If you think the great Wal-Mart firestorm of l996 has abated, you are underestimating the depth of the righteous fervor many in America have about cleaning up popular culture and driving its most vulgar manifestations - rap, rock, sexual imagery - from the marketplace.
The email I get on the subject has gotten more civilized - no mail bombs, hate messages, or mass-mailing programs - but continues to pour in daily. Bless those of you who know right from wrong so clearly. You have a leg up on me.
Righteousness in the pursuit of morality is no vice, apparently. Wal-Mart supporters are indefatigable and undeterrable. I haven't put a dent in the beliefs of a single one that I know of.
And they have a great advantage: They have no doubts about the moral purity of their position.
But I do. And if they haven't been moved by my messages, I've been altered by theirs.
The major themes of my continuing email:
Wal-Mart has the right to sell what it wants. Who am I to punish it for what it decides? Censorship can only come from government, not corporations. And (this is my favorite category) why am I picking on Wal-Mart and William Bennett, when both are simply trying to clean up the sludge that passes for pop culture in America?
The debate has mushroomed way past our little old Web site. The Wal-Mart controversy, first raised by The New York Times weeks ago, has popped up in columns, magazines, and newscasts all over this country and a few others. Among my favorite email is that of bewildered Canadians and Europeans who can hardly believe what they're reading. "Don't you people have real problems in America?" wrote Dan from Toronto. "How come nobody ever talks about them?"
Call me, Dan. It's a long story.
William Bennett and his legions, wrote Jonathan Alter in Newsweek last month, are different from the truly dangerous moral crusaders like Jerry Falwell.
"Bennett and his compatriots are not saying rap artists or record producers should be imprisoned or sued into poverty." And, says Alter, Wal-Mart "is not saying you can't make a CD full of explicit sex or gangster garbage; it's simply saying Wal-Mart won't sell it. Huge difference."
Sorry, Wal-Mart. And Bill, too. I know you're just doing what you think is right. I understand you're not motivated by commercial concerns, and have only the interests of us and our children at heart. I will try to stop bullying you.
In fact, in the interests of moving this forward and demonstrating true reasonableness, I propose a Wal-Mart Compact that all parties involved might agree to, a sort of historic cultural coming-together that might have the happy side effect of forcing Bennett to go out and find real work. This compact is meant to reflect the many heartfelt concerns of not only Wal-Mart's loyal supporters but the many admirers of Mr. Bennett as well.
The Wal-Mart Compact
Article One: Wal-Mart is free to sell whatever it wants. We call off the boycott - it wasn't exactly bringing them to their knees anyway. Wal-Mart is also free not to sell whatever it wants. No more squawks here.
Sure, it would be nice if it told its customers what was being altered, what songs were deleted, what lyrics changed, what cover art covered up, but that's just a suggestion. (In the spirit of "sanitizing" culture for children, as Wal-Mart claims it's doing, we trust that the company will also soon provide warning labels for sugared cereal, candy, expensive sneakers, and sports gee-gaws - and the guns, ammunition, and knives - sold in their stores. Or are CDs really the only dangerous things sold at Wal-Mart?)
Article Two: Music companies like Time Warner and MCA are free to sign whatever artists they choose and produce whatever CDs they like. They don't have to first seek permission from William Bennett or anyone else. And craven and greedy scum that most of them are, they should refuse to alter the original work of artists for anybody. If Wal-Mart doesn't like them in the form in which they are produced, then they can sell them somewhere else. (How about a bit of spine here, folks? And yo, all you superstars writing all those squishy songs every year to save the rain forest and stop racism, how about bringing your hands together for some freedom?)
Article Three: Parents are responsible for the moral development of their children, for overseeing what they do and don't buy, see, or hear, up to the point that children can make their own decisions. If children are harmed in any demonstrable way by the pop culture they're exposed to, their parents are first and foremost responsible. The heat starts here.
Article Four: Schools, religious institutions, and government will seek to establish and fund programs to teach children how to use technology safely and responsibly and make rational choices and judgments about culture, advertising, and explicit sexual or violent imagery. This isn't nearly as much fun as banning things, and is more complicated and expensive. But unlike ratings, it actually might help kids a bit.
Article Five: In a capitalist democracy, the marketplace decides. If people want to buy vulgar music CDs, they have the right to do so. They ought to have at least as much freedom as Wal-Mart. If they want to watch tacky talk shows, they have the right to do that as well. Nobody else has the right to decide that their choices are garbage and force them from the marketplace. (Here's the rub with Article Five: It doesn't work if such a dominant retailer as Wal-Mart is forcing the removal of this material from the marketplace. But we're trying to be reasonable).
Article Six: Economic censorship is just as dangerous to the free movement of culture and ideas as government repression. It's naive to shriek about one and turn away from the other. In modern America, and particularly in modern American media, corporations have restricted diversity of opinion and "sanitized" free expression and culture far more than any government agency ever has.
Article Seven: Inspired by the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War, advocates of free choice and cultural diversity - the anti-Bennetts - should provide Web sites, catalogs and other resources to offer unsanitized music to refugees trapped in shopping areas dominated by Wal-Mart. Don't worry about guns and knives - Wal-Mart still sells those.
So that's it. Do we have a deal? Culture has a miraculous way of reflecting the political realities of its time. The Wal-Mart controversy seems to have inspired a dark, strange, and timely movie, "Mars Attacks," in which the Wal-Mart phenomenon is acted out subtly but unmistakably through campy science-fiction metaphors. The invaders arrive, they appear to be friendly, but when they see anything they don't like, they attack and incinerate it. This is, in fact, the drama played out in hundreds of American communities when the Wal-Martians arrive and drive out smaller retailers, imposing their own righteous notions of morality on surviving shoppers.
The alien ambassador in the movie (and his real-life counterpart, William Bennett) not only understands how Washington works, but is a master media manipulator. He cackles merrily on as a gullible media and political culture greets him with open arms and studies his every utterance.
Into the Alice-in-Wonderland debate about whether Wal-Mart and William Bennett should be shaping our music and culture came a late-arriving burst of reasoned clarity from, of all unlikely places, The New York Times op-ed page in mid-December. Perhaps because of his brilliant past as a cultural critic, columnist Frank Rich spotted the inherent absurdity of the drama this surreal cultural civil war has forced on us.
Rich raised the most heretical notion of all (he's lucky he doesn't have email yet), noticing that personal responsibility, the biggest issue of all, has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle.
If adults were serious about eliminating coarse culture, he wrote, they would do something about it themselves. "... they would turn off 'Married ... With Children' and refuse to subscribe to risqué cable channels. Sponsors would flee, cancellations would follow, channels would die. American children will never grow up in a healthier electronic environment unless their parents grow up first."
In writing this, we have to warn him, Rich has crossed the line from commentary into heresy, something that would be instantly clear to him if he had an email address at the end of his column.
Americans are not into taking responsibility for their children. They would much rather pay someone else to do it for them.
(Psssst. We were only kidding in Article One. Boycott the hell out of the suckers. Spread the word that they're a menace. Keep them out of your town. And don't you dare mail bomb me again. Wired is cheap, and I can't afford any new equipment.)
