

“The interesting thing is,” Freberg told Westover, “that after that record, both Coca-Cola and Marlboro came to me to do ad campaigns… When it first came out some sponsors refused to pay for any of their commercials that were programmed within five minutes of my record being played.”

Now that they’ve taken Santa Claus off of the cigarette cartons (they have, haven’t they?), my favorite Christmas shopping promotions are from the car dealers: if you truly loved your wife (rarely your husband; I guess woman can’t buy cars for men) or your 16 year-old kid or, I dunno, your mailman, buy her or him a new car. You can put a great big bow on the roof. Show ‘em you care.

Problem is, you can’t buy a new car with a credit card. I know; I’ve tried.

I hope you and yours are safe and sound.

Fellow-traveler, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on America’s pop culture channel The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.