Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Tuesday, Oct. 09, 2007 - 6:06 p.m.

Oy. If this is how it is 3 weeks out from Halloween, I can't WAIT to see how Christmas goes. Me and retail? We are NOT like [this].

In this episode of Katie's life, we will be discussing Christianity and the evils of worldly, satanic things. You know; like books.

I'm walking past the Halloween display with an armload of cookbooks today when I overhear this woman remark to J, one of my coworkers (and my best friend there), that she just had to come into the store to check out Big Chain Bookstore's infamous Christian section, which she has read all about on the web. This completely grabs my attention, as a) I had no idea our Christian section was infamous, and b) who the hell is so interested in a store's Christian section that they blog it and discuss it at length on the web? So I pretty much stopped dead in my tracks, and went, "Wait; people write about our christian section on the web???"

So she launches into this big thing about how our Christian section is not only horrible, it is eclipsed by the multitude of evil, demonic, and satanic things leading to and surrounding it, and that more Christians would shop there if they didn't have to wade through such a sea of horrific worldly (all italics are her actual words) and satanic filth on their way there. So we should move it next to the gardening section. (Apparently, a lot of uberchristians garden; who knew?) This makes no sense to me, since the gardening section is in the farthest corner of the store, the very back corner, so wouldn't the pure have to travel through still more muck and moral turpitude if they had to go even further, I ask? To which she replies, no, we must move the religious section AND the gardening section to the front of the store, because (here she stops to swing her arm in this gesture which encompasses the whole of the center/main aisle of the store, from the front door to the information desk - consisting of pretty much the most G-rated objects you can find in any store catering to actual adults, since the company mostly prefers not to shove sex or alternative lifestyles in the public's collective face, so you mostly walk past stuff like calendars with horsies on them, planners with butterflies or solid colors, crossword puzzles, business books, and whatever the new fiction and non-fiction books are that week, plus the bestsellers), all her good christian friends (and those on the web) are sickened by all the demonic things of the world that they have to pass by in order to get to the christian section because of the way the store is currently arranged, so they all refuse to shop there and instead shop at the christian book store a few miles away. She realizes, of course, that some corporate marketing head designed the store, but the company really needs to take the situation in hand and change it. She continues to lecture for the next 15 minutes (it's already been 5) on how everything surrounding the Christian section is demonic, satanic, evil, and worldly (not necessarily in that order), while I stand there and look around the store. From where I'm standing, I can see the Christianity and Christian Inspiration sections. If I lean forward, to my left slightly, and stand on tiptoe, I can see over the World History section to Christian Fiction and the Bibles sections. Across the aisle from the Christian section (the aisle I'm standing at the end of), I can see Biographies. Along the cross aisle to my right are the rest of the History sections (US, Military, Civil War), True Crime (granted, good people don't go around slaughtering people, but fact is not, in and of itself, evil), Current Events (ie. political stuff and stuff too recent to be termed history), Science (oh - well, I can see what she means), Nature, Pets, Sports, and Cookbooks. The tables in the aisle, beginning with the one directly behind me, contain Halloween-themed books, sports books, gift books (mostly coffee table books of classic art and scenic photo essays), self-improvement, and cookbooks. To my left is the help desk. Of everything I can see in the store from where I am standing, the ONLY thing one could term satanic if one wanted to are the books on the Halloween Theme Table, which contains a book about people who believe in demons and possession (not supporting the existence of demons, just about the phenomenon of belief in demons), a book about people who think they're vampires, some humor books (not dirty humor, just humor), fiction anthologies of ghost stories, and some new age paranormal books about contacting the spirits of the dead and ESP.

Horrors.

Everything else I can see* is a board game (Cranium - EEK!!!), non-fiction book of some sort ranging from business and law to self-help and cooking), and the fiction section. Which, yes, contains stories about adultery and drug use. But which also contains many, many more books in which no one does drugs, sleeps around, worships the devil, or in any other way contributes to the rend in the moral fabric of society. And what I'm thinking is, "If you are so freaking sheltered that the stuff you encounter on your way from the front door to the christian section is offensive or might sway your belief in any way and tempt you to go suddenly astray, you really need to stay inside and never leave your frigging house."

Then again, I know SuDoku can be very seductive. Curse you, Howard Garns! (Or as I like to say: "GAAAAAAAAAAAARNS!!!")

* Granted, we do have a tiny (one single bay) section containing GLBT fiction and non, and 2 full floor to ceiling bays having to do with sexuality and the healthy expression thereof (NOT porn, though some of the books definitely push the limits, but are also geared toward loving RELATIONSHIP SEX, not random lust with strangers), which apparently, fundamentalist evangelical christians feel is the devil's handiwork and must be stamped out. We also have a section on divination and prophecy (2 shelves) and one on Wicca and magic (3 shelves total). So no, we are not all pure as the driven snow. But neither do I think we are contributing to the fall of man, so suck it the hell up.

But she continues to lecture me for 20-30 minutes on the evils of Big Chain Bookstore. And the longer she goes, the more and more angry I get. Because A) she is assuming I am not a Christian (or that I am only a poser Christian and not a true Christian, which phrase she has now used several times), and this means that B) she is operating on the assumption that my moral grounds are lacking, and probably C) I am a shameful and wicked person who is most likely going to hell, and D) she is a better person than I. Obviously, as I work in a smutty bookstore filled with evil, satanic, and worldly things, and as I am so obtuse as to actually see nothing wrong with it, I am part of the smutty, worldly problem, and clearly when I die, I am going to hell in an adulterous, drug-using, demon-worshipping handbasket, crotchless lace-up teddy, snowball, and all. Finally I get the chance to speak, and suggest to her she go to the Big Chain Bookstore's website and send corporate HQ an email, as I am sure they would be interested in what she has to say as a consumer. But she doesn't want to do that. No, she wants ME to do it. AND, I should be sure to tell them it was my idea, to be sure I get all the credit for it. Like I am about to, for any freaking reason in the world, tell my employer - who pays me a mere 50 cents above minimum wage and would happily squash me like a grape, who ridicules those employees who *do* call HR to make suggestions, despite the insistence that the company *wants* us to make suggestions - and does so in company-wide bulletins - I'm going to tell *that* employer that he is a smut-peddling sin-master, and oh yeah, "Hey, dudes, let's redesign every company store to shove all the new product and best sellers that 97% of our customers want to buy to the *back* of the store so that we can move the christian books and the gardening section to the front of the store, so that it's the first and only thing you see when you walk in, so the freaking 3-5% of our customers who will actually shop in that part of the store won't be bothered or inconvenienced by all the other filth and moral turpitude we call merchandise (aka books), because all this satanic stuff is really dragging us down here."

Yeah. That'd go over real well.

I told her well, I'd mention her concerns to the manager (which I did), and she again pressed me to be sure and tell him it was my idea so I'd "get the credit." She told me that several times, in fact. I really wanted to slap her, if for no other reason than she was so freaking clueless and tactless as to not demonstrate more diplomacy than she had, or to even realize just how insulting she was to both J and me, informing us how evil the books are, and how true christians understand this and simply do not enter our little den of iniquity; she was only there to check out the evil for herself because she had been sure it was so exaggerated as to be impossible, but alas, no, it was the truth.

Seriously: Bulls have smashed through china shops with less aplomb.

My entire brain was taken up with wondering why she ever leaves her house and how sheltered she wants to be, and how she ever plans to protect herself from the perils of Bunnicula, and that if people like her got their way, the world would be a terrifyingly sterile and oppressive (not to mention repressive) place. And as I said, I got angry, because while I don't want Christopher Hitchens telling me I'm a fucking moron for believing in God, I don't need some sanctimonious Bible-thumping twit telling me I'm a bad person because I don't see anything more egregious in Edgar Allan Poe's works than that he seems to have had a propensity for self-indulgence and overwrought pretention. (Or at least, that's what I remember from the many forced marches I took through his works all the length of junior high; if I never have to read The Tell-Tale Heart again, it will be far too soon.) Granted, the man himself might have been a laudanum-addicted freak, but we don't judge writing by the personal choices of the assholes who write it. If we did, nothing Ann Coulter wrote would ever see the light of day*.

And I've been trying to get to a way to wrap this up and end it for frigging hours now, but this thing just keeps getting longer, and I don't seem to be able to reel it in or come to a point, so I guess the bottom line is just that it both astonished and pissed me off. It astonished me that anyone has a need to stick their head that deep in the sand and such a fear that I might not want to stick my head in there with them. And it pissed me off that she felt she had the right to tell me to stick my head in the fucking sand in the first place, when I live in a free country, and there are men and women she most likely "supports" in Iraq right now so that they can bring democracy to the people of Iraq, but she doesn't really want them to have freedom and democracy, she wants them to have her version of it, which is some freakishly sanitized, stainless steel world with book burning and stoning, where it's not okay to neutralize a fertilized egg, but it *is* okay to blow up a clinic full of people, and women are supposed to do what men tell them to do, anyone who is different or thinks differently is demonized and/or denied equal rights, and no belief but her belief is allowed. It's 2007, and a book is evil because it fancifully supposes there might be something scary out there in the dark.

What, if anything, have we ever learned?

Katie

*look, don't get me started on ann coulter. i don't think she's even a decent writer, so just don't go there. seriously. my point is that she's a vile, poisonous trainwreck of a human being, and if we based her right to publication on her personal life, she'd never get a book off the press at lulu.com; nothing more.

ps. i started this before dinner, had a half glass of wine, made dinner, wrote more, at dinner, tried to watch tv, wrote more, got interrupted about a million times, and am now longing for bed at 3:43am, nearly 10 hours later. i'm sure it is full of all kinds of misspellings and typographs, but i'm really just too tired to care by now. please be kind and overlook all the there/their/they'res and words that either don't fit or don't make sense but sound like they might, maybe, approximate something else that might make sense if you squint and tilt your head to the side and talk real funny. good night.

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