A meme spreads

Dear reader(s), meet Liberty Fillmore, Cart-Whisperer:



If you need or want some context, go here--or, if that's not enough, here. I can't resist one quick comment, though: it's indeed a testimony (positive or negative, I'll let you decide) to the co-optative powers of the free market that the image of the abandoned shopping cart, which can be read as a commentary on the excesses of consumerist culture, itself becomes a means by which consumerist culture perpetuates itself. The cart is too-empty a vessel?

And, yes, you smart people out there, I know that by linking to it I'm participating in the very thing about which I feel more than a little ambivalence. All I can say to that is, short of finding a nice cave in Montana and taking with me a couple years' worth of tuna fish (not forgetting the can-opener) and an Uzi or two, at times the box is so large that one can't think outside it--and that that, too, is our collective doing.