The United States of Target

For those who haven’t visited, and I’m talking about 2 percent of the country, who are either on a space mission, doing “time,” or are banned from malls by their psychologist, Target, the mega store with everything, is the Ellis Island of our era.

These days my wife goes alone. She prefers it that way. I prefer it too, since that one and only time around Christmas, two years ago. It’s not that I’m a xenophobe, or acrophobe, it’s just that I was overwhelmed by America’s great Kasbah and the people moving down the aisles speaking a multitude of unknown languages. Ever heard Uzbek? Go to Target. Amharic? What’s that? You don’t know? Go to Target.

Of course I’m guessing, here. It may just be what with all the goods, the funneled music and the smell of over-cooked dogs from Café Target that I wasn’t in the most cosmopolitan of moods. But as a landing point for America’s new immigrant, Target has that big behemoth Wal-Mart beat. It’s where the new America shops. It’s lifestyle, not general store. It’s Kashi cereals, not BB gun pellets. It’s design done cheerfully, not utilitarian meatloaf. And best of all is its logo: red and aggressively seductive. I mean who wouldn’t set their sights on that mark, having just arrived from Belarus or Yemen; like a bull drawn to a matador’s cape, it would be un-American not to charge toward the Mosssimo collection of women’s apparel and spend?

The apocryphal quality to this massive chain and their capitalist mantra is that it is socialistic. It is socio-corporate solidarity—for profit. Growing up in Sweden in the late ‘60s, shopping was the same experience: decent quality goods, affordable prices and best of all, although I can’t describe why, the feeling of complete social equanimity. The doctor, the lawyer, the cab driver, the cleaning lady and carpenter would appear the same because they shopped the same. Now, I’m not saying Target is the equivalent of a Eugene Debs utopia, here, in the USA. I’m saying that in our present economic meltdown, Target has saved many a breakfast table from appearing famished, many a mom from having her children look like Oakies and many a Christmas from the Cratchit’s threadbare observance. I know that many red-blooded Americans already feel that our President is the love-child of LBJ and Marvin Gaye and his radical ideology nurtured in Saigon, but the fact is that The United States of Target receives the tired and the weary, the befuddled masses yearning for twenty percent off retail price on a daily basis with a no-questions-asked return policy. Under the superstore’s colossal roofs, humanity’s disparate ingredients spend and blend in the great melting pot. Want to see America? Go to Target: it’s naturalization for less.