Zola Would Never Have Guessed!

Police found a bomb today at Printemps, a Parisian department store that rivals Macy's in size and scope, taking up three complete buildings and probably more than a square city block. Actually, it wasn't much of a bomb: five sticks of dynamite, old dynamite at that, were tied together without benefit of a detonator. Crack Frech forces scurried in and cleared the store, telling employees that it was a "technical incident." (This reminds me of a bomb scare at my former school in which teachers were asked to go back in and search for a bomb...huh? And we did it? Well, yeah, it was friggin' cold outside. What's a hand worth, anyway? Workman's Comp!)
Anyway, the threat was an anonymous one by a group calling itself the Afghan Revolutionary Front...or the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front or something. Anyway,Paris was teeming with Christmas shoppers so it made the New York Times and a host of other papers, I suspect, though, not surprisingly, not the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
"Why is all this noteworthy?" I hear you ask. Well, the store is a livng example of what Emile Zola described in Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies Delight)in the 19th century just as Paris was about to become a city of department stores instead of the smaller Mom-and-Pop specialty stores that catered to their customers and really cared about them. It was eerie to read that book and then see that small businesses were forced out of business in this century by the same tactics Zola first mentioned long ago. In the name of profit, the globalized market now gives us chep, lead-painted toys and other goods made to be used and thrown away instead of handcrafted things we can hand down to the next generation. Dimly-lit caves of fascinating discoveries have given way to glaring warehouses and end-cap specials on things nobody bought last year. Specialty shops are gone, swallowed up by strip malls and mega-malls just as Zola "predicted" in his novel.
I'll bet the real culprits in this case were members of the Small Business Bureau who'd simply had enough.
Look out, Wal-Mart!