Wal-Mart Turns in Student’s Anti-Bush
Photo, Secret Service Investigates Him

From the Progressive:

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service.

On Tuesday, September 20, the Secret Service came to Currituck High.“At 1:35, the student came to me and told me that the Secret Service had taken his poster,” Jarvis says. “I didn’t believe him at first. But they had come into my room when I wasn’t there and had taken his poster, which was in a stack with all the others.”

She says the student was upset.

Click here for the rest.

Wal-Mart sucks for many, many reasons. And this is yet another one. Obviously, this is less of a corporate thing and more of a function of the kind of places the mega-retailer sets up shop, and the kind of people they employ. That is, Wal-Mart is big in the boonies. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that, but it strikes me that the intersection of Wal-Mart's corporate down home family values with the attitudes of the hyper-patriotic country folk who work for them (at an embarrassingly low rate of pay, I might add) long ago made such an event inevitible. My guess is that what's kept this from happening more often is that there has been a particularly low level of anti-Bush sentiment in small Southern towns until only recently. When you get down to it, this is just a case of a working class right-wing country dumb-fuck spying on people's personal photos. And that's just the kind of person Wal-Mart likes to have on the payroll, too stupid to know that he, too, should oppose the President who has done everything possible to allow his employers to give him the shaft, so stupid, in fact, that he mistakes an art photo as a threat to the oppressive and economically unjust America that he loves.

Just another day in our red state nation.

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