WAL-MART TRANKS AND POP ROCK SAVINGS SPECIAL: Aqua-Dots and The Eagles in aisle eight

Not only can you get the Eagles new double CD, "Long Road Out of Eden," at Wal-Mart, but if you're quick and store employees are slow, you can buy up some Aqua Dots, the toy beads set that turns to GHB in your stomach.

One suggested use: Invite that girl who has been denying your advances over for a listening party. Put a couple beads in her drink while she's listening to the Eagles in your living room. Soon she'll be as pliant as putty!

Of course, Aqua Dots, one of the most popular Christmas toys in the nation, are made by slave labor in China. Buy 'em with The Eagles' pop rock CD, not yet determined to be poisonous or made by slave labor.

"Last month, Wal-Mart named its 12 top toy picks for this holiday season. On the list were Spider-Man action figures, Elmo, a game based on “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader” and various other toys," wrote the Wall Street Journal last week. "And, unfortunately, the 'Aqua Dots Super Studio,' which it said combines 'creativity and crafting to create multiple designs — just add water!' "

You'll certainly be feeling creative upon listening to the Eagles and popping Aqua Dots.

In a Wal-Mart Oct. 1 press release, a Wal-Mart official said, "You really can’t go wrong with any of these toys," reported the Journal.

When DD was a kid growing up in Schuylkill County, PA, you could get music by the Eagles in every record store. In fact, you could buy records at the Pine Grove general store, called Burke's, before it burned down and was rebuilt sans much of its original stock. It was just a ten minute walk from the Smith house on American Legion Boulevard.

It's a reflection on how broken and unpleasant the United States has become in 2007 to realize that there's no way to get the Eagles' new record in Pasadena.

Over the past seven years, the citizens of Los Angeles and its suburbs have been fairly successful at keeping Wal-Mart out of the area. After many well-distributed news stories and documentaries on the unfair practices and toxic nature of America's Store, civic action has made Wal-Mart largely persona non grata here.

It's well known that Wal-Mart products come from China (among other nation's with pliant but impoverished labor pools) and that the company's vendors either employ slave labor, or when Western/American intermediaries, sanction it by looking the other way.

"The Chinese government’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine also identified the factory that manufactured [Aqua Dots beads,] the Wangqi Product Factory in the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen, and said the factory’s export license had been suspended," reported the New York Times today.

"The Chinese response to the poisonous toy beads represents an unusually swift reaction, and a contrast with other recent cases of recalled products from China, when the Chinese government has moved more slowly and been more defensive."

"The toxic glue ingredient used by the Shenzhen factory reportedly costs less than one-third what the ingredient that was supposed to be on the beads costs," continued the newspaper.

To make the slave labor toy cheaper, a cheap poison was chosen as a substitute glue. "The United States heavily regulates the ingredient so as to prevent kitchen chemists from using it to produce GHB ..." continued the Times.

DD dragged out a double-CD of Eagles hits last night and reflected on the music, noting bandmembers have no significant reputations as humanitarians or people who stand for things which are right as opposed to really wrong and bad.

If you're looking for messages in "Heartache Tonight," "Already Gone," "In The City," "Life in the Fast Lane," and many others, you can't find them. There aren't any.

What the Eagles were good at was crafting meticulously carved pop songs, perfect for classic rock radio, movie music and television shows. The Eagles were easy to like but because they succeeded quickly, rising to omnipresence as a de facto "America's band," they became polarizing. Hating the Eagles became a sport for many music fans.

It makes shrewd sense that the Eagles would tie themselves to Wal-Mart, one of the most repellent companies in this country. Although it is not where all the Eagles' audience shops, it's where a great deal of it does.

In any case, the Wal-Mart shopper is the quintessentially stupid white trash middle class/lower class American. And that demographic really digs the Eagles, too.

The Eagles have staked their album sales to that consumer segment and if I were them, I might do the same. In the US, the record business has become so ineffective, fractured and crippled by young people who view stealing music as a civil right, there is some sense to putting your record in a store where it could be bought with a cartload of other cheap goods. Some of the "savings" one makes on buying Wal-Mart's goods can be diverted to an impulse buy, "Long Road Out of Eden."

Impulse buying always worked for me when shopping for pop rock records as a kid and college student.

If this entered into any of the reasoning behind putting "Long Road Out of Eden" exclusively at Wal-Mart, it worked. The record smashed into the number one sales slot this week, pasting the new offering by white trash Britney Spears, even forcing Billboard magazine to make an exception in its reporting. The trade magazine traditionally excludes CDs sold only in one bigbox chain, a practice which would have made "Long Road Out of Eden" a ghost number one.

It's with a little sadness that DD realizes there's no "Long Road Out of Eden" in fine Pasadena shops. The Eagles started on Sunset in Hollywood and it's just not quite right that the place of "Life in the Fast Lane" no longer counts as much of a sales stop.

In Schuylkill County, Pennsyltucky, however, the Eagles remain in good hands.

Census demographics show Schuylkill County is still as it was when I lived there, maybe worse: Primarily stupid white trash middle/lower class America. Only ten percent of its citizens have a college education, ten points lower than the state average.

Citizens of Schuylkill County will gladly shop at a store which puts their neighbors out of business. And they are simply too dumb and unfocused to be much bothered by poisonous and defective slave labor consumer goods. If some children got sick from eating Aqua Dots, well that's just the an acceptable risk for the right to have dollar underwear.

To give you a better look at how crippled the citizens of Schuylkill Country are, try to get your head around the fact that they'll patronize a business that embodies the destruction of their community.

Growing up in Pine Grove in the Seventies exposed one to one of Schuylkill County's few employment opportunities -- other than the military -- after big coal went bust: The garment industry.

Pine Grove had Penn Dye and Gold Mills, strong dye finishing and garment-making businesses. Local little league teams were even named after both firms.

The garment industry in Schuylkill County was essentially crushed by NAFTA. Further outsourcing of the business to China has made conditions worse. About seventy five percent of the Schuylkill County jobs in garment making were lost or went overseas to cheap labor between 1994 and 2006.

Gold Mills used to be in the business of making America's garments. No longer. It's a minor employer, located in Pine Grove on a rather substantial tract of land -- thirty acres on the banks of the Swatara River, all of it now polluted with unacceptable amounts of organic solvent.

"We basically don’t do apparel anymore," said a Pine Grove plant manager to the Pottsville Republican newspaper earlier this year. "It was a business you couldn’t make any money in in the United States. What happened was back in 2000 and 2001 our business was about two-thirds apparel and about one-third industrial fabrics. Our costs couldn’t match even the prices the companies were buying the industrial fabrics at."

In patronizing Wal-Marts, the citizens of Schuylkill County work hard at putting themselves out of work for the privilege of buying made-in-slave-labor-China underwear.

However, the county's citizenry is not JUST stupid.

It's also bigoted and riddled with hypocrisy. In Schuylkill County, cheap illegal labor is desired to build things, like a new Wal-Mart store. And it is also desired that those who furnish such labor be arrested and deported when finished.

"Federal agents on Thursday rounded up more than 100 suspected illegal immigrants working at a construction site in Schuylkill County," reported a local radio station last year. "The raid took place near Minersville, where a Wal-Mart distribution center is being built."

"One hundred twenty people were taken into custody. That amounts to about half the work force at the construction site. They were put on busses and taken to a processing area. The government will determine what will be done with the workers from there."

And in May, the Schuylkill County Commissioners approved a special grant for taxpayer subsidized bus services to a Wal-Mart store between Tamaqua and McAdoo.

"Life in the fast lane/Everthing all the time...Life in the fast lane, uh-huh!"