This was to good to pass by..
The Almighty vs. the Almighty Dollar at the mall
I saw a poster at the Galleria last week.
“In God We Trust,” it says.
It’s on the office door at the Town of Wallkill mall, just off the food court.
I asked a shopper who was eating some pizza at a nearby table what she thought of it.
“I think it’s nice,” she told me. “It’s patriotic.”
And that, my friends, is just how confused we are right now. Under the current regime, we’ve got patriotism and religion all mixed up together in our heads. There seems to be no distinction between the Virgin Mary and Betsy Ross.
I didn’t just stumble upon the poster by accident. I went looking for it after getting a call from a woman named Christina Murphy, whose sales job brings her into stores throughout the region.
She’s seeing God everywhere she goes now.
“It’s a growing trend for corporate America to use God as a sales weapon,”
Another snippet
A God poster at the mall is nothing more than a shrewd marketing trick – and a way of supporting an evangelical president who’s been very, very good to corporate America.
So, happy Fourth of July. Be sure to catch the sales at the mall in honor of our nation’s birth. You can trust that God wants you to.
It says so, right on your money – and on the mall office door.
Dear God, Please get me to the mall safely.
Ironic that fewer and fewer of God’s children can afford to go to the mall these days, because of these so-called patriotic policies.
and when you tell them your poor, they say, “God will provide”
hmmmmmmmm, which one is that? I did’nt seen him at the ATM the other day.
It will take 20 or more years (and we’ve been in this cycle since Reagan’s 1980 election), but when religion becomes this entangled in government and commerce what happens is that it totally loses credibility with the next generation.
My older son (sophomore in college) is something of a deist (which is what I was at his age), but my younger son (sophomore in high school) has been so turned off by the muddling of church and state in America that his opinion is more along the lines of: “God? What a lame concept – that’s for losers.” Of course, I find this personally upsetting, but perfectly understandable given the world he’s grown up in.
So I expect the pendulum to swing back, if we can prevent too much damage from being done in the meantime. It may already be starting to swing back – I have a feeling Bush may tell the religious zealots to go @#$% themselves and appoint someone not to their liking to the Supreme Court.
Personally I expect this to happen; I expect him to nominate Gonzales. (He’s certainly been consistent about sticking by his friends to date.) And when that happens there will be a horrendous shriek and the fundies will crawl back under their rocks for a generation or two. This will widen the wedge already started between the politicians and the zealots when the Right backed off on Schaivo after stepping in the dog poo. It will also be another nail in Frist’s chances for the presidency.
I really doubt it. This has been their goal for the past decade, and it’s finally within reach. If Bush ignores them on this, and they don’t get another shot before his term’s up, his base evaporates. That’s 20% of the voters in the last election gone, right there.