Not to shop at Mall*Wart, that is. Seems the boys from Bentonville are more than a little peeved at the prospect of not being able to build a new SuperDuperMegaGalactic Emporium o' Crap in Flagstaff, Arizona. Citizens there are considering Proposition 100, which would require a special-use permit for retail buildings bigger than 75,000 square feet--and would prohibit retail buildings larger than 125,000 square feet--in the city.
The citizens of Flagstaff are also more than a little peeved at some of the ads Wal-Mart is running in an attempt to head off the proposition. Why? Well, it might be that one of the ads sorta-kinda-almost-explicitly compares a zoning restriction on a ginormous corporate bad citizen (which already has a retail presence in Flagstaff, mind you) to the Holocaust.
Words fail me to describe exactly how galactically, off-the-fucking-charts, egregiously sick and wrong, clueless, offensive, insensitive, and just plain stupid that ad campaign is. Mall*Wart might--might--stand to lose a few bucks because it can't expand its already huge presence in Flagstaff by some 80,000 square feet, and devote 30%-40% of its floor space to grocery items. Could someone please explain to me, using really small words and some diagrams, exactly how that trifling loss (which won't even show up on the daily balance sheets of the world's biggest retailer hypocrite) is supposed to be the moral or other equivalent of the murder of six million Jews, hundreds of thousands of homosexuals, tens of thousands of priests and nuns and political dissidents?
I find it particularly offensive that the well-known homophobes from Arkansas chose to use a photograph in their ad against Proposition 100 that was pulled from the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The picture shows German students tossing books from the library of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft onto a blazing pyre in the middle of the Berlin Opernplatz in May 1933.
For those of you not familiar with Hirschfeld and his work, he founded his research institute (the first in the world to study sexual matters exclusively) in 1919. He was himself gay, and he lobbied tirelessly on behalf of gay rights in Germany, including the repeal of the notorious Paragraph 175 of the German civil code, which criminalized homosexual sex. He died in exile in France just two years after the Nazis looted his research institute, burned its library, and ransacked the files of the counseling service it ran, looking for other homosexuals to persecute. For Wal-Mart, no friend to gays and lesbians, to compare its petty little inconvenience in Flagstaff--and only a potential inconvenience at that--to the brutal repression of gays and lesbians at the hands of the Nazis is hubris on so galactic a scale that Aeschylus on his best day wouldn't have known how to work it into a tragic trilogy.
Cross-posted from Musing's musings. For other Mall*Wart antics, surf over to Wal*Mart Watch and put it in your bookmarks.
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