By Staff
Thanksgiving night I was talking with my niece Kathy about Black Friday, trying to understand what motivates otherwise normal people to arise in the middle of the night in hot pursuit of "doorbuster" bargains.
Kathy was valedictorian of her class, a teacher and the mother of twin sons.
She also admits to standing in line for two hours to pay for merchandise.
The next day, Nov. 28, this insane tradition – since I always have to work, I don't even know when this nonsense started – lived up to its name as "out of control," bargain-crazed shoppers broke down the doors at a 5 a.m. sale at the Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., and trampled Jdimytai Damour, 34, of Queens and four other people, including a woman eight months pregnant.
Damour was pronounced dead at a hospital.
The woman, 28, and her baby were reported to be OK.
A metal portion of the door frame "crumpled like an accordion," The Associated Press reported.
To prove they were indeed out of control, customers shouted angrily and kept on shopping when store officials said they were closing because of the death. The store on Long Island did close for several hours, then reopened.
Shoppers streaming into the store would argue they did step over the man on the ground.
And when ordered to leave, they felt like they earned their places in line by waiting since the morning of Nov. 27.
Nassau police said some 2,000 shoppers gathered outside store doors at the mall 20 miles east of Manhattan.
"This crowd was out of control," said police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming, who described the scene as "utter chaos."
My only experience with this mentality is concert chaos, though, fortunately, not on a scale of the Who in Cincinnati.
Nobody died.
But the tide bouncing us off unopened doors before a Kiss show was scary nonetheless.
Toys 'R' Us shootout: Two men were shot to death in a crowded toy store Nov. 28 in Palm Desert, Calif.
Understandably, everybody is jittery, creating a standoff at a New Jersey bank.
A SWAT team surrounded PNC Bank in Montgomery Township Thanksgiving night trying to roust a "person" seen inside who turned out to be a cardboard figure.
Bat spat: Huseyin Kalkan, pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party mayor of Batman, an oil-producing city of 203,000 in southeastern Turkey, is suing director Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. for Caped Crusader royalties from "The Dark Knight."
"There is only one Batman in the world," Kalkan said. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."
No explanation why legal action took almost 60 years.
Batman debuted as a comic book character by artist Bob Kane for DC Comics in 1939.
Batman became a campy TV series in 1966. Tim Burton gave the franchise its first big-screen treatment in 1989.
You'd think George Clooney in the batsuit might have provoked them before now.
The Turks also want to blame the Batman character for a number of unsolved murders and a high female suicide rate on the psychological impact the film's $1 billion box office has had on the city's inhabitants.
Progressive foreign policy: Liberals groan at the lack of change in Barack Obama choosing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and retired Marine general James Jones as National Security Adviser while retaining Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense.
But none of the three can be "lampooned as doves," according to Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, so they could provide Obama cover for a withdrawal from Iraq and diplomacy with Iran.
Jones, who once worked for John McCain, called the Iraq war a "debacle" and urged that the Guantanamo Bay detention center close "tomorrow."
Gates has also reportedly pushed for closing Gitmo and for faster withdrawals from Iraq.
Gates also called a military strike against Iran a "strategic calamity" while urging diplomacy with Tehran's mullahs.
Gates, a Republican, even denounced the "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy.
Remember that Bill Clinton negotiated the Kyoto Protocol on global warming with more than 100 other countries, but couldn't get it through the 100-member U.S. Senate.
So "what distinguishes Gates, Jones and (Hillary) Clinton isn't their desire to shift Obama's policies to the right; it's their ability to persuade the right to give Obama's policies a chance," Beinart writes in the Dec. 8 Time. "In Gates, Jones and Clinton, he's found people who can do more than sell his foreign policy to Iranians, Iraqis and Israelis; they can sell it to Americans, too."
Quips, quotes and qulunkers: "Early on, Obama forged a strategy for victory, assembled a team around that strategy and executed the best-organized and most brilliant campaign we've seen in American politics since John Kennedy in 1960. Essential to that strategy was the building of a new coalition … 40 percent are minorities. They look past gender and race in ways that baby boomers do not. They embrace diversity, whereas older Americans tend to be wary or even scared of it. So this is an enormous potential asset for Democrats … If you look at history, every major realignment in our politics is a joining together of a new generation and emerging technologies. Obama has been a pioneer in joining the powers of the Internet with the principles of community organizing … but the old order has not vanished … Blue-collar voters joined up for this ride, but they may not stay on the bus – they could easily get off if Obama misplays his hand. There is a progressive movement that is being born here, but it could easily slip away … Of all the 7-year-olds in the country right now, 25 percent have Hispanic origins. That's a huge wave that's coming … Democrats got 67 percent of the Latino vote … Latino voters are values voters, with a lot of conservative Catholics who could be open to the Republicans … The election was more of a repudiation of the Republicans than it was an embrace of liberal theology."
– David Gergen, my favorite CNN talking head, directs the Center for Public Leadership at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He advised Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton.