What this country needs is a good five-year plan

I'll admit it. I've never been a big fan of grocery stores. I don't blame them for being awful. They really can't help it. Grocery stores run at incredibly low margins, and can only thrive if they pump through huge numbers of customers and sell them huge numbers of goods while operating as cheaply as decently possible.

This means that the grocery store is the worst-case scenario for a certain kind of modern sensory overload: being sold to. It's incessant. Everything your eyes light on in a grocery store is for sale. And while there remain a couple of holdouts to old-style utilitarian packaging (the meat counter comes to mind), for the most part, everything that your eyes light on, from the "artisanal" Safeway baguettes to the SUPER EXTREME NACHO FUCK YOU RAGGED Doritos, is crying out "Buy me! Buy me!"

And then you come to the checkout stands, which, being the primary site of the impulse buy, take this visual assault about as far as it can be taken. What you see there is, for the most part, scraps of a kind of folklore, yelling at you in inch-high yellow-on-red sans-serif headlines about how Brad isn't really the father of Angelina's child, and Jessica has a new date, and all of the other doings of our brain-damaged Olympian gods.

What made last night's slog through the Safeway at 16th and Bryant especially hard to endure was another logical consequence of the low-margin grocery business: understaffing. In this case, there were four checkstands running to service (by a conservative estimate) a hundred customers. It took me, no lie, forty minutes to check out.

And that's not forty minutes having your feet massaged and sipping cognac. No, it's forty minutes of the Kodak kiosk telling you that you, even YOU, can figure out how to use it. It's simple. Just touch the screen to get started. Now. Touch it. Touch it. And then the music (tonight's selection is the Eagles' "Heartache Tonight," oh yes) gets interrupted by the bright voice of a woman telling you about a product that will make you happy, that you need, that's so affordable anyone can have two. (I don't remember what it was.) And to the left, I see the cover of TIME, consisting entirely of a head shot of al-Zarqawi with a red X drawn over his face.

Back during Reagan's first administration, I had the insight that as a nation we were at a turning point. I saw two possible courses. In one, we could collapse into Italy: we could become a once-great nation of discontented grumblers whose government was so terrible all we could do was laugh at it. In the other, we could collapse into the Soviet Union, which would be much the same, only no one would be laughing and the food would be terrible.

It seemed clear to me, trudging in this joyless line last night and picking my way through a landscape of propaganda too ridiculous to believe and too ubiquitous to ignore, what course we have chosen.