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[The Technomancer]

Okay the full title was too long to fit but also its incredible well put together.. Its long but its absolutely worth reading. Its a very complex sort of look at corporate sponsorship of progressivism, including how, at the end of the day, cash for a good cause is still cash for a good cause, but also the cognitive dissonance required to be in such a position of support on the one hand while most of your execs are living in and participating in Trump country

I do wish it went a bit further into how said dissonance by necessity extends to operating a mega corp under capitalism in general, but perhaps that's for another piece

http://www.mtv.com/news/3019514/in-...-davis-at-a-walmart-soda-counter-in-arkansas/

For three years, Walmart headquarters in company town Bentonville, Arkansas, has hosted the Bentonville Film Festival, a weeklong, corporate-sponsored embrace of feminism, inclusion, and empowerment. The biggest store in the world wants to fill — and sell — Lois Weber’s shoes.

To qualify for the Bentonville Film Festival, an aspiring movie submits a scorecard grading its wokeness. Two or more of the creatives — i.e., the director, producer, writer, lead, or 50 percent of the cast, crew, or extras — must be from an underrepresented group, defined as women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, or veterans.

At this year's festival there were still films about sensitive white guys wondering what to do with their lives, but not many. Instead, Bentonville programmed movies about female veterans, female delinquents, female country singers, female thieves, female spies, female housing activists, female farming advocates, and witches. Women dealt with everything from their first periods to breast cancer. They fell in love with men with Down syndrome, and parented a child with paranoid schizophrenia. There were documentaries about women who kayaked across the Pacific, a single lesbian struggling with infertility, an all-black Baltimore girls school, a transgender firefighter, and a Kenyan millionaire who adopted 12,000 orphans.

The festival, now in its third year, has made major strides since its 2015 launch. Attendance doubled from 35,000 to 73,000. Sure, only a fraction of attendees came to see the films, but the 91-seat mobile theaters couldn't have fit them in anyway. The films were mostly sold out and the audiences were passionate. Over a bizarre sponsored brunch of Entenmann's doughnuts, Takis, and honey-mustard crickets, a short-film maker beamed that in Bentonville, new fans stopped her on the street. Q&As were enthusiastic and sincere. After my favorite movie of the festival, Joyce Wong's Wexford Plaza, a tricky she-said/he-said drama about a drunk 19-year-old girl who misinterprets her crush's intentions, a local woman's hand shot up. "I don't know what I think about the film," she announced, "but it made me feel something."

At the after-party, Jewel took the stage again, this time with her guitar. She told a room of merchants that she used to shoplift. As a homeless teen, she started with carrots ("a gateway food") and escalated to a sundress. When she caught a glimpse of herself, dirty and desperate, in the dressing room mirror, she put it back. "I realized I'd become a statistic," she said. By the time she was 21, she'd gone platinum. Now she was in Bentonville to promote her self-help website, Never Broken, and, as she’d mention later during the panel "In Control of Her Own Destiny,” gauge interest in a kids' TV series about mindfulness.

Between songs, Jewel flattered the Walmart employees ("How do you handle transportation? What does that mean?") and the company itself ("Walmart speaks with humility about doing better") while chipping away at conservative capitalism. She talked about the time her call-center boss fired her for refusing a date, about her immigrant grandparents, about when she nearly died for lack of health insurance. Her acoustic set was totally punk rock. Jewel talked more than she played, and when loudmouths talked over her, she'd stop strumming until they shrank into silence. Pop's biggest hippie had cowed the corporate world into buying her every word.

Sixty-three percent of Benton County voted for Donald Trump, slightly more than the overall Arkansas tally. On the radio, I listened to a Christian financial adviser nudge his listeners to invest in Israel, urging, "Nothing's more important than being biblically responsible." The week I was in town there was a grand opening for a coffee shop called Guns & Grounds, which sells rifles, ammo, and fresh-brewed cups of Longshot Lattes and Caliber Cappuccinos.

But Bentonville allows shelf space for dissent. That same week, AHCA protesters held up cardboard tombstones at a "die-in" on the town square, a tidy park just 58 paces from end to end. Bentonville hadn't planned an event for the Women's March. But on January 21, ladies showed up at the square anyway — if anyone was meeting up, it would probably happen there — and were delighted to see 500 other pink knit hats.

"I think Hollywood thinks women don't gather," said Geena Davis. "We did gather in January."

Bentonville is eerily soothing, as if a vintage Norman Rockwell Coca-Cola ad became a 3-D town — and if you don’t leave soon, you’ll never escape. On farmers market day at the square, there wasn't one stand of little girls selling lemonade — there were four. Joked Terry Crews at the awards show, "I'm feeling nostalgic here. I drove by the square and it was like the set of White Chicks." One night, I stopped a drunk man in a white button-down shirt. He was swaying so much on his feet that I figured he'd be honest. Were there any stray dogs in Bentonville? "No." Homeless people? "No."

His tone wasn't proud or defiant. It was factual, like I’d asked if he knew any radioactive clowns. I walked on to my car, which I'd parked in a town lot next to a 2-foot-tall boulder. On impulse, I kicked the rock with my toe. It was hollow plastic, placed there to cover up a pipe. I kicked the next one. Same.

The ruse reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a Bentonville high schooler. The town has an 11:30 p.m. curfew, which rich teens ignore. Parents are always out of town anyway, so they throw the kind of house parties I thought only existed in movies. I asked what kids here did to get in trouble. "Speed," he said. I thought he was joking. Maybe not.

My brain was starting to glitch. No one seemed to be speaking straight and every belief was for sale, like the $2,750 giant plastic meerkat a store hawked as "a playful reminder of the importance of sustainability and environmental conservation.”

At the Chobani free-sample booth, if I looked north, I could see Hank Willis Thomas’s “Raise Up,” his sculpture of young black miners being strip-searched in an echo of generations of young, black men forced to prove their innocence. If I looked south, I could see the town square’s only statue, a 20-foot-tall monument to Rebel lieutenant James Henderson Berry. The word "CONFEDERATE" screamed out in all-caps from every side of the base. The national headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan is in northwest Arkansas, an hour-and-a-half drive away.

I can't imagine that's the Bentonville that Walmart wants to represent. Maybe it’d point to the bronze plaque around the corner honoring Arthur "Rabbit" Dickerson, a black shoeshine man who "on this spot provided generations with lively discussions and exceptional customer service." But even the best boot-polisher in town is several hundred steps below CEO.

It wasn't idealists who integrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s Nobel Prize banquet in 1964 Georgia. It was Coca-Cola, which threatened to leave Atlanta if white businessmen didn't buy tickets. "It's embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner," warned Coke president J. Paul Austin. "We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all have to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company." The dinner sold out.

If Coke can combat segregation, no wonder the BFF believes it can make Hollywood hire more voices. Its strategy isn't just to invite studios, all of whom came. It's to energize its sponsors — Mars, Slimfast, Mattel, Chobani, Clorox, Coty, L'Oréal, Hard Candy, Duracell, Campbell's Soup, Little Debbie — to think bigger than handing out samples underneath cursive quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt. BFF wants corporations to think wisely about how they spend their money during the other 51 weeks of the year. If they’re serious about supporting social progress, their ad dollars can incentivize networks to add more diversity.

If companies don’t demand real change, Walmart’s good intentions are just the discount version of what Bitch Media's Andi Zeisler hashtagged #MarketplaceFeminism, a mall of $800 gold bracelets that spell "empower" and $710 tees touting, "We should all be feminists." We should all have such disposable income. But for those who don't, Bentonville's Walmart Supercenter offers shoppers a chance to save the world with the right lipstick ("Show your support for girls' education") or a LUNA Bar ("an invitation to make your own breakthroughs happen, every day") or shirts that literally announce, "Girls will save the world."

Ironic, because Geena Davis started her career in a department store window. She was a human mannequin. "I have the rare talent to be motionless for a long time," she says. Going from silent beauty to a voice for equality is a lovely career turn. I arrived at the festival wondering if Walmart was poaching Davis’s star power to shine its own brand, and left thinking she’d masterminded how to promote the good work of her institute using Walmart’s cash. After all, she’s both an Oscar winner and a member of Mensa.

 

[outunderthestars]

The Walton family has made Bentonville a really cool town. An amazing art museum, tons of bike paths and greenways, a dozen or so breweries, amazing food etc.

NW Arkansas is a place worth visiting.