AMAZON: JUST ANOTHER WAY TO SAY "BIG BITCH" [Part 1 Of 3]

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A number of friends and acquaintances have asked me how I came to be banned from Amazon.com. I’m afraid I really don’t have a good answer because evidently I was passed out at the time. Well, it wasn’t so much that I was passed out, as knocked out – my life partner, Jack Daniels, and I, got into a lover’s quarrel, and he’s awfully strong, ya know! Where does one go to report spousal abuse? He really oughtn’t to treat me that way.

OK, seriously, I am now – for the first time ever – going to tell the whole truth (and nothing but the truth), so help me Jack. But before relating how things came to an end, let me first briefly tell you how it all got started (*cue the harp music) . . .

Once upon a time (in early May of 2004), I discovered Amazon.com. I’m not sure how I wound up there or if I had even heard of the website before, but I was immediately drawn to the concept of just ordinary people writing product reviews. I surfed around for a few days, just enjoying reading what others had to say about various books and movies, etc. It never really entered into my mind that I might eventually write reviews myself until the day I looked up the intensely interesting book “IN SEARCH OF THE MOUNTAIN OF GOD” by Robert Cornuke (I would learn much later that Cornuke had actually been my Brother-In-Law’s high school football coach).

I had read Cornuke’s exciting and intriguing book several years earlier, and I was disappointed to find that up to that point, no one had yet written what I considered to be a really on-target review for Amazon.com. To make matters worse, some of the reviewers had posted what appeared to me to be intentionally or unintentionally misleading reviews of the book. I decided it was up to me to do that book justice, and so on 2004, May 6, I submitted my first review to Amazon.com.

As time went on, I wrote a few more reviews for the website. Early on, I adopted the personal policy that I would not write a review for a product unless I had something new to say about it, or I had a very novel way of saying what had already been said; I couldn’t understand why people felt the need to restate over and over again, in review after review, the same pedestrian (and often boneheaded) observations: “Led Zep II ROCKS!!!”; “Julia Roberts is so pretty in Pretty Woman”; “If you hate the N.E.A. then you must hate children! YOU SUCK!!!” Due to my own chosen reviewing policy, I tended to review more forgotten or overlooked items than popular products.

After I had written perhaps 4 reviews for Amazon, one day I discovered a review written by a woman named Lanker on April 5, 2002, for the Tom Waits album “NIGHTHAWKS AT THE DINER.” (A title inspired by the Edward Hopper painting “Nighthawks," by the way.) She had titled her review “In The Oldest Bar In Nevada...", and I thought it was (and still think it is) one of the very best reviews ever composed for Amazon.com. She related some personal experiences in her review which, for me, gave it a quality of human relevance.

Several days later, I happened to stumble on a review written by a bloke named Martusheff for the Nazareth album “HAIR OF THE DOG". In his review, he told the story about how he first heard the recording as a little kid while riding with his uncle in the man’s hot rod. He asked his uncle what that sound was and the man replied, “An electric guitar.” And that was the start of this boy’s love of Rock ‘N’ Roll.

I came to realize that the reviews I seemed to be most attracted to at Amazon.com were those written in a highly individualized way, in which the writer related some personal details about himself or herself which gave the review a human element; these weren’t just a cold, hard recitation of facts about some product, but a real live person’s view of it. With Lanker and Martusheff, I liked the idea that I could see standing behind their reviews, genuine human beings with honest-to-goodness real world experiences which somehow related to the products they were reviewing and which they included in their reviews.

It was at this point, with a few Amazon reviews already under my belt, that I made the conscious decision to incorporate some information about my own personality and life experiences into most of my future reviews. I wanted the reader to come away with the idea that this review was written by a REAL PERSON who has experienced some life; that I wasn’t just some computer program-like reviewer – I was actually living, thinking, feeling, and drinking (the alcohol haze of my ancient youth became a long-running joke throughout the years of my life as a reviewer at Amazon). If memory serves me, the first review I posted utilizing my new style was for the movie “THE BLACK STALLION” – one of my favorite films.

As I often found myself weaving little personal stories into my product reviews, the reviews added up and so did the feedback. While some readers at Amazon mistook my anecdotes as egotistic ramblings (never realizing that this story-review approach was in fact a deliberately selected style for reviewing based upon my own preferences learned from other reviewers), it seems that my contributions to the website were generally well received, as I acquired a fairly impressive number of “Helpful Votes” and climbed in Amazon’s reviewer rankings – much higher than I could have ever anticipated climbing, and higher, in fact, than I really desired to climb. My goal had never been to become a top ranked reviewer; it was simply to turn others on to good products they might have missed, and to warn them away from bad “stuffs” they might be tempted to purchase. (Actually, my REAL goal was to direct people to God, but that’s a story for another day.)

Anyway, on April 28, 2008, I suddenly discovered that Amazon.com had responded to a single, random complaint by a Liberal who didn’t like my politically incorrect views. This anonymous Liberal filed an electronic complaint against the latest installment of my Amazon Blog. (The Blog installment in question, which caused all the fuss, I have recreated here: read my entry entitled “EDJUCATION-R-US: We B Edjucatin’ U. [Issue #1: Polatics & Soshial Studies]” which I posted here on Monday, June 23, 2008).

This person might have chosen to try to engage me in debate in the public “Comments” section of my Amazon Blog, but undoubtedly recognizing that he or she would have a tiger by the tail in a genuine, objective debate with me, chose the cowardly path instead, and sought to have my Blog and Comments deleted by Amazon.com. And Amazon was only too happy to immediately respond to the complaint by removing my Blog and former Comments, and by canceling my ability to post Comments in the future. This really ought not to surprise anyone, because this is a typical tactic of Liberals in general: when they can’t defeat an authentic conservative (of which there are very few left) in a fair and objective debate – despite all of their frequent cries against censorship – they will often attempt to have their opponent’s "politically incorrect" voice silenced. I call this an aspect of the “Help Me, Big Brother” Syndrome which, unfortunately, so many Liberals suffer from.

If you are interested in reading the e-mail exchanges that took place between myself and Amazon.com representatives as I attempted to get the website to reverse the ban against me, then please read on. As one reads Parts 2 and 3 of this Blog installment, the story will unravel itself and become clear. In other words, if you want to know THE TRUTH about Amazon.com vs. Stephen T. McCarthy, you are now one-third of the way there. The dirt begins flying in Part Two below . . .

~ Stephen T. McCarthy

[Continued Below...]

Link: Amazon: Just Another Way To Say "Big Bitch" - Part 2
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