Bent Corner

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I was reading The Consumerist when I noticed a post about Wal-Mart still selling t-shirts in their Men’s department with a Nazi SS Totnekopf or “Death’s Head” image on it.

Whoops.

I’ve lost track how many different times Wal-Mart claimed it was taking prompt action to removed these shirts. The U.S. Congress even got involved.

I was the one to discover this little bit of Wal-Mart goodness. It was back in November 2006 that I noticed it at my local Wal-Mart store here in Hagerstown. I took a picture of it with my cell phone and then compared it to reference images online. It was an exact match. I decided to blog about it and it kind of took off from there. I was interviewed on the telephone by someone from the AP which resulted in the story appearing in just about every newspaper in the country. I was interviewed on my local NBC TV news about the story. That interview then was carried on CNN and MSNBC.

I learned a lot about the whole news business. The reporter from the AP was extremely professional. When the article first ran on the AP newswire, it incorrectly said that I was a veteran of the U.S. Navy. I am a veteran of the U.S. Air Force. To me it wasn’t a big deal. The reporter must have realized his mistake, contacted me, confirmed that I was in the Air Force, and resubmitted a corrected article. The incorrect article stayed online only for about an hour. I was impressed.

I wasn’t impressed with my local hack newspaper, The Herald-Mail. Even though I only live a few miles from the newspaper, they didn’t even bother to ask me any questions before writing an article about me finding the shirt. Sometimes I forget they don’t bother to research their articles. My guess is they are too busy writing fake Mail Call comments. I think they just took information from my blog post and then added details from the AP story.

Speaking of hacks, Christina Hoag from the Miami-Herald wrote that I was a “World War Two buff”. If she had bothered to speak to before writing her article, I could have told her that I was not a World War Two buff and that I had no interest in becoming one. I even sent her a tongue-in-cheek email telling her that I wasn’t a buff of any sort and that I wanted her paper to publish a retraction. I was afraid that the World War Two buff community would become angry that I claiming to be one of them. I didn’t want to get on their bad side. She actually replied as though I was serious. She even attempted to argue the point that I was a World War Two buff.

I think I would know if I was a buff.

The funniest part about these t-shirts still being sold at Wal-Mart is the specific Wal-Mart where they were found. They were found in a Wal-Mart in Palmdale, California. Though I now live in Maryland, I am originally from the Palmdale area. It is the Land of My People. It’s where I grew up and lived until I was 19. I find it to be so ironic that these shirts are still hanging on the rack in Palmdale, or as I like to call it, Palmtucky. In Palmdale, the mullet isn’t just a hairstyle, it’s a way of life.

The Consumerist posted about a new Nazi SS skull t-shirt sighting at an Ohio area Wal-Mart. It’s been 22 weeks now since I first found them at my local Wal-Mart and posted something about it. Since then, Wal-Mart has issued apology after apology along with promises to remove the offending shirts as quickly as they can.

They then proceed to continue selling the shirts as though nothing ever happened.

This is just too ridiculous. Even for Wal-Mart. Either they want to sell Nazi SS skull t-shirts to kids or they don’t. They need to make up their mind. I realize that Wal-Mart likes to say one thing and do another when it comes to how they treat their employees, but this is about selling a t-shirt with an image worn by Nazi SS concentration camp guards at Auschwitz. Claiming that they offer affordable health insurance to their employees even though they don’t is not the same thing as claiming that they don’t want to sell Nazi SS merchandise even though they seemingly do.

I realize they are used to lying about stuff. They shouldn’t lie about this.

I noticed that this story made it’s way to digg again. A lot of people are commenting on this issue as though it’s something new. Some people are making the same lame retarded arguments that this is not a Nazi SS skull image even though it is an exact copy. They claim it’s just a skull. I used to get emails every day from people saying all sorts of things. Right now their are digg users arguing about Wal-Mart selling these t-shirts as though it wasn’t already argued to death last year on digg. Are these people all new digg users? Why didn’t any of these digg users making these comments last year? Not to say other digg users didn’t try to make similar flawed arguments.

Sometimes somebody posts a comment that makes me re-think my position on a subject that I blogged about. This is not one of those comments.

ilike_kidrock@hotmail.com wrote:

thank all this is bull shit i am not a nazi but i like the nazi stuff every mother f***er need to get over the Sh** it is a part of history we shouldn’t forgit it yea and go ahead and call me what you want but we do have a fredom of speach and yea it may offend people but it is something we don’t need to forgit everyone wants to forgit it but we shouldn’t

Normally I try to cut people slack that are even worse spellers then me, but this fella that loves to profess his admiration for Kid Rock doesn’t even know how to use a period.

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.

I got a call yesterday afternoon from a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. It was concerning my not-so-recent discovery of Nazi t-shirts being sold at my local Wal-Mart. I blogged about it at the time. Feel free to go back and read my posts if you want to.

I haven’t blogged about the ‘controversy” since November 21. I did write about some idiot that emailed me about it, but that doesn’t really count. I wasn’t blogging about how bad Wal-Mart was for selling Nazi paraphernalia to kids. I was blogging about how much of a tard some guy was. Others have been blogging about it though. Some have been quite active on the subject. Just not me.
It seems that congressperson Jan Schakowsky from Illinois has learned about Wal-Mart selling Nazi swag. She is pissed off about it. She wrote a letter to Wal-Mart and even got other members of Congress to sign the letter. In fact, she even got Representative Barny Franks to sign it.

Nothing demonstrates just how angry you are then than getting Representative Barney Frank to sign your letter.

The reporter from the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about it that was published in today’s issue. She mentioned in her article that I was the one who first wrote about Wal-Mart selling the shirts.

I hope this does not get me in trouble. There is a chance (albeit a small chance) that I am a wanted man in Chicago. The last time I was in the Windy City I drove through a toll without paying. I wanted to pay the toll. I had the money to pay the toll. Sort of. Illinois has these unmanned toll booths where the driver has to throw change into a big orange plastic basket. It’s really quite easy. If you have any change that is. I had just flown in and I didn’t have any change. I only had paper money. Not knowing what to do, I just drove through without paying.

I haven’t been back to Chicago since. I haven’t dared.

I’m still getting email about the whole Wal-Mart Nazi SS Totenkopfis t-shirt controversy. Is it really a controversy? I don’t know and I don’t care.

Some of the email messages I get are positive and well thought out. Others, not so much. Some of the messages sent to me are so idiotic and stupid that they are actually quite funny. Here is one such email I received this morning.

Steve Cook <keywest63020@charter.net> wrote:

Emblems similar to nazi emblems on wal-mart t-shirts….!

To quote john Stoessel (sic) “give me a break”..so what…..do you have any idea howlong the skull and crossbones have been around? The skull and crossbones is also an insignia for the fighter wing aboard the USS Washington aircraft carrier(I think that is the correct ship). I saw it on the History channel the other night. You gonna contact George Bush and have him change that also?

The swastika has also been around since the dawn of civilization and was used by many civilizations including the american indian…..it can actually be traced back to ancient judiaism (sic).

The ss symbols are from the ancient Runes symbols…shall we outlaw all of them also?

Why dont you get your panties in a wad over something that matters and not some vague reference to last mid-century.

If you wanna get mad @ wal-mart about something ,why not complain about the crappy produce selection .

Nothing personal…..but if you really want to make a difference in this world quit looking back and try to look forward.

I am pretty sure that no one was gonna walk into wal-mart and say.” Dude!…look….an SS deathshead t-shirt..i gotta have one!”

Steve

My favorite part is where my new friend Steve invoked the name of ABC’s 20-20 John Stossel. He’s the guy that’s always trying to argue that global warming is fake or that it’s perfectly acceptable to charge $20 for a bottle of water during a disaster because it ensures that the person who really needs that water gets that water.

As though there are some people that don’t need water.

Steve takes me to task for “looking back”. He advises me to instead “look forward”. This is interesting since he’s the one commenting on a blog post I made over a month ago.

Talk about being relevant.

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]

Ben Popken from The Consumerist has discovered that some of Wal-Mart’s Nazi t-shirts are now being listed on eBay. I have to think that the eBay seller who listed them knows the significance of the Nazi skull since he lists them as being Totenkopf in the listing’s title.

The seller made sure to also list them in the Militaria/WW II (1939-45)/Germany/Medals, Pins, Ribbons catagory. I’m guessing that’s where one goes when they want to find Nazi stuff on eBay. When you cannot simply run out to your local Wal-Mart.

Totenkopf Shirts On Ebay [The Consumerist]

Magellan over at ExploreForTruth has posted that his local Wal-Mart is still selling the Nazi SS t-shirts. He also purchased one and took a pic, which demonstrates that the shirts haven’t been put on hold or frozen in Wal-Mart’s central inventory computer system. Something that would be very easy to do if they actually wanted to. He makes a good point on his blog:

I know they said it could take a couple days, but if this was E.coli laced spinach or acetaminophen, it would have been off the shelves in hours. Tomorrow I will be checking another Wal-Mart.

I would hope to believe that they would be a lot quicker to remove tainted products. Seeing how they have dropped the ball at getting rid of Nazi swag, it makes me wonder how proactive they would be when it comes to removing product that could actually kill you such as E.coli laced spinach.

My problem with Wal-Mart is that they refuse to sell products that they deem to be offensive. They will not sell CD’s to adults that contain adult language. They canceled orders for the best-selling satire book America (The Book) by Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show because it dared to show phony naked pics of Supreme Court justices. They also refuse to sell magazines such as Maxim because they show woman wearing sexy clothing.

They then turn around and sell t-shirts adorned with the very same symbol worn by Nazi SS concentration camp guards at Auschwitz.

Imagine a situation where a someone buys this shirt at Wal-Mart not knowing the significance of the Totenkopf or even that it is a Totenkopf. He then wears this shirt in public and the wrong person sees it. How is he supposed to know that the shirt he purchased at his friendly local Wal-Mart features a Nazi symbol?

I think like most people, he expects Wal-Mart to be more responsible. The reality is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Maxim magazine to adults, but it will sell Nazi swag to kids.

I was surprised at the level of response I got from yesterday’s post about Wal-Mart selling t-shirts with the Nazi SS “Death’s Head” logo on them. I knew some blogs got over 55,000 visits in a single day. I just never thought this blog would ever be one of them.

If I have learned anything over the last 24 hours its that people love a story involving Wal-Mart and Nazis. Go figure.

I was contacted yesterday by someone from a PR firm that represents Wal-Mart:

Rick:

Good morning. My name is Marshall Manson. I work for Edelman doing online public affairs for Wal-Mart. I noticed your post about the t-shirts that Wal-Mart is selling. I wanted to make sure you saw the company’s statement about this and knew that Wal-Mart is now removing the t-shirts from its stores. Obviously, with a company as big as Wal-Mart, that may take a day or two.

The statement is just below. If you would like to discuss anything, feel free to respond to this e-mail.

Statement from Wal-Mart:

We were not aware of the origins of the image until this morning when we learned about it through the blog Bent Corner.

We are deeply sorry that this happened, and we are in the process of pulling all of these t-shirts from our stores.

Respect for the individual is a core value of our company and we would never have placed this t-shirt on our shelves had we known the origin and significance of this emblem.

We are reviewing our product review process in an effort to ensure this never happens again.

Sincerely,

Marshall Manson
Edelman

If you would like a copy of the above correspondence sent directly to you by Marshall Manson, simply post something on a blog about Nazi’s and Wal-Mart and wait about 30 minutes. I doubt it will take even that long. The very same email sent to me was sent to just about every other blog that posted something about this. Word for word.

The New York Times published an article about Wal-Mart and bloggers. In it they mention Marshall Manson quite frequently. It’s an interesting read.

Marshall Manson asked me if I would post an update to my original post about Wal-Mart and the Nazi shirts. Something about how quickly they responded to the problem once they realized they were selling Nazi swag. I would have no problem doing that. If I felt they had indeed acted upon the information that they were selling Nazi clothing.

The problem is that they haven’t yet done anything about the Nazi shirts.

Yesterday afternoon I stopped at a Wal-Mart on my way home for work and found a stack of the same shirts still for sale in the men’s department. My wife also stopped at a different Wal-Mart on her way home from work yesterday. She too found a stack of these Nazi shirts still for sale.

In my opinion, quickly taking care of a problem involves actually taking care of the problem.

Instead of having someone from a PR firm contact bloggers, Wal-Mart should have concentrated on simply removing the shirts from their stores. They could have worried about contacting bloggers after their stores were free of Nazi clothing.

Marshall Manson claimed that because of the size of Wal-Mart, removing the shirts from all the stores might take a day or two. I don’t think so. Wal-Mart could have removed these shirts from every store in a matter of minutes if they actually wanted to. Would they be this lethargically slow if they found out they were selling child porn? I don’t think so.

I am more then a little pissed off that because of my post, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are now goose stepping to Wal-Mart to buy these shirts. For example, over at the Resistance Records official website, members of the forum linked to my post and wrote about going to Wal-Mart to buy these shirts. Resistance Records produces white supremacist and neo-Nazi music. It is the same record company behind Prussian Blue, the Nazi version of the Olsen twins. One member of that forum even posted a photo of herself wearing the shirt she bought at Wal-Mart. The shirt she didn’t even know existed until I posted about it on my blog.

I wish Wal-Mart had acted more responsibly and taken care of this situation as soon as it was brought to their attention. Instead they worried more about trying to control the blogosphere then stopping teenage wannabe Nazis from buying Nazi SS shirts in their stores.

The reality is these shirts are so ugly, I doubt anyone was even buying them. Until wannabe Nazis learned about them on my blog. Great.