Bent Corner

I hate to do this, but I feel the need to once again weigh in on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy. I promised myself I wasn’t going to blog about it any longer. I don’t want to be known as the Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt guy. It might already be too late for that. Also, there are other bloggers doing a much better job with it then I ever could. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. Look to the The Consumerist. It is the number one place on the Internets to find out the latest on the whole Wal-Mart Nazi t-shirt controversy.

This morning I received an email Google Alert telling me that “BentCorner.com” had appeared in a news story. I set up a Google Alert so I would know when my blog appeared in a newspaper article. Most of the time I know ahead of time when my blog or myself is mentioned in a newspaper article. The reporter doing the article usually contacts me to ask questions. I believe it’s something people in the news business refer to as professionalism. Sometimes like in the case with The Miami Herald, the reporter didn’t even try to contact me to get facts. Instead they just made stuff up.

This morning’s Google Alert pointed me to something called the American Thinker. I’ve never heard of it. That seems like a shame too since I am an American and I think about things. It sounds like the American Thinker would be right up my alley.

When I went there, I realized two things. It’s not really a newspaper. It appears to be a blog. A rather nice looking blog, but it’s still a blog. Also, it appears to have a right-wing slant to it. That would account for me not knowing anything about it.

This from the article about the Nazi t-shirt:

Back in November the blog BentCorner.com revealed that Wal-Mart was selling a T-shirt that displayed the Nazi Totenkopf–the “death head” emblem, which was worn by Adolf Hitler’s personal guards. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) sent a letter, signed by a bipartisan group of 21 representatives, to Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. asking the retail giant to remove the shirts immediately from store shelves.

So far so good. I would have pointed out that Rep. Barny Frank (D, gay) also signed the letter. Nothing gets Right-Wingers more worked up then a good Barny Frank story. It’s right up with a hatchet job on Hillary Clinton or something that attempts to disprove Global Warming by quoting the Bible.

The only issue I had with the piece over at the American Thinker was this:

Even though Wal-Mart did take immediate action, directing all stores to remove the shirts and deleting the item barcode from their computer system, about three dozen of their 3300 stores have not successfully removed all shirts.

This just is not true. Though Wal-Mart said they were taking immediate action, they never did. They allowed these shirts to remain on their sales floor and be sold to anyone with an extra $7.88 in their pocket. People continued to find these shirts at their local Wal-Mart weeks and even months after this story originally broke. The Consumerist did an excellent job chronicling the on going status of these shirts.

Though Wal-Mart did delete the barcode from their computer system, it took them almost a whole month to do so. Even then, people were reporting that they could still buy the shirt. They would simply take another similarly priced shirt to the register and ask the person (Wal-Mart prefers to call them “associates”) to scan the other shirt.

Make no mistake. Wal-Mart continued to sell these shirts. If your local Wal-Mart no longer sells them, it’s because someone bought them all up. It’s not because Wal-Mart actually removed them.

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According to the Miami Herald, I am now a World War II buff. It’s a label I strongly reject. How does one even become a World War II buff? I don’t watch the History Channel. Something I believe World War II buffs do all the time. They certainly don’t just flip past it to get to other channels. I don’t want to be a buff. Not about World War II or anything else for that matter. Really.

I was never contacted by anyone at the Miami Herald before they wrote this article. I certainly never told anyone that I was a World War II buff. To the best of my knowledge, nobody else ever referred to me as a buff.

Here is the article from the Miami Herald:

Skull emblems are huge sellers these days, so Scott Deutsch had no problem placing 50,000 T-shirts emblazoned with a distinctive version of the gory symbol in Wal-Mart.

Trouble is, this particular skull and crossbones was the insignia used by a division of the Nazi Waffen SS — the Death’s Head or Totenkopf. Wal-Mart yanked the shirts off the shelves last week.

”We would never have done that shirt if we had known,” said Deutsch, president of Miami-based Orange Clothing Company, a manufacturer of young men’s apparel. “Furthermore, I’m Jewish.”

The T-shirts are now flooding back into Deutsch’s warehouse, leaving him with a loss of more than $200,000.

Wal-Mart started pulling the tops after a Maryland blogger — and World War II buff — noticed them in local stores and took a photo of the squashed-looking skull with his cellphone.

After Rick Rottman checked the emblem and saw it matched the Nazi insignia, he posted an item on his blog, bentcorner.com, on Nov. 9 along with comparison photos.

Wal-Mart, which had placed the T-shirts in stores a couple weeks ago, reacted quickly. ”We would never have placed the T-shirts on our shelves had we known the origin or significance of the emblem,” the retailer said in a statement.

The Death’s Head was used by the Third Division of the Waffen SS, which was notorious for war crimes. Many of its men were concentration camp guards.

Deutsch said his designers found the skull in a European ”trend book.” Apparel makers use trend books to decide which motifs and styles to manufacture for the upcoming season.

The T-shirt was made for Wal-Mart’s private label, No Boundaries.

Skulls, Deutsch said, have been popular emblems for the past five years.

”It’s a cool, bad-ass image in the young men’s market,” he said. “We do skulls all the time.”

A Miami native, Deutsch started Orange Clothing in 1999. The company manufactures in China, where it has an office in Shanghai, and Latin America. It sells $10 million worth of clothing a year to retailers such as Macy’s, Dollar General and JCPenney.

Deutsch said he doesn’t know what he’ll do with all the extra T-shirts, which have also started cropping up on eBay. But he’s sure about one thing.

”We’re checking the origins of the skulls now,” he said.

So the totenkopf shirts sold at Wal-Mart stores was done so by a company owned by a Jewish man? You couldn’t make this stuff up.

What’s a trend book? Are clothing designers allowed to just copy things and then pass it off as their own? If so, it makes me wonder just what they are actually designing. Maybe they didn’t know they were copying a Nazi SS totenkopf, but they had to know they were copying something. Something not designed by them. Something that might have been trademarked by another artist or designer. The company or person that actually created the image. It’s an exact copy of the Nazi SS totenkopf. They didn’t even reverse the image. They didn’t change the shape or add anything.

Maybe next time they are paid to design something, they should design it instead of lifting it from a book.

It’s strange that a clothing maker that provides clothes for Macy’s also makes clothes for Dollar General. Talk about a wide range of products. No matter which way the economy goes, they are covered.

Nazi shirt was an accident, Miami designer says [Miami Herald]