The youth in God’s country will learn to sell.

The Scouts of America–and here we include both the Boys and the Girls in their generalized popular image–are deeply nationalist, deeply moral, and deeply patriotic. The Girl Scouts’ cookie-selling is central to their role in pop culture and in the larger context of the Scouts, commercial enterprise is not only core to the organization but core to AMERICA, baby! Commerce becomes one of–if not the most important–fundamental values of an idealized American youth.

The Scouts have found a shortcut to building trust with their buyers. How can a cookie salesman on the street (cookies, of all things!) build the instant rapport needed to convince passersby to open their wallets? Ahh, but imagine if our salesman is in fact an adorable child, backed by an organization synonymous with the ever-youthful temporarily-inconvenienced-billionaire optimism of the American Dream? Now we’re cooking with gas. And when you enjoy such tremendous populational goodwill, what’s a red-blooded all-American youth to do but SELL SELL SELL!

Sales is a highly individualistic profession that leans into a one-against-the-world mentality, treating all contacts as exploitable marks. Sales, in other words, fits perfectly with the American ethos. The salesman is a pioneer in an unfriendly wilderness to be conquered–a mental positioning that maps exactly atop the ever-westward settler mentality that constructed the American sense of self.

And yet, paradoxically, the Girl Scouts are chumps: Allegedly, over $1 BILLION dollars of cookies are sold each year, but the kids aren’t walking home with that dough. For a badge or sticker, underage children labor to sell wholesale quantities of cookies for their (de facto, not de jure of course!) employer. In fact, the kids’ families also pay the Scouts for the privilege. We bring up our children right in this country: From the moment they hit middle school, we fold them seamlessly into the production of alienated labor.