Supercenter Nation

Like a predator waiting on the periphery of a herd of grazing animals, Walmart has stalked the Great American Frontier, picking off isolated and vulnerable communities, implementing their now-infamous and systematic takedown of “Mom and Pop” retailers, what is essentially a strategic price war of attrition that dries up small business and sends them rolling through vacant Main Street shopping districts like so much drifting tumbleweed.

This is no longer news to anyone–even the uninformed, if not exactly reluctant Walmart patrons and employees left in the wake of these small town implosions, left with few other options. Walmart’s is the story of free enterprise, global supply chains, and market efficiencies. A story that has played out over ten thousand times across America, in just as many Walmart stores and Supercenters, these Spartan rectangular warehouses, oftentimes opening and closing in quick succession, their arrival and departure merely for the sake of annihilating competitive local business.

No other political or commercial entity so better embodies the profound class and political polarization America has undergone in the past twenty years than Walmart. And what legacy has Walmart left in the second decade of the 21^st century? Having in recent years added to its list of public relations catastrophes, we find an impudent retailer owned by a family that boasts a total net worth of $102 billion, a sum exceeding that of the bottom 40% of all Americans combined. An employer fervently opposed to labor organization, keen to limit employee hours in order to evade health insurance, and accused of a gender discrimination class action lawsuit so widespread and varied that the Supreme Court in 2011 threw it out on the grounds it was literally too widespread and varied to qualify as a class action lawsuit.

Walmart has not shied away from any of these practices, and this could be in part due to the fact that grievous monopolistic practices in today’s America go unpunished by Federal regulators. Nor does the public seem to mind, as the inevitable consequences of are today associated with bedrock conservative values. Well, conservative consumers accounts for a large demographic, but what about the rest of us?

Walmart need not be concerned with the shopping habits of Liberals. Already largely absent from left-leaning regions typified by affluence and informed that Walmart brings little benefit to one’s own community, Walmart has emerged as a hyper-consumptive outpost for Americans too desperate, too ignorant, or too hoodwinked by a culture of immediate gratification to resist.

Public awareness has so far failed to gain traction in the face of bargain prices. Last November we saw the first clash between these two ideologies take shape. When a grassroots effort emerged and sparked protests on the ur-shopping holiday Black Friday in an effort to bring attention to Walmart’s unfair labor practices, the usual cadre of right wing media outlets rushed to their defense. Fox News lead the charge, evoking the bogeyman George Soros and imploring viewers to stand up to union thugs forcing fair labor practices on hapless Walmart employees. The 2012 Black Friday event that witnessed protests at over 100 stores did nothing to harm sales, in fact, a Walmart spokesman claimed it was the most profitable Black Friday ever.

Perhaps this was simply a matter of succès de scandale, that there is no such thing as bad press. Or could it be that Walmart’s rejection of fair labor practices serves as an advertisement for low prices? Or an appeal to those who are already politically derisive toward organized labor? Toward progressive politics in general?

Just as the practitioners of what Slavoj Žižek termed “cultural capitalism” will buy their own redemption from their consumer actions through organic produce or fair-trade coffee, so too will right-leaning consumers go out of their way to ally with a right-leaning retailer. Though the exact sales figures are not made public, Walmart is all but certain to be the nation’s number one gun seller, as firearms are sold at roughly half of Walmart’s 4,000 retail outlets. Walmart is also famous for its draconian censorship policy, which creates a distinction between two otherwise identical products—the normal version and the sanitized, “clean”, Walmart version. A particularly troubling example of this can be found in Green Day’s 2012 iUno! iDos! iTre! Album, scrubbed of offensive lyrics for the sake of Walmart’s puritanical demands. The famous line from the song American Idiot had been changed from “subliminal mindfuck America” to “subliminal mind America.” More often, however, the sheer size of Walmart’s retail market coerces artists to comply with Walmart and “clean” all publically released versions of their art—or risk losing the nation’s largest music retailer behind Apple. For instance, you won’t find the original American Idiot lyrics in the video for the song on Green Day’s Youtube channel any longer.

What began as an erosion of pluralism in American retail stores is now emerging as a multi-billion dollar cultural bulwark capable of creating and disseminating an agenda in compliance with its own moral code, backed by patrons that support its dodgy corporate practices. If Walmart continues to act with impunity, and if price point continues to win out against ethical consumerism and dollar voting, driven by an increasingly impoverished and desperate consumer population, we might not experience a war of retail political persuasion.

It may already have been won.

Behold, your if-you-are-only-going-to-watch-one-TED-talk-this-year TED talk! With an erudition typical to his manner, Lessig shows how .000042% of the American population, or 132 Americans, provided 60% of the SuperPAC money raised in the 2012 election. These people essentially have the money to ensure who is going to make it out of the primary process, and hence win that golden opportunity to run in a general election. And these 132 individuals do not represent a demographic sampling of all Americans, they share at least one thing in common–extreme wealth. But it gets more interesting from here, I won’t spoil it–watch the talk below.

The only point that I disagree with the Larry here is when he suggests the one upside of this money-fueled electoral system is that it creates “equal opportunity corruption” across party lines.

Unfortunately, we already live in a world where only one party is the party “of the people,” at least ostensibly, and that is the Democratic party. The Republican party has proven they need not take the interests of the people to heart or even be held accountable when it comes to actual policy, and they can still rely upon the votes of their constituency, simply by virtue of the advertising/propaganda machine funded by those who they truly serve.

And as we all know, once again this comes down to Corporations, structured money-making entities that drive elections and write legislation. Any policy that serves the best interests of the public must first serve the best interests of large corporations (their armies of lobbyists) willing to allow such a policy to go through.

Even President Obama himself believes that progressive politics and the Environment are things for voters like, things the public likes, but ultimately the bidding of Corporations must come first, as he so eloquently articulated last Wednesday–politics of the environment “are tough.”

Washington politics, according to Lessig, have only an interest in maintaining the status quo, oftentimes in situations and circumstances it is in most need of change. Congress enjoyed a roughly 15% approval rating in 2012, and this is likely to continue well into this year, as the Sequester begins its path of destruction and the debt ceiling looms large once again this fall. And then, with the 2014 midterm elections, will we see progressive primary challenges to these elected leaders so thoroughly repulsive? Replaced with leaders who know how to better represent their constituency?

Consider this–maybe we don’t need to. Maybe our elected leaders know perfectly well how to act in the best interests of their voting public. Maybe they desperately wish to fulfill the promise they made upon accepting the oath of office.

Maybe they just, simply, can’t.

A small grocery store in Augusta, Georgia, the Laney Supermarket, is forced to destroy its remaining food stock rather than give it away for free. According to the law surrounding eviction, the property should have been made available to the public, but thanks to the Corporate power of Sun Trust Bank, backed by taxpayer funded law enforcement, the food was loaded into dumpsters and hauled to the local landfill.

workers toss fresh food into a dumpster as onlookers watch in disbelief

Sun Trust bank issued a statement, “We are working with store suppliers as well as law enforcement to dispose of the remaining contents of the store and secure the building.” Even Marie Antoinette would not be so bold.

This is the reality of Capitalism and the economics of scarcity. Here is the local news report:
WJBF-TV ABC 6  Augusta-Aiken News, Weather, Sports

Alright! So today is the day Supercenter is released. Ta da. I’m getting a kick at how it’s the fourth result when you search for the title on Amazon. Ho-hum Bose ear buds (iPod earbuds actually figure prominently into the plot, so maybe Amazon is onto something), yeah, but the frickin’ Gazillion Bubble Machine absolutely belongs alongside this work of fiction. If you wanted to kick in the extra fifty-five cents for the bubble machine instead of a print copy of Supercenter, I wouldn’t fault you.

Supercenter released today. Way more interesting than New Pope.

I imagine the heuristic searchy stuff will push Supercenter to the top in a few days or so, hopefully not at the expense of the bubble machine, which may just completely embody everything Supercenter stands for in a single, correlative product.

Everybody has that crazy uncle, or maybe it’s just a distant, long-lost friend, reunited by the glory of Facebook. You get emails or see Facebook posts that are so alarming delusional you don’t even know where to begin a rebuttal. The kind of person who justifies the consumption of endless propagandizing and audience manipulation on Fox News because “CNN is just as bad but on the left,” or, the kind of person who only knows about two media outlets in total. They are beholden to a powerful racket, one run by unabashed con men, certainly the producers of Fox News, but also the hucksters of snake oil that are Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter–you know the usual suspects. These are the people who ravenously consume media that reinforces their world view and reject anything that challenges it, people who under no circumstances could possibly be reading this blog post this far by now. (And if you are, here is a consolation prize: I too dislike many policies of President Obama.) These people, according to Maher, “think there is a war on Christmas, and that the socialist policies of our Kenyan president have been so disastrous that the end of the world is coming.” And in the following clip, my favorite Supercenternation post’s survival seeds get to make a cameo!

Before you watch the clip, I first want to mention that came upon a podcast that featured a lecture given by the one and only Aldous Huxley. In it, he bemoaned the existence of such back-magazine advertisements as one that boasted “subliminal learning” by playing records of verbal instruction while one sleeps. Huxley saw this as blatantly absurd, and proposed a “gullibility bell curve” theory, where least 10% of the population will reside at the far end of the spectrum, far enough that they will fall for such a con, but the important lesson Huxley learned in his observations was that 10% of the population is plenty to sell subliminal learning records, otherwise these ads wouldn’t exist. Now, I invite the rest of you to take that little 10% figure out the door with you on your daily routine and ask yourself what things you encounter may cater to the “10% principle of gullibility.” (And don’t feel too bad if you’ve been taken in by a con or two, I am thoroughly guilty of this, just a little wiser now in my old age. You’ll find my poems in the National Library of Poetry tome for 1994.)

The Right Wing hate machine just uses Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh as gateway drugs. Next, when one matures far enough along to realize they are being taken for the “proverbial ride,” as Maude would say, they often move on to a monster far more insidious, and far more dangerous–Alex Jones and his Prison Planet network, which I shudder at the thought of as I now type it in as a link. (Note to Alex, if you are reading this and want to berate me on your show, I promise to play nice, and if questioned about this very sentence, I might even go so far as confessing that the Jews made me say it.)

I had a semi-famous author mention to myself and a group of people, I’ll assume in confidence, I won’t say his name here, that he was approached to take over a popular series of right-wing-hate fetish porn books (by William Johnstone) after the passing of the series author, and that he gave it a go for a while before finally turning away in revulsion. He never finished the first book, but tried, as the publishes drove the proverbial “dump truck full of money,” as Krusty would say, up to his house if he would help carry the torch and ghost write this series. Point is, there is money to be made and where there is money, there is momentum. Considering the Republican Party’s disastrous primary process around this time last year, this sort of harmless scam risks putting a crazy person in the White House. Primary candidates require anointing from the Hate Machine, must take a laughably paranoid posture towards the opposition party, and let’s not forget what happens to Republicans who dare speak ill of the Grand Vizier Rush Limbaugh himself–Excommunication.

And its not like these 10%’ers are just pining for a glorious Libertarian paradise, don’t be deceived by this ostensibly noble purpose, no, they are Tribalists at heart, they don’t want to create a fair and equitable society based on leave-everybody-the-hell-alone, they want what is best for their own tribe. When you hear about lawmakers of this ilk engaged in what may appear like hypocrisy, spurning their mantra of states rights and condemnation of Federal Government when it comes to, say, the voter-sanctioned legalization of recreational marijuana, this is because they and their tribe don’t like marijuana. The reason for harming minority groups with contrary interests is because they are elevating their own tribe. Not because of rights. Not because of “the founders.” Not because of “The Constitution.” And most certainly not because of “The Bible.” Welfare isn’t harmful because it promotes “takers over makers,” as the insipid Ayn Rand would say, it’s harmful because they want that money for themselves and their tribe. Taxes always bad? Not when it is a tax on people outside your tribe. Homosexuality isn’t really an abomination in the eyes of God, let’s be honest folks, we are talking about people who use the bible as weapon of control, interpreting it insofar as it suits a political agenda, it’s that they don’t want to increase the rights/economic privileges of a contrary tribe.

I don’t want to belabor this point any longer, feel free to post a comment or ask a question for further clarification. And last but not least, I have a tentative publication date for Supercenter. The first five people to contact me via the contact form on this website requesting a copy, with their mailing address, will get a signed print copy of my first novel for free, very likely in March.

I’m not one for New Years Resolutions, but bathing, brushing, and wearing deodorant …I don’t know, it’s not a bad idea, y’all.

Seriously, I don’t know any other way to interpret this other than “will you please wash yourselves you filthy animals that shop here everybody know how stinky you are.”