Wal-Mart Kind Of Hell

Stop. You've found it. This is the place. Americana HQ. Patriotism in a giant tin bucket. This is where souls recoil, children wail, dreams die. This is Wal-Mart. The glorious consumer mecca, the epic wonderland/wasteland of prefab landfill merch, not only the world's largest and most powerful retailer and the most aggressive snarling frightening happy-place marketer and quite possibly the most hideously overlit soul-draining monster empire you will ever know in your entire lifetime, but also the very multibillion-dollar pseudo-Christian kingdom that censors their offerings and refuses to sell certain music CDs and bans "risqué" beer- 'n'-babes mags like Maxim and FHM and Stuff, because, you know, pretty girls are evil.

And Wal-Mart just recently decided to cover up the covers of other, less garish but apparently equally "naughty" women's mags like Elle and Cosmo (which, BTW, is owned by Hearst, as is SFGate) and Vogue due to racy or suggestive images -- but will not, presumably, cover up the truly dangerous and psychologically debilitating mags like Better Homes & Gardens, Mary-Kate and Ashley and Cake Decorating & Dog Mange Monthly. Go figure.

We must try to focus. We must zero in. Innumerable are the intellectual insults and karmic assaults Wal-Mart represents (atrocious labor practices, reliance on foreign sweatshop slave labor, anti-union stances, saturation marketing, etc) and hence we shall concentrate on the censorship issue. Because it matters. We wish it didn't. But it does.

It might seem mild. It might seem innocuous, this magazine cover-up, this prosaic Bible- lickin' censorship, merely representing Wal-Mart's ostensible pro-family nightmarish dystopian mega-ethos of perky corporate sweatshop happiness and their infamous claim that they are merely responding to their customers' wishes when they remove products, block out words, cover up those horrible boobies. People complain, they claim, customers call in and bitch that their kid might've seen a racy magazine cover and asked one too many questions about just what "orgasm" or maybe "pleasure" or even "happiness" means, and the parent was all flustered and humiliated and confused and hence Wal-Mart, being the good falsely sanctimonious citizen, not wanting to offend the American Family, covers up the mags or removes them entirely. How thoughtful.

Except there's a bit more to it than that. Except the groups that complain about the mags are often the same ones that cheer Wal-Mart's censorship decisions, groups like the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association (AFA), one of those desperately hyper- Christian anti-choice anti-gay anti-porn asexual pseudo-ethical groups representing "traditional" family values -- like, you know, massive reeling intolerance. And hellfire. And the end of icky tongue kissing.

And, of course, the safety of America's checkout lanes. This is what they really care about. Because as we all know, if there's one overlooked extant hot spot of debased American culture, it's our unbridled freewheelin' checkout lanes. Shield your eyes, little Timmy, it's the new issue of Glamour. Gasp. Of course it shouldn't matter. Of course we shouldn't care. There is no shortage of Maxims or Cosmos in the world, and if you don't like Wal-Mart, hey, don't shop there, and if you live in one of the smallish Midwest towns the gluttonous and voracious Walton family hell-beast has invaded like a plague and you have no real remaining shopping options because Wal-Mart has killed all the small family-owned competition, well, too bad for you.

Here is why it matters. Here is why you should care. Because Wal-Mart is not merely a store. Wal-Mart is not merely a hollow and deeply frightening Christian-values mega- retailer that makes you feel like you need a karmic shower and soul de-lousing immediately upon exiting the vacuum-sealed whooshing glass doors.

Wal-Mart shapes ideas. They affect mind-sets. They influence cultural perspectives. This is frightening and wrong. They ban (or "sanitize") the latest Marilyn Manson CD? They don't carry Maxim? Then for 100 million benumbed Wal-Mart regulars, Marilyn and Maxim might as well not even exist. Why not choose a nice issue of, say, Guns & Ammo and the new Shania Twain instead? There there, Timmy. Now hush up and let Daddy buy some bullets and a vat of Cheez Doodles.

Do you understand? Do you see the danger? That's 100 million customers per year, $200 billion in annual sales, 3,000 stores and growing fast, and isn't it just wickedly telling that the state with the largest number of Wal-Marts in the entire country is, by a wide, wide margin, Texas? Pretty much says it all, really.

Wal-Mart manipulates the culture. They represent a type of cultural myopia and a prefab brand of hollow sexless Americana and a value system that does nothing to promote any core conviction you genuinely care about, and censorship decisions like theirs are a threat to all that is good and sexy and alternative and righteous and naked and I don't care how cheesy sexist frat-boy stupid Maxim magazine is, its message isn't 1/100th as poisonous or dangerous as much of the deleterious junk Wal-Mart hawks, the AFA lifestyle they endorse.

Let's put it this way. Wal-Mart is all too happy to pummel customers with mountains of toxic processed foods and Teen People and giant tins of barbecued popcorn and sweatshop-made T-shirts and gaudy porcelain-clown bookends and giant bins full of stuffed teddy bears made in Malaysia.

All well and good. Hey, they're a discount retailer, after all. Horrible landfill merchandise and giant ads for Doritos and tons upon tons of plastic crap you really don't need intermixed with a few things you actually do, and deep deep deep this nation is in a BushCo recession so of course Wal-Mart is flourishing.

Of course, they also sell guns. Did we mention the guns? Oh yes. How's that for a message -- hey kids, don't look at the impossibly pretty half-naked Photoshopped model on the cover of Elle because your undereducated little mind might get corrupted and you're just not ready for the word "sex" in bold 48-point Helvetica. But here, have a nice Remington .22. Now scamper off and go kill something, sweetie. Wal-Mart is, in short, deciding what America needs based on the shockingly uptight whims and intolerant perspectives of the hard Right. This is why you should worry. This is why you should care. The arbiter of taste for much of the country is not the media. It is not the movies. It is not Britney or Keanu or MTV.

It is a giant suckass superstore, one that aggressively works every single day to drain out any semblance of voice or personality or alternative viewpoint and works harder than any other company in the nation to kowtow to the masses and keep the nation in a nice big hole of casual blind lockstep sameness without the nation even knowing any better. Ah, just like BushCo. Just like America.

Except, you know, cheaper.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which it never does. He also writes the Morning Fix, a deeply skewed thrice-weekly e-mail column and newsletter. Subscribe at sfgate.com/newsletters.

In A Wal-Mart Kind Of Hell Censored magazines, banned music and pseudo-Christian fun at America's scariest retailer

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

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