(One small step for man; one giant weekend tent sale!)

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July 4, 1776. I can hear it now. Thomas Jefferson’s famous prophecy of patriotism:  “My fellow citizens, this is the day. Throughout America’s future, this sacred day will stand apart from all others as the day when we celebrate our hard-fought freedom by offering deep discounts on fitted sheets.”

America. Land of the free shipping and home of “The Brave Wear Briefs” Three-Day Sale.

I don’t know where you spent your Fourth of July holiday weekend, but wherever you were, it couldn’t have been crowded, because everybody in America was with me. Somehow, this Saturday, roughly twenty-seven million Americans managed to discover what errands I had to run, what items I needed to buy, and from where, and then they all managed to beat me there. Every single one of ’em. Driving like Otis from Mayberry, parking like Salvador Dali, bouncing from aisle to aisle like Arlen Specter, and charging like a hippopotamus might charge if a hippopotamus could run for Congress and spend other people’s money, and besides, hippos could not possibly be worse than the mud-wallowing mammals in Congress right now, and they’d probably be less cocky, and definitely better behaved. (I don’t know if hippos have morals, but then … yeah, you know where this is going.)

My first stop, the grocery, was a chaos, along the lines of 1975 Saigon during “last call.” Soft drinks were being traded as commodities, chips and dips were a faded memory, and cookout buns were as rare as leftover money at a Pentagon budget summit. Even in the Four-Hundred-Thousand Items Or Less lane, sympathetic staff were doling out cots and complimentary shampoo. And I’m not sure, but based on observed buying patterns, I believe some shoppers had been told that spare ribs could cure cancer.

But this is what we’ve done to ourselves. We celebrate with sales. We consecrate with cash or credit, we honor with outlay, we praise with “paper or plastic?” Whether it’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, President’s Day, Spam & Three-Bean Milkshake Day, National Midget Aardvark Preservation Week, the Cinco of Mayo, or The Fourth of July, car dealers and other one-celled organisms will find a way to turn a holiday into a way to turn a dollar.

And this Independence Day weekend was no different. Every surviving, un-shuttered shop with a shingle and a shill had some barbed “Buy here if you love America” lure, spinning on some lame marketing hook, feebly tied to the “theme” of the national holiday. Used cars for $1776, that sort of nonsense.

A local clothing store teased that any second item was only $76. For a loss leader, the grocery led with thirteen-to-a-dozen “Original Colony Eggs,” and a fast food joint was hawking Cornwallis dogs with a side of Cheez Yankee Doodles. An uncommonly large, muumuu-ed woman named Estelle took out a half-page newspaper ad touting a special group therapy session, billing it as Codependence Day. (“Girl, we didn’t need the British, and you don’t need him!”)

A regional weight loss center named Heft Hiders unveiled a new “Give me 76 sit-ups or give me death” exercise plan, an over-eager orthodontist marketed his “1812 Overbite,” and an obviously holiday-challenged entrepreneur was pushing Rosa Parks’ memorial seat cushions. An appliance store promotion promised a free “Philadelphia Flier” dryer with the purchase of any new “Washing-ton” machine, but thankfully, a hole suddenly ripped opened in the Universe and the store’s marketing department was sucked away to that dark place were really bad puns go to die.

Cell phone companies promised steep discounts on all phone calls, as long as the calls were made within one of the thirteen original colonies, lasted exactly 76 minutes, and were completed prior to the end of the Spanish-American war. (Some ante-bellum connection charges may apply. Offer not valid in New Jersey, North America, or Earth.)

And of course, in Washington, you could get a sweet deal on an overnighter in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Meanwhile, the home improvement stores were particularly frenzied this year, given the current state of our housing market. (see “Saigon 1975”) You know these stores, or at least the two major competitors. I forget their names; Home Skillet and Low Depot, maybe, something like that. One is orange, the other is blue.

For a marketing slogan, one of the two – the blue or the orange, I forget which – one or them invites shoppers to swing round and “build something together that will utterly void your warranty,” while the other pumps up Joey Homeowner’s ego with the reassuring jingle, “You might or might not be able to do it. We might or might not help.”

I forget which store is the reassuring one, but the other one, the codependent one, might want to consider brokering a cooperative marketing venture with Estelle.

Both stores have parking lots the size of some small European nations, and they’re both populated by roving, color-coordinated-vest-wearing squadrons of savants who all somehow manage to know everything there is to know about lumber, toilets, lawns, lawnmowers, grills, shelving, paint, brushes, blinds, boring tools, bits, brads, nails and anodized self-tapping chrome-plated toilet brush gasket caps.

And these cavernous competitors are always located right across the street from each other. I suppose there are hordes of insecure shoppers out there right now, constantly zipping back and forth across the divider highway, looking for the three-penny-better bargain on cap-tapping chrome-gasketed anodyne brush-mounted free-range toilet air-gun self-dissolving pre-greased flag mounts.

“Let’s build something together,” they say. This Saturday, apparently, the something they were planning to build together was an epic, eight-lane, cross-country mulch highway, laid down by an army of buffet-enabled workers boldly outfitted in the most horrid plaid shorts imaginable.

Visiting the blue & orange giants always reminds me of a brilliant stand-up comic, the late Mitch Hedberg:

“I don’t own a house. I rent an apartment. People like me need a store called ‘Apartment Depot’ – a great big huge store, full of people just hangin’ out, saying, ‘We don’t gotta fix squat.”

So. Happy Independence Day, America. Now get out there and buy something … else, the terrorists win.

And let’s end the holiday on a happy note:  fortunately, neither the orange place nor the blue place is one of those pesky membership clubs. I’m not paying a store before I buy something; I’m not paying somebody for the privilege of paying somebody. I have a relationship with my wallet that’s far too codependent for anything like that.

At least, that’s what Estelle told us.