The news yesterday that Wal-Mart Corporation has hooked up with the national Gay/Lesbian Chamber of Commerce can only mean trouble. Not to be excessively coy, I use the terhttp://dev.huffingtonpost.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=27984&blog_id=3ms "hooked up" and "trouble" in their ur-gaymalespeak sense implying energetic sexual congress. I speak of what I know as an incurably queer preacherman.
To review briefly: Wal-Mart has until now been having the other kind of trouble--the tsuris kind--in its do-or-die efforts to break into major urban markets. The company lost the Battle of Inglewood a few years back, and more recently it was handed its hat in the Battle of Chicago.
But this is not a company without creative resources, not to mention extremely deep pockets. Its response has been fascinating to observe, as it seeks to straddle the sensibilities of its core red-and-pink-necked customer base along with, shall we say, "urban" sensibilities of various kinds. Its moves have included hiring much savvier PR consultants, upscaling its product mix to appeal to more sophisticated shoppers, and--most crucially--putting people of color out in front as advocates for the wholesale WalMartification of inner city neighborhoods. Smiling Tavis Smiley was first enlisted to say nice things about them for a price. When that scheme fell apart, and when Armstrong Williams was no longer available, they turned to the Hon. Andrew Young.
They probably thought they had scored a coup by getting Young on board as their new Ambassador to Black America, but here they proved themselves to be really rotten shoppers. If they had looked closely at Young's shameless shilling for Phil Knight and Nike, back ten years ago when Nike's Vietnam sweatshops were taking considerable heat, they would have known that Young is incapable of whitewashing even the purest driven snow. I don't care that he was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations; I don't care that he was once the president of my own denomination--the United Church of Christ; I don't care about the role he may have played as Martin Luther King's "favorite Republican" in the Black Freedom Movement. The man has SELLOUT written in large letters across his forehead. In the Nike debacle, Andy jetted off to Vietnam without a single Vietnamese translator in his entourage. Spending about 15 minutes in country, he immediately declared, without so much as a tremor, that Nike's Vietnam factories were all squeaky clean. For his service Young's now-defunct Good Works International consulting firm received a really sumptuous fee, reported to be $1 million. Yet following this shameful caper our shameless Andy soldiered on to yet new horizons of self-aggrandizement at the expense of just community. We will probably never know what Wal-Mart was paying him to make the case for a SuperCenter in every urban core. What we do know is that Young fell off his bike yet again in confiding to a Black newspaper in Los Angeles that the reason Black people need Wal-Mart is the sorry history of Jews, Koreans, and "Arabs" selling Black folk wilted lettuce. Leaving aside the racial slur aspect, one might even concede Young's point that the lettuce has indeed been wilted and overpriced without proposing that Wal-Mart is the answer. So what was Andy thinking? He was thinking, "When do I get my check?" And so exeunt omnes in this tawdry drama.
But wait! Wal-Mart's ever-alert consultants, never at a loss for new ideas, took a closer look at the rich urban mosaic, only to slap their foreheads and realize that places like Bed Stuy and Newark and even Chicago's Southside have more than just a post-civil-rights-era Black leadership that needs to be engaged. These places are also starting to crawl with those worker ants of gentrification, the Gay People. And to be quite specific as to the real target group for Wal-Mart, these areas increasingly have Gay Men, usually Gay White Men, who possess the economic means to restore run-down but architecturally interesting properties and create the little enclaves that usually form the nuclei of neighborhoods "in transition." Many of the gentrifiers are already "in real estate" as they arrive, some of them no doubt mouthing Oscar Wilde's imperishable deathbed words, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do!" as they take their first look around in the new digs. People like this will need a place to shop for the basics and it won't be the corner bodega, or so figure the Wal-Mart strategists.
If I should seem a bit harsh in my assessment of my GWM brothers, it's because they/we generally have no politics apart from the politics of personal entitlement, e.g. "I want my wedding, and I want it right now!" They/we have never really understood, or wanted to understand, the core principle of solidarity among the oppressed. They/we have blithely moved into working class and poor neighborhoods, expecting the long-time residents to love and accept us while we pay not the slightest attention to their lifelong struggles and concerns. They/we are only too happy to go along with Bushian "ownership society" proposals that privilege the already privileged while stripping the fabric of social reciprocity and starving public provision of the most vulnerable. Some wealthier GWMs, comfortably ensconced in Martha Stewart-accented Log Cabins, openly embrace such antisocial measures, while others merely wait for Hillary to do the same things while putting a Democratic gloss on the proceedings.
In a word, the politics and political judgment of such opportunistic and politically brain-dead queers have all the credibility of a three dollar bill and are never to be trusted.
I want justice, including full equality in life partnerships, for myself and for all my same-sex-oriented sisters and brothers. But right now, and in respect to the Wal-Mart courtship, I can only scream at the top of my voice, Wake Up, Gay America! You have nothing to lose but your (Bulgari, preferably) chains!!