But before examining the motives and aims behind these types of emails, let me just run quickly through some of the other pictures that accompanied this one. Each picture has the "unhappy face" with "People of WalMart" icon at the bottom right. Some appear to have been photo-shopped. Some have quite nasty captions below them. And some are so obviously outrageous that there is not a doubt in my mind that they have been "staged." But staged by whom? And for what purpose? Explanation follows the pictures below.

Hey Hulk Hogan, guys with a full head of hair look stupid with a ponytail. Wanna take a guess how good it looks without half your hair?

Hookers love cupcakes. I have nothing else to add to that. Can’t argue with the facts.

Listen hunny, the “ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL” tag is lying to you, so I suggest we try things on before we buy.

Your first move should be checking that backpack for a pair of underwear. If there are none in there, well, you ARE at a store that sells underwear. Problem solved. I would move on to pants...but....I don’t want to get too far ahead...and lose you.

I’m sorry sir, but those Christmas hams put you over the 12 item limit for this line.

Before he died, did Elvis get a poodle pregnant? I don’t know, I’m not here to judge...Okay, I am...but still...

Okay, had enough? So have I. These circulating emails have always puzzled me. Here's the answer, in the form of my email below, sent to my friend "Ed."

Email sent on July 17, 2010:

Ed, old friend, I have just received your email about "Wal-Mart people." The one with all the shockingly ugly pictures of people who are supposedly shopping at Wal-Mart? I must ask you to stop sending this stuff around, not only to me, but to anyone, and I think you'll agree with me once I explain.

I am am pretty sure that you're aware of the hatred that unions, socialists and other statists have toward Wal-Mart. They vent that extreme hatred at Wal-Mart for various reasons. One is the fact that it's a penultimate capitalist enterprise. It gives extremely good value to its customers while making a profit for its stockholders and providing jobs for thousands if not millions of working people. It also refuses to allow unionization (and you and I both know that unions are simply labor cartels that have become harmful to both workers and companies, not to mention to the economy itself; that's why all labor unions except for government employees have been losing membership for years). Yet another reason is that Wal-Mart doesn't ask for or take special government favors; thus, it's not part of the political-class "team," and statists and unions certainly can't have that. Still another reason is that Wal-Mart benefits poor people far more than all the harmful government programs (and public employees who administer those programs) that appear designed to make people permanently dependent upon government. (Why would that be? Because creating government dependency creates a large pool of voters who can be depended upon to consistently support and vote for the poisonous Welfare State.

Now, one way that socialists, unionists, and other statists carry on warfare against Wal-Mart is (of course) by using the power of their chosen tool, government, to attempt to forcibly stop the building of stores. Another way is to attempt to generate what might be called "cultural hatred." That is, through a propaganda campaign...a generalized effort to harm the image of the company and its stores by giving the false impression that its customers are ignorant, slovenly, and ugly. The email you have sent me is part of that campaign. By doing this, people who hate Wal-Mart and its success, hope to convince people that they should not shop at Wal-Mart. With luck, the propaganda may even help to scare people out of shopping there. 

By engaging in such an ugly propaganda campaign, unions and their socialist friends seek to "culturally delegitimize" the company itself. I shop Wal-Mart whenever it's convenient, and I rarely see anyone even vaguely resembling those in the pictures below. In fact, when you think about it, people who engage in this type of cultural warfare against an immensely successful and beneficial company are really more ignorant and ugly than the poor people they victimize.

However, with all of the above that said, it must be admitted that ugly, dirty, fat, slovenly, ignorant, ill-dressed people really do exist, and might on occasion even be found shopping in Wal-Mart. (After all, it's still a free country, for the time being at least.)  But you know what? if you really want to see shockingly large numbers of ugly, slovenly, ignorant, dirty people, you don't go to Wal-Mart. No! You'll see far more of them are at...wait for it...government-dependency offices, of course. In fact, in the bowels of the welfare state, government dependency offices is where you will find people who are actually in the process of being transformed into ignorant, slovenly, dirty, ugly, lazy wards of government. After all, after about 75 years of making it happen, we can now see that the real "function" of the Welfare State is to create such people. Why? For the purpose already explained above, that is, to create a totally ignorant, hopeless, dependent class of people who the political class can always depend upon to support the Welfare State that has been erected (and as we have seen, the Welfare State is VERY profitable to that political class of politicians, bureaucrats, and public employees who feed and live off of it).

Now, to the extent that the permanently poor and helpless wards of government actually do shop at Wal-Mart---along with the rest of us---it is for an obvious reason. To the extent that they are transformed into ignorant, dirty, poor, helpless wards of government, they will take the small amounts of money that the very well-off political class doles out to them, and do their spending at stores that give them the best value for the pittance they receive from their Welfare State masters.

In the meantime, the political class and its unions attempt to delegitimize Wal-Mart by attempting to generate ulginess and fear in the general population by spreading such as your email all over the Internet. In fact, it has become ubiquitous, and no one seems to know where it comes from. The answer is obvious: It ultimately comes from the political class and the unions that support it, particularly government employee unions. So to the extent that you see ugly people like those pictured in any Wal-Mart, it's most likely that they're actually just people who have allowed themselves to become "wards of government," as opposed to the admirable and independent working classes (from the "working poor" right up to the rich people) who love to shop at Wal-Mart.  

This brings up a real problem in our society today: To the extent that more people are becoming poor, slovenly, ugly, dirty, and ignorant, the dominant reason is because our government is MAKING them that way. From the disastrously failing public (government) schools, to the failing economy, to the skyrocketing unemployment rate, to the destruction of millions of small businesses, to the financial raping of working people through ever-rising taxes, to the unmitigated disaster of the Welfare State itself, our government is engaged in MAKING people jobless, helpless, poor, ignorant, dirty, slovenly, and irresponsible. And, as  noted above, you can see such people being created and trapped in any government welfare office you care to visit. THIS is the reason that you and I---and everyone else who isn't pushing for more wards of the Welfare State---should immediately cease sending around "humorous emails" such as the one you just sent me. Wal-Mart is not our enemy. It is the enemy of the socialists who now temporarily control American politics, and it is the enemy of the Welfare State. Instead of sending around union and Welfare State pornography, we need to note the truth, and spread it far and wide: People don't necessarily want to be that way, and they don't have to be that way. The problem is that they are encouraged, and even forced to become that way by the ignorant, ugly, and culturally disastrous incentives being forced upon us by the federal government, its welfare state, and the political class that has been pushing this form of "cultural heroin" upon America and its people for the past 75 years.

Now the time has come to stop it---and them---and reclaim our country, our culture, our economy, and our independent, self-reliant, working heritage. Right now.    ---Tim Condon