Plenty of stories are currently circulating on the Internet about President-elect Barack Obama and his challenge to corporate giant Wal-Mart to reassess their corporate values and the wages and benefits provided to their employees.
Perhaps in retaliation to his open call to retool their company, I have witnessed Barack Obama’s own book “The Audacity of Hope” displayed in the fiction category of Wal-Mart’s book section! I wrote an unpublished blog on the matter the same day. It is as follows, unedited and unabridged:
On a typical Sunday here in good old South Carolina, you have to wait until approximately 1:30 pm EST in order to purchase anything non-food related. So when I strolled in Wal-Mart today at 1:00 pm it didn’t really surprise me that anything that wasn’t deemed a grocery was cordoned off with bright yellow nylon rope.
I was however bored while waiting on the blue laws to unleash their baptist grip on society for the day so I walked around the warehouse that is Wally World to see what there was to see of what I was permitted to explore.
I walked through the grocery section, picked up some Great Value glass cleaner and cheap toilet paper then was summarily brought to a halt by that yellow roperati so I resigned to turning back around and checking out the sections just before the cash registers. I happened upon the book section and veered immediately into it as it is the most intelligent section Wal-Mart has to offer other than the gun counter.
I perused the adolescent readings, the magazines and then came upon the largest section of the lot: fiction. Dean Koontz, Stephen King, James Patterson and the likes were abound on the shelves. It was among a load of Louis L’Amour, Max Brand, and Zane Grey novels that I found the most peculiar of books. The Old West books, it seemed, were surrounding it much like you’d imagine a band of Apache Indians surrounding a covered wagon train. There at the center of this stand off was Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”.
What was Barack Obama’s non-fiction book about thoughts on reclaiming America doing in the fiction section? My first thought was that it had to have been a rogue copy that had wandered into the wrong section from the hand of some maverick South Carolinian like myself. Perhaps this person just couldn’t afford the book when other things such as groceries and gas for the rest of the week are taking immediate precedence over everything else in this day and age.
So I picked up Senator Obama’s book to examine things further. Lo and behold there was another copy behind that. Behind that, another copy. All in all, there were five or six copies of the book on this shelf! Obviously this was not a mistake so I delved into another line of thinking.
Recently Wal-Mart was hammered in the news over their alleged botched attempt at influencing politics. The Employee Free Choice Act was ruffling corporate feathers as its passing would mean that employees could hold unionization votes without secret ballot elections. It is alleged that Wal-Mart discouraged their employees from voting for the act, a charge which Wal-Mart execs deny.
Is it possible that the placing of this non-fictional book in the fiction section is an act of throwing down the gauntlet in the face of Barack Obama (and ultimately the Democratic Party)? I can certainly see it that way. There were no other non-fiction books that I saw which were so grossly miscategorized, so why would this one be the exception? And to put it, in all places, in an area where it is surrounded by Old West fiction is such a metaphor for the efforts of the “cowboy president” Bush to stifle the Democratic party!
I personally believe that it very well could have been placed in the Inspirational section. There were nothing but books on God in that section! There are definitely other forms of inspiration than the divine. “The Audacity of Hope” is subtitled “Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”. Truly there are inspirational words within the pages of this book as there is no higher thing to aspire to in our country than living out our dreams.
The American dream is a huge part of our foundation and to remiss it as merely non-fiction is really pissing all over the backs of the American people, telling them that it’s raining, then suggesting that they buy one of Wal-Mart’s umbrellas.
