Weeping Outside Kmart
Weeping outside Kmart on Easter: For Hanoverians disaffected by corporatocracy.
It was the first time I witnessed a mass emotional bloodbath among strangers. I must have been eight years old, with three younger, eager-eyed siblings at the field beside the Kmart on Eisenhower Drive.
Real-life Hanover parents had brought their kids to this shameless showdown. I remember the adults' panic lining us up shoulder to shoulder with children they did not know as we eyed that bulky yellow plastic egg in the distance, ignoring the small ones nearly within reach.
When the starter fired her gun (at least I choose to remember it as a gun), the athletic kids among us bolted toward the distance. A few steps in, I realized I didn't have a chance. I settled for anything I could find halfway through and consoled myself that maybe the big yellow one was prepared by some cruel person—disgruntled with the holidays—who stashed it with a solitary candy.
Less than sixty seconds later, the field—once tilled for generations by the same farmer—was completely decimated. A girl with a beautiful canary-yellow Easter dress to my right, about two or three years old, watered this forsaken farmland with her tears. She hurled her vacant basket toward the earth with more tragedy than I could imagine she'd ever experienced. A squatting parent placed a heartbroken hand across her.
The solitary egg in my basket was a lucky find. There were more kids who turned up than there were eggs to snag. When the older boys weren't satisfied with their inventory, they began pillaging the baskets of the younger ones.
At least half the parents, trying to salvage any sense from the pandemonium, tore their offspring from the mayhem and loaded a red shopping cart with Peeps, chocolates, and other sweets. A consolation, at least.
I don't want to be cynical enough to believe it was a calculated marketing ploy. Could a good-natured Hanover manager, desperate to save the sinking ship of their chain store, really pull one over like this on our entire community just to offload a holiday inventory surplus? Perhaps this Easter massacre was more likely born of good intentions at a too-boring Tuesday afternoon ad hoc meeting.
Even so, the memory is emblematic of the false polarization that characterizes our little slice of Anytown, USA. We compete with one another for the breadcrumbs that fall from the tables of billionaires, unknowingly pitted against ourselves, and always for their smug invisible enrichment. None of them, after all, are Hanoverians—even though they own our town, even though a single Kmart executive's net worth is more than 400 times larger than our entire town's annual net income.
"We couldn't have expected anything better," I recall overhearing a disappointed parent grumble. "It was organized at Kmart."
Walmart or Kmart? Lowe's or Home Depot? McDonald's North or McDonald's South? These aren't mere chitchat conversations for our people; they are identity markers essential to the ideological discourse among our neighbors. At that innocent age of eight, my best neighbor-friend and I would at times sever our ties for weeks on end over disagreements about the best chain buffet restaurant in town, at least until one of our parents would take us out and all bickering could cease in the name of mountains of salt and fat.
Salt and fat. The savory curios upon which our town was built. Leave it to the Anabaptists among us to produce brilliant goods without really caring about profit and leave it to some other German businesspeople to lift their ideas and commodify them at scale. From this history, we proudly declare ourselves as the Snack Food Capital of the World. Factories and lard-farms of hardworking Hanoverians.
Or at least, that's the romanticized version. In a recent drive through our crossroads, after being away for several years, I saw eerily familiar signs erected where our homegrown factories had expanded within my brief lifetime. The corporate logos of Campbell's proudly decorated York Street.
As if wealth inequality weren't massive enough in Hanover already, we handed some of our proudest industries—robbed as they were from our modest Pennsylvania Dutch friends—to a billionaire family celebrated in corporate Americana culture for putting watery vegetables any Average Joe once grew at home into a can to ship off to far-away places that don't need them. (This economic capture of one of the most decentralized fruits/vegetables of our times, the tomato, is perhaps best captured in Andy Warhol's iconic soup can screen prints. The meme-ified proliferation of this art, which is, in fact, about corporate marketing memes—art critic Arthur Danto actually famously called such art "the end of art"—is about as ubiquitous as the cans themselves.)
I am concerned about the inevitable implosion of an economy run by billionaires. We hardworking folks (as differentiated from billionaires who don't work in any legitimate sense) feel it in our pockets more now than we ever have. We should all be concerned about these things.
But I'm also concerned about the cultural phenomenon of harsh competition among us consumers to align with one billionaire's brand over another. I'm worried how their branding captures and polices our imaginations and loyalties. We should all be concerned about these things too.
Is shopping on one side of Eisenhower or the other what makes a resident of Hanover good to their community? Or is one a good Hanoverian for stopping corporate expansion into the wetlands, for building member-run institutions, for supporting that rare surviving family-owned niche business, and for communing with neighbors who think and behave differently?
The political class will pull us into sensationalized scapegoating wars. Prices will rise, and we will blame one president or the other, one party or the other, one demographic or the other, one company or the other. But the system that sustains only a handful of massively wealthy companies in each industry is what decimates small towns like ours—culturally as much as economically. It is a system bound to implode, bound to tear our social fabric right through the middle, preying upon our pastime (now birthright) to "other" and blame. When this untenable system implodes, we will foot the bill as the rest will cash out.
Kmart executive Billionaire Edward Lampert, for example, is chilling in his Connecticut waterside mansion. Kmart went under, but his personal wealth has boomed. When he cashed out of Hanover and the rest of smalltown America, he threatened not to pay out pension payments to tens of thousands of Kmart workers. His 288-foot yacht (named after an Ayn Rand novel) sports a tax haven Cayman Islands flag—nothing star-spangled. His wealth certainly ain't tricklin' down to us.
The line between Walmart and Kmart (or now, Target) is razor-thin, although the false polarization of corporate branding would have us think otherwise. The line between the billionaire ruling class and everyday Hanoverians—including most of the wealthier neighbors among us—is a cavernous canyon chasm. Instead of bludgeoning each other for those few plastic eggs, maybe we should turn to the interdependency of our community. Maybe we should turn our backs on Eisenhower Drive and build something wholly other together.
It's best, in the proper tradition of Hanoverian morality, to yield to the wisdom of one's mother. In reflecting upon the Kmart carnage, which my own mom called "an unbelievable display of disrespect," she advises that we organize the meaningful rituals of our lives "at our homes, with neighbors, with friends, with cousins." In this way, we offer a more beautiful world to our community, ideally out of the reach of the grip of the corporate nonplaces of supermodernity, such as Hanover's peri-urban sprawl.
Phil Wilmot was raised in the village of Smith Station of Heidelberg Township and brought up at the church behind the former Kmart. Phil is a cultural worker and writer who now lives in East Africa. The fondest place in Hanover, for Phil, is the Magic Elm Skateland bathroom, where scandalous memories seem to live on into the present.
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Phil Wilmot and/or Andrew T. Smith
