The outer shell of savings Valhalla“Initially it made me sick to my stomach, but what was I going to do? The only shop that Wal-Mart hadn’t run out of business was closed and I needed to start work on the signs. And I really wants to get a head start on the crochet work for our six-foot yarn Satan,” said Rayner while flipping through a list of the names of G20 attendees to see how many could have an 'S' in their name replaced by a dollar sign. “What I saw when I entered the store nearly buckled my knees and knocked the wind out of me. The deals! My God, the deals!"
Among the many items that piqued his interest were the six-pack of multi-colored Sharpie markers (on sale for only $2!), the poster board (just $5.67 for a bundle of 50!), and a $12 Larry the Cable Guy t-shirt, which he assumed was being sold for ironic purposes.
“I always assumed the 'low' in 'low prices meant 'dirty' or 'underhanded'" said the embittered anti-corporatist, his eyes welling up with tears as he thought of the sheer joy he had known as the full extent of the price breaks were revealed to him. “I know, I know: they’re evil, multi-national, corporate, blah blah blah. Hell, I wrote up most of the material attacking them. Remember, you're talking to the guy who saved up an entire year's worth of excrement and sent it in bulk to News Corp."
“But just think of all the good I’ll be able to do with the money I save. Each penny I save on poster material can be spent on wheat paste and focus grouping my anti-capitalism slogans, so I might better spread the message. Maybe the ends do justify the means.”
To be sure, Rayner is not the first to rage against Sam Walton’s sale giant and end up loving the trillion-dollar monster’s bargain basement prices. In fact sources close to Wal-Mart executives and their future planning department note that this is just part of a long-term strategy to convert weekend anarchists, trustafarians, people who ride public transportation of their own free will, those who safety pin patches to their backpacks, left-wing socialists, people who start compost heaps, and other such freaks who are traditionally hostile to corporate evil with a bare bottom pricing scheme.
“You know how it goes: show them how useful we can be to them, then slowly convince them they can’t live without us,” said Kenny Walton, member of the Wal-Mart Board of Directors and Chairman of Wal-Mart’s Special Division for Truly Evil Shit. “Show them how much they can save, get them to believe they’ll be able to use those savings to further push their cause, get them to notice that hemp rattan chair we have on sale or the shirt we slapped the phrase ‘organic cotton’ on, then get them to kill on behalf of our glorious corporation. You know there isn’t even such a thing as ‘organic cotton”? Nothing has been made of cotton in at least 30 years.”
“It’s a shame though,” Walton said, his hand gripping a cane that seemed to be made of the femur and skull of a small boy. “He was right about us. All the protesters are. But now who’ll believe them? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go laugh manically while lightening flashes in the background.”
As for Rayner, he noted he was considering using Wal-Mart to purchase his papier-mâché supplies for a large model he was building of a pig, dressed like a banker, defecating a large burlap sack of money.
“That is,” he noted ominously, “if I even still believe in the movement. Now that I think about it, espousing the belief that a society could actually work based around a mish-mash of anarchism, communism, and no monetary system is impossibly childish. As is the notion that waving around a hectoring puppets, dressing in a pink stormtrooper outfit, or getting maced by the police would ever cause men like Silvio Berlusconi to give up their cushy lives of pampered corruption. You know what? I think I’m going to get a job.”
And with that, next month’s G-20 protests were left with one less person to make spray-paint stencils of world leaders riding nuclear bombs. Off in the distance, lightning flashed and the faint sound of laughter was heard.
pic via code poet
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