Editor, Daily Nexus,

I have to admit, every time I read a Courtney Stevens column in the Nexus, I am overcome with bewilderment. The recent one about Wal-Mart (“Liberty Belle: Wal-Mart Keeps Low Prices, Brings Gains,” Daily Nexus, May 1) has been just as puzzling as all the rest. Stevens seems to believe that the central tenets of the American Dream are to subordinate your own well-being to that of global mega-corporations while at the same time drowning under a torrent of shoddy consumer goods produced via the ruthless and calculated exploitation of foreign peoples. She clings to the fantasy that our lives are somehow better now because Wal-Mart allows us to buy crap we don’t need and provides us with shittier jobs than the ones we lost because of Wal-Mart’s influence.

Furthermore, if Stevens honestly believes that the installation of health clinics is guided by anything other than profit and public relations, I can soundly conclude that battery acid must be involved. Corporations are only obligated by law to turn a profit for their shareholders. They will externalize as much as they can possibly get away with and will not do something out of the kindness of their hearts unless it also somehow helps increase their margins. Such blatant pandering to a corporation via the use of marketing speak like “high efficiency and uncompromised quality” reveals her for the corporatist shill that she is.

But because of her crooked rhetoric, I’ve come to the conclusion that what Stevens writes must be a cruel lampoon of extreme right-wing fanatics, in the vein of Stephen Colbert. The fact that people this out of touch with reality could exist outside the confines of Fox News headquarters is an impossibility on the magnitude of a chimpanzee breastfeeding an iguana. If this is indeed the case, cheers to you Stevens, and thanks for all the laughs.