Freak Inquisition: Borders Book's Gutless Magazine Ban

In the mid-1980s Borders Books and Music was one store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It has since evolved into a chain of 470 superstores in the United States, 54 abroad, and another 650 Waldenbooks—mall kiosks that serve up bestsellers and how-to’s like triple-decker burgers at Wendy’s—for a combined $3.9 billion in sales and 34,000 employees. What stands out about Borders, for readers who care about finding more than the latest Crichton and Clancy landfillers on the shelves anyway, isn’t its middling Wall Street profile. It’s that Borders has been to suburban sprawl what Constantinople was to the Middle Ages—a concentrate of culture slightly more bracing than the surrounding gruel. The company’s PR (“finding new ways to surprise and delight customers—and turn them into lifelong friends”) is, for once, closer to the truth than these self-serving proclamations tend to be. So a bit of shock and a lot of disgust should greet the company’s decision not to carry the April-May issue of Free Inquiry, one of the better small magazines around, because that issue is running four of the by-now stalish Muhammad cartoons (This site has carried the whole series since January 31). Only a bit of shock because a corporation’s cravenness is never surprising, and even less so in these days of dividends by all means necessary. More disgust is warranted for various reasons: The response to critics by the Borders CEO, the fact that the left-wing blogosphere has seemed indifferent to the story, as if right-wingers championing it somehow renders it less legitimate, and of course the irony of the ban itself. Read the rest...