SF Gate columnist Mark Morford hates Black Friday, and he’s written an over-the-top Network-style screed against it, backing it up with some cringe-inducing YouTube clips of giddy, running Americans swarming into retail outlets last Friday morning.

I don’t even know what Kohl’s is. I’m guessing some sort of mass-crap superstore, like Best Buy or Target or T.J. Maxx or a weird amalgam of all of those and it doesn’t really matter because last Friday they opened at 4 a.m. for the mad rush of Black Friday shoppers, because if there’s one thing you want to do when your body is groggy and sleep tugs at your heart and your dreams have turned vacant and sad, it’s grope cheap waffle makers before sunrise.

In the second half, Morford draws a loose connection between America’s overwhelming consumerism and our hunger for oil, which is now leading petroleum companies to develop environmentally damaging bitumen extraction refineries in Canada in order to produce synthetic crude.

Until there’s a profound shift in how we approach the world, in how we view the goods we buy, in how Black Friday and the rape of Canada are grossly, inextricably connected, we cannot effect much change. Much as I love the green movement and the Buy Nothing movement and the Slow Food movement and all the rest, in the face of the countless billions still to be made by raping the planet for oil, they’re merely the equivalent of trying to water the rainforest with an eyedropper.

“Black Friday Die Die Die” [SF Gate]
(Photo: Associated Press)

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