Two weeks after Hillary Clinton became the first former Walmart executive to be named Secretary of State of the United States temporary seasonal greeter Jdimytai Damour died at Walmart.

The New York Times reported that:

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled. “When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

The lethal Walmart stampede and the subsequent Clinton appointment should have brought to light once again the uneasy confluence between ideological idealism and the political process it’s supposed to guide. Just weeks after the tragedy inside that Walmart on Black Friday November 28, 2008 – where new AC/DC music was being heavily promoted and long awaited Guns N’ Roses was being introduced to consumers – there was a message received about our own deteriorated relationship with our ideals.

This issue previously came to a head in 2000, when the Democrats ran a presidential candidate who had direct personal involvement in advocating censorship of Blackie Lawless, W.A.S.P., and Cindy Lauper. While any number of factors, including blatant vote fraud and/or a partisan decisions by our venerated independent judicial system, could have ultimately have determined the outcome of the 2000 election, there’s no question that some people in America, angry about censorship and outrageous sociological positions taken in the recent past, were not ready to forgive Al and Tipper Gore for the 1985 Senate rock hearings.

A significant portion of the left-leaning electorate, presumably constituting a portion of the 2,883,105 total votes cast, defected to the sycophant-appealing but largely vapid idealism of Ralph Nader for any number of reasons. But Al Gore has never even asked us to forgive him for Tipper Gore’s zealous persecution of Jello Biafra (self described “High Priest of Harmful Matter”) or anyone else. Including John Denver.

Plainly, the public was hungry for an idealism which Al Gore could not provide. Subsequently, Gore sported an occasional goatee beard and now makes visually appealing PowerPoint presentations to a country slogging though terrorist attacks, wars, illegal wiretapping, a politically motivated justice department, government endorsed torture and thousands of dead people in Iraq.

In 1986 Hillary Clinton served on Walmart’s Board of Directors. She was the first ever female Board member for the Arkansas-based company. As recently as 2004, she told an audience at the convention of the National Retail Federation that her ineffectual time on the board – in which she accomplished nothing – ”was a great experience in every respect.” It’s easy to interpret this as advocacy, aligned with Clinton’s failure to oppose Walmart’s efforts against unionization, the company’s gross gender imbalance in management, and – to come full circle – the 1991 decision to not sell any music containing the Parental Advisory Warning “Tipper Stickers”.

But with a national economy limping into a new presidential administration, Walmart has raked in money with the “Walmart-only” release of Black Ice by AC/DC. The cookie cutter AC/DC cock-rock CD release actually outsold the highly anticipated and ultimately horrible Guns N’ Roses epic Chinese Democracy. Black Ice sold over a million units in the first two weeks after its October 20, 2008 release – the band’s most successful release since 1991. Walmart’s AC/DC promotional efforts certainly completely eclipse its efforts concerning its workers (unless one considers the massive effort Walmart puts into preventing employees from unionizing. (See this.)

Walmart is the largest corporation in the world. It is the largest private employer in the world. It is largest grocery retailer in the United States. 100 million customers visit its stores weekly. It’s also a fact that the National Labor Relations Board has ruled several times that Walmart has violated law by retaliating against workers who were trying to unionize. Walmart has also been investigated by the Federal Elections Commission for improperly suggesting to its supervisors that it should vote against Democrats in 2008 because the Democrats could pass laws that make it easier to unionize. While these issues are hardly novel, the last eight years have clearly worsened the ability of the public to control a corporate interest of this
magnitude.

I heard someone say that the ostentatious Chinese Democracy is the eulogy to the eight years of the second Bush administration: an overproduced, overpromoted, unmitigated self-indulgent disaster endorsed by over a hundred million votes from 2000 and 2004. We remember the Tipper-Stickered Appetite for Destruction with an unnatural nostalgia that signaled the end of the 1980s. But the confusion and malaise built by over a dozen different straining producers into Chinese Democracy is hardly a complete eulogy to what has happened since 2000.

The reality is that the death of Jdimytai Damour speaks directly to where the United States is as a country in 2008. We are frenzied on all sides – a country with a strong vocal minority connected to the angry rhetoric of Sarah Palin, buried in manufactured fear of Fox News and religious zealotry, and led by appointed captains of capitalism entrenched into a political system by a commercial one, bent on control and armed with the resources to weather any penalty or human tragedy.

In a way, everything about the success of AC/DC’s Black Ice completes this eulogy. Every song could have been written 20 years ago. It is the well-promoted, full and formal rejection of evolution as a concept – sold at record pace by the largest corporation in the world to frenzied “savages” who disregard life. AC/DC’s final effort represents the legacy of eight years of the Bush administration: the commercial success of ideological and creative stagnation. The death of imagination.

Working for Wal-Mart was certainly a less enjoyable end for Jdimytai Damour than for Clinton; Damour was literally trampled by a “Blitz line” of thousands of shoppers. Walmart failed to do anything to protect him in terms of training, security or crowd control for dealing with “Black Friday” shoppers. There is no possible way to fully compensate Mr. Damour for his suffering as he was trampled, foot after foot. There is no way for a nation of consumers who does not believe in evolution to atone for those sins.

George Carlin said that the comfort that comes with a eulogy is for those that are still here to hear it. Real change is slow. It advances inch by inch, and the presence of failed ideals remain a prevalent force in our future. We move on led by a Secretary of State who helped develop the world’s largest corporation into what it is today – a model where profit directly and unabashedly adversely impacts the welfare of people.

Perhaps ratcheted-up expectations and desperate times caused us to view Chinese Democracy as potentially providing the forward-looking perspective we’ve lacked for the last eight years, by presenting something 17 years in the making. But it cannot reflect the shape of that future because it fails to understand that the idealism that rejected consensus in 2000 is steering us into 2009. Neither AC/DC nor Guns N’ Roses has a place in that future. Chinese Democracy is a mirage founded on nostalgia for prosperity and creativity which never really existed.

The acceptance of liquidation of this nostalgia is what steers the future. The belief in the idealism which will allow innovation and imagination to reemerge steers the future, slowly.

–

Jack Sanders, Esq.
Certified as a Civil Trial Attorney by the Supreme Court of New Jersey
Piro, Zinna, Cifelli, Paris and Genitempo
Nutley, NJ
973.661.0710