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When Black Friday Earns Its Name

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The Absurdity Exhibition

Before most of us woke up on Black Friday, maybe even before some of us went to sleep, a maintenance worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart had been trampled to death, his body identified, and the Supercenter nearly cleaned up. Two hours earlier a mob of shoppers smashed through the front-doors and flooded the store in search of televisions and vacuum cleaners and digital cameras and marked down Kung Fu Panda DVDs. 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour, a temp worker from Queens, found himself staring down the barrel of the desperate mob of slobbering mommies and daddies and sons and daughters poised to unleash their savage fury on anything standing in their way. And that’s what happened. They shoved him to the ground they stomped on him, stomped on his stomach, his chest, his face, on whatever their sprinting legs happened to land. And no one stopped. Even as he attempted to steal some finals breaths, the shoppers surged over him, stampeding a listless corpse without taking pause. There’s a hell of a deal on an Xbox up there and fuck you if I’m gonna stop for a dead body. Even the cops who came were trampled as they futilely performed CPR.

He died of a heart attack, officially. His body was carted off and the store was emptied and the glass and carnage cleaned up and his father identified his body and by 1pm the store was back open — shoppers scuttling about, Alvin and the Chipmunks emitting from the loudspeakers, elderly greeters standing where the corpse used to be, smiling as wide as humanely possible at each basket-wielding consumer who charged through the entrance.

This story will go down as a lesson learned, a strange tidbit filed under Weird Accidents. Next year Wal-Mart will throw up some barricades and call in a few local cops; no one will die and Black Friday will be deemed a success. But this isn’t a quirky little conversation piece or some atypical outlier; it’s not just one of those things. It’s really the expected product born of a society who values cheap plastic shit more than anything else. This is America, we value “hard-work” not for hard-work’s sake but because hard-work equals money, patriotism involves buying a Chevy instead of a Toyota, holidays are tests of love measured by the quality of products you present to a someone close to you. So what did you expect? We’re a tribe obsessed with material wealth, we value it more than anything else, even life.

Consider the evidence: our kids are dieing in Iraq but the economic downturn dominates the news, hundreds of thousands of people are dieing of genocide and disease in Africa but we only take issue when a few Somalis start snatching up oil tankers, President Bush’s advice to this country’s shell-shocked citizens after 9/11 was to keep buying stuff. The human life takes a backseat to material interests. So when a mob of Americans break into a store at 5am and someone is standing in their way you expect restraint? No, that’s not how we operate.

And we’re all to blame. The Wal-Mart execs are who are too cheap to give their workers protection, the crazed Long Islanders who wanted a deal bad enough to murder someone, and even us, motivated young geniuses at the prestigious Cornell University. Our allegiance to the idea that success is dependent entirely on material wealth creates this depressing, meaningless environment of which tragedies such as the one that occurred on Black Friday are merely logical extensions; and we contribute to it. We trudge away at trivial academic endeavors, hoping that someday all this pointless busy work will help us become the best consumers we can be. We aren’t the “smartest” or “most elite” but simply have the strongest stomachs for this mouthful of bullshit we call living the American life. We’ve thought the least about the merits of living this hyper-consumerist, dehumanizing lifestyle in which I will literally stomp you to death if you get between me and the item of my consumption; and we’re praised for it.

But Cornell-bashing aside, what sort of commentary on America is it when shopping needs to be regulated by the police or else people will die? Thinking about it is maddening. We’re such a materialist society that if the government doesn’t pay people with guns and nightsticks to keep order at a Wal-Mart we will start tearing each other to pieces.

It makes you think about alternative ways to live — ways of life distant and impossible and beyond this absurdity.

Tony Manfred is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at tmanfred@cornellsun.com. The Absurdity Exhibition appears alternate Wednesdays.

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