In my story I went off on a tangent about grocery stores. Y’all may be forgiven for thinking it a pointless digression but I have always been delighted with cheap plentiful food. Like a fish that can’t see water, most Americans (Westerners?) don’t notice.
Here’s a video of a grocery store in 1971. Park your ass down and look upon the mundane with new eyes:
Reflect on how amazing and miraculous such things really are. This isn’t a society recently created out of technology and unicorn subsidies. This is a society that has black and white TV. Their wall mounted telephones don’t have touch tone and long distance is expensive enough it’s reserved for special occasions. This society, 51 years ago, provided all of this food not to elites with good social scores but to average peons! The average peons drove in with big Detroit iron cars, bought as much or as little as they wanted, and drove away. This is the culmination of a society that has its shit together. Do you notice there are no police at the doors? No EBT cards? The coolers run on unlimited uninterrupted power. There are no blue haired masked freaks protesting out front. It’s normal law abiding capitalists enjoying the fruits of their labor.
This isn’t a rich people only store. This existed on the same planet where Soviet peasants waited hours to buy their allocation of bread. The food available is in greater variety and abundance than any society ever produced in all of human existence. A king in 1400 couldn’t even see this level of food. A Roman Emperor in 300 couldn’t witness it. An earthly representative of God in ancient Egypt came nowhere close. How sad that people gazed upon one of the greatest achievements in history and took a fucking hammer to it.
“…took a hammer to it.” It’s an evil fucker thing…nothing personal, we just need to trim the excess peons by about 7 billion. Yours Truly, Evil Fucker Boss.
P S Thanks for your blog, nice to know there’s regular, good folks out there…that keep us thinking, amused and entertained. PPS, I’ve come to grips with the likely demise of the Activist Lesbian Squirrels. Tree Mike
Don’t give up on the Squirrels! There will be more Squirrel chapters!
I’m just busy with a million things and life in general. (Who isn’t?) I especially wind up busy during summer. I’ve got the next chapter about 1/3 typed and 2/3 figured out.
In 1976 a Soviet pilot defected by flying his MIG 25 to a US air base. He was wary of being tricked and being shown a false view of American life because his upbringing warned him of the evils of capitalism. What made him a believer that what he was seeing were regular people, was a grocery store. He saw that if you put all that food, all those choices, in front of people they couldn’t act as if it was normal unless it was.
We take for granted a lot of things, or at least we did until Covid shortages pointed out how much we rely on toilet paper being on the shelves.
In 1976 a Soviet pilot defected to the US, with a MiG 25, . The first thing he asked to see in the US was a grocery store. He didn’t believe it was real. They then took him to a poor intercity store. He could not believe the food available and there we no riots trying to get at it. …..
You are quite correct in your observations…..and it’s further proof that we are a CLEVER species. NOT an intelligent one.
Yet a certain group has Lenin and Stalin as their Messiahs, and yearns for those “good old days!”
“The average peons drove in with big Detroit iron cars, bought as much or as little as they wanted, and drove away. This is the culmination of a society that has its shit together.”
And then we elected Jimmy Carter and f’ed it all up for a couple of decades.
One thing that struck me from the video…how many people in that store do you see wearing jeans?
Now that’s pretty much what everyone wears every day…even in the office in many industries.
Not saying whether that’s good or bad (I grew up on a farm, have never been comfortable “dressed up” and enjoy the fact that I can wear the same clothes in the office that I used to wear working in the fields) just an observation.