I got a comment from EvilWhiteGuy today regarding my response to people just postive that bookstores are hiding Unfit For Command from them:

Have you seen the Borders' Employee Union chatboards? Here's an excerpt:

"You guys don't actually HAVE to sell the thing!
Just "carelessly" hide the boxes, "accidentally" drop them off pallets, "forget" to stock the ones you have, and then suggest a nice Al Franken or Micheal Moore book as a substitute. Borders wants those recommends, remember?

I don't care if these Neandertals in fancy suits get mad at me, they aren't regular customers anyway. Other than "Left Behind" books, they don't read. Anything you can do to make them feel unwelcome is only fair. They are the people pushing retailers to cut costs, don't forget. And they would censor your speech, your books, your music in a heartbeat, so give them a taste of it!

Don't get mad, get even!"

Originally I defended this quote from the Union website as an emotional response from one person). I still support that idea. Individual people can come up with some really stupid thoughts. All sorts of right-wing blogs have put up this particular "Borders Union Employee" quote as proof of a conspiracy (make sure you check out all her trackbacks). Well, maybe they should have told the complete story. I went back to the Borders Union website today to pull quotes from other employee posts that completely disagree with the idea of hiding books or "forgetting" to put out the stock onhand. Instead of the website, I got this:

Dear visitors from land of blog:
Thank you for your interest in the Borders Union web site. Please be aware that it is not the policy of Borders Books, or of any of the Unions that represent its employees, to "hide" or refuse to sell a book based on political content. Borders management can be expected to take appropriate disciplinary measures if they catch employees interfering with sales.
Some people who post on our bulletin board do not work at Borders. We do not verify employment. According to IP Address records, the person who posted the "let's hide the book" message was also posting under another name, responding to the messages he posted under his first name. Under his second ID, he claimed to be a conservative who was shocked that Borders employees would not tolerate diversity of opinion. This suggests to us that this was a troll who was trying to manufacture controversy. His account(s) have been deleted. He was a new user. Other, long time users told him his ideas were bad. We are temporarily ending user registration to prevent further incidents of trolling. Accounts created on September 15th have been deactivated.
We have temporarily blocked access to a portion of the site in order to protect our webserver from crashing due to high traffic. Please be patient. The site will return in full when traffic levels ebbÂ….
Since Borders, like many corporations, refuses to pay a Living Wage, Borders local customers have the option of speaking to an underpaid manager if they feel an underpaid floor employee is pursuing an agenda different from the sales agenda of the corporation.
Have a nice day.

Hm. Interesting (IÂ’ll leave the Living Wage discussion for another time). I finally found the Google cache of the page via EvilWhiteGuy and was able to pull an important response:

From “Withrow”:

I really, really disagree with this point of view. Booksellers have an ethical obligation IMO to present different points of view and not get in the way of freedom of speech. What you're suggesting is a form of censorship, only worse, because you're not being up front about it.

So—I’ll give the right-wing conspiracy freaks this—there is a "conspiracy" when it comes to Unfit for Command. A couple of booksellers in bookstores might be hiding the book from you. It’s always possible. However, I maintain that there is no widespread conspiracy throughout the country regarding this book, just poor planning on the part of the publisher, or maybe some clever marketing.

Posted by: Ensie at 09:19 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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