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Black Friday may currently be associated with its ability to put retailers "in the black"; it was originally named, however, for human impulses of a much more basic variety. In the 1950s, the Harvard historian Nancy Koehn says, factory managers started calling the day after Thanksgiving "black Friday" because so many workers would call in sick for it. (The scourge was, as one magazine put it, "a disease second only to the bubonic plague.") In the early '60s, police in Philadelphia began using "Black Friday" to describe the crowds of shoppers and traffic that would flow into the city post-Thanksgiving—making their jobs, and consequently their lives, temporarily more difficult. It wasn't until the 1970s and '80s that retailers began to emphasize the connection between the day after Thanksgiving and the start of the (commercial) holiday season.

Today, Black Friday is a series of spectacles in the guise of a series of sales. It is an event that springs from a state of mind. It is the culmination of all the dreams that Alexander Hamilton and Walt Whitman and Andrew Carnegie had for us, when the nation was itself an aspiration: It is social Darwinism and cultural cohesion and a country soothing itself with the salve of stuff. It is the dream of self-improvement, vacuum-packed and bubble-wrapped. Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?

But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.

Which is another way of saying what a headline last week, from the Los Angeles Times, summed up well: "Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few. Black Friday stands, both temporally and culturally, in stark contrast to Thanksgiving, which is not a Hallmark holiday so much as a Williams-Sonoma one, and which involves, at its extremes, people who can afford heritage turkeys/disposable centerpieces/vessels designed solely to pour gravy congratulating themselves on how wonderfully non-commercial the whole thing is. With stomachs full of bird and broccolini and bourbon-ginger-apple pie, they settle in to watch the news stories that come out of Black Friday—the stampedes, the stabbings—and gawk in amusement and amazement. "All that for a flat screen," they say, drinking their wine and clucking their tongues.