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

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.
[more]