among the findings of a new "60 Minutes"-Vanity Fair Poll released Sunday...[n]early half of the respondents chose Wal-Mart as the institution that best symbolizes America today.Nooooo!!!!! I mean, have you been to a Wal-Mart?
I can't help but think that last week's Onion story was correct:
Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.
An international panel of leading anthropologists, cultural critics, biologists, and social theorists announced this week that Western civilization will reach its lowest conceivable point at 3:32 p.m. Friday.
"From the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings to the stirring symphonies of Mozart to today's hot-dog eating competitions and action films with comical gerbils, culture has descended into a festering pool of mass ignorance," said Yale sociologist Paul Riordan, who has spent his career analyzing western civilization's fall into the depths of depravity. "If our calculations are correct, this complete erosion of all that is enlightened and unique will reach absolute rock bottom on the afternoon of Sept. 25, 2009."
Added Riordan, "It is scientifically impossible for civilization to sink any lower than it will this Friday."
...
Experts predict that the penultimate catastrophe will occur at approximately 7:15 p.m. Thursday night, when the social networking tool Twitter will be used to communicate a series of ideas so banal they will instantaneously negate the three centuries of the Renaissance.