By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The hugely best-selling twentieth-century novelist Taylor Caldwell wrote with a religious sensitivity of complex moral situations. Her own rambunctious life was an example not to be emulated at every turn.
She portrayed a visit by the devil as that of a charming fellow, not a filthy demon. After all, if temptation were repellent, who would fall for it? Eating the apple in the Garden of Eden supposedly offered great wisdom, not the awful expulsion from Paradise. The serpent hadn’t signed the businessmen’s pledge for truth in advertising.
During the same recent day that I happened to recall this tale of temptation’s empty allurement, I later had an experience that served as a reminder of its daunting reality.
This temptation is the globalist one of marvelous modern powers — such as technology that provides instant access to the worldwide net, and social media that seem to promise all wisdom and strength. This isn’t the early 1950s, with heavy black-and-white TVs that were a foot thick, sat on a firm table and offered three local channels from maybe breakfast time to midnight.
(You don’t know how to repair today’s bewildering electronic lock on your front door? A few taps on a smartphone and there’s the knowledge. No phoning a repairman or even having to print out instructions. However, you do need to be adept. I drive a car and write on a computer, but I don’t try to repair either of them.)
Today’s Garden of Eden includes a lot of “Out of Business” signs on the doors of the small Mom and Pop shops outside the city limits from that stupendous apple tree. The future has arrived and passed them by.
Government-ordered pandemic lockdowns put them out of business while we customers, in astounded fear, complied with the commands.
As the confusion of the pandemic continued, mega-businesses feasted on the helpless remains of little restaurants and other sorts of shops.
You can’t buy a book at a nook or from a cart in the mall any longer? Maybe the mall itself had been shuttered by online shopping? As the twenty-first century arrived, who would have known what soon could be?
Another attack on individual business from massive-government Democrats — while their super-rich allies salivated — arrived with Joe Biden acknowledging that it was illegal and unconstitutional to continue to protect renters from having to pay for the roofs over their heads. But it was fine with his administration to keep breaking that law.
It’s simply not true that rental housing is provided only by huge corporations that will never miss having a million dollars here or there. In many cases a person has only a unit or three to rent out, and he has been expected to keep making all his maintenance and mortgage payments since early 2020 while he in effect houses squatters asserting their protection from eviction.
Those squatters of course might have their own unlucky circumstances, but they may have friends or relatives who could help. Or maybe they should go knock at the residences of Joe Biden, who not only has a big White House but also some private mansions, just as his unnecessarily well-housed former boss (or maybe even current boss?) does, Barack Obama.
Anyway, we’ll await the millionaires in Congress to start housing the homeless in their own backyards, garages, attics, and maybe Biden-style basements.
But I digress. My topic was to be the temptation offered by this age of limitless electronics and their capabilities as sold from big-box stores, such as the one where I bought my laptop.
A few weeks ago I consulted my Internet provider about a computer problem. I pay this particular very large company an extra $10 a month for special assistance. However, the voice on the phone just said I needed a new battery, so go find whatever was the correct one.
Then I phoned the big-box service line. I couldn’t call directly to the local outlet where I bought my little computer three years ago, and also had paid $200 for annual service protection in May of this year while my laptop had a thorough going-over.
The first person I spoke to at the end of July was no help, so I phoned back and got helpful Maria. She didn’t know if the local outlet already had the battery I needed, or would have to look over my laptop and then order it for me.
She made an appointment for the following week. My laptop was okay as long as it was plugged in, but died immediately otherwise.
I arrived promptly for my appointment but was told at the service desk that they neither keep batteries in stock nor even order them! I would have to go home, order a battery online, then have it delivered to me. I replied, What?! I said that when I take my car to the shop for a checkup, I’m not told to go home and order my own parts. The clerk said this is different.
He also said there must have been “miscommunication” with Maria. Not at all, I replied. Our only topic was a battery, and she specifically said that when I brought my laptop to the store, a clerk either could provide one then or order it after seeing what I had.
Two people in line with me commiserated about their own experiences after this clerk stepped away. He at least took my laptop behind a curtain in order to find out which battery I should order on my own.
When he came back out, I said I wanted to report this to his manager. He said I would have to go through corporate. (You mean no manager is behind the curtain, or on the floor?)
On my way out the door, I told the greeter that I couldn’t even get my complaint through to someone there. The greeter gave me a business card with a man’s name — whose phone number was the same as Maria’s.
Fairy Tales
I proceeded to a small battery shop with just a few clerks that’s part of a chain but is only the size of one medium house, not a dozen homes under one roof. This shop had helped me a few years ago with a different, older computer and I hoped it could again.
It was able to order a battery for me, for nearly $140 including installation once the battery arrives. My $10 extra monthly for the Internet provider and $200 annual service coverage at the big box availed me not at all.
In globalism world we can buy lots of things that enrich Communist China. Which makes China stronger as it treads the path to take us down. But apparently China hasn’t gotten the word through to my big box about how to get batteries.
Mom and Pop are on the breadline, and Jeff Bezos gets richer than ever.
This is the kind of tale to share around the campfire. Unless government has declared a no-burn day. The way things are going, kindling is the only source of energy we’ll be allowed to have while we squint at the distant gleam of chandeliers in the mansions of the elite.
Say, does anyone wonder why Barack “Global Warming and Rising Seas” Obama chose to have a stupendous mansion on an island, down by the water?
Obama knows better than to believe his own fairy tales. They’re just for our consumption. And once the elite take away our food, too, because growing it somehow offends Mother Nature, chewing over those fairy tales better taste good.
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