big brother is watching -- this time, at Wal-Mart

I close out the night with another article from The Progressive:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that's what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class "to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights," she says. One student "had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb's down sign with his own hand next to the President's picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster."

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

Duh! Everyone knows that for teenagers today a thumb-tack stuck in a picture is a real threat, the hip equivalent to using a bobble-head as a voodoo doll. Good thing attentive Wal-Mart employees everywhere are on the look-out for the slightest sign of disrespect aimed at G.W. That hippie social studies teacher will probably give the student an A for the semester for this unbelievably sacrilegious behavior.

Honestly, the irony is just too much. It's funny and frightening, sad and scary all at once. If nothing else, it's one more reason not to shop at Wal-Mart (where local economies are liable to fall faster than the store's prices).

Good night and God bless.