Consumer Complaint: Best Buy's Lies

A few months ago I bought a new notebook.  I knew what I wanted, played with a few models to be sure, and efficiently and independently made my decision.

Then Best Buy's standard practice went into operation. The young man who was assigned to get my computer from storage told me he'd see if there were any left (of the notebook that had been nationally advertised). He was sure there weren't and urged me to buy a pricier model.

I asked that he check for my model. It was in.

Then he tried to sell me a Word package.  I told him a use OpenOffice--shareware.  He shook his head in warning but saw I wasn't budging and so launched into the protection plan offer.  You know how wise guys sell "insurance" to candy store owners and butcher shops. That's what it felt like. He kept insisting my computer would  not be safe unless I spent another hundred dollars on a Best Buy maintenance plan.

I've been using computers since 1985. Maybe around 1987 I had to get my harddrive checked out but other than that, nothing. I declined, but what was insulting (yes, I know I'm taking this personally) was his comment to the sales girl about me, how I was a lost cause. She ignored him.  Buying my little $300 and change Toshiba was one long lying sales pitch from Best Buy.

Now I have a new cell phone I have to return to Best Buy. The clerk lied to me. I know lied is a strong word, but I am quoting the phone carrier. We just got off the line.  I've been using this make phones and plans since the get-go.  Best Buy has stepped up its bid to fill in its financial holes by way of pressure and misrepresentation or mistakes of ignorance; I'm especially annoyed.

Big picture is I am thankful I can currently swing purchases--a new notebook a few months ago--a new phone (my old died). I'm thankful for the convenience and opportunity.  My very first cell phone about seven years ago paid for itself in less than four hours through some freelance work.

So that's that. A rant. A nonpoetic segue.  And now I see it is an opportunity for me to recalibrate my emotions so I remember what I want out of life--it's not anger. Onward and with less emotion.

The Omen: The antifeminist fathers the Antichrist

With what passes for benevolent husbanding Gregory Peck (Ambassador Robert Thorn) decides in the beginning of The Omen to hide the truth (as he knows it) from Lee Remick (Ambassador's Wife, Katherine Thorn). Their son didn't survive childbirth. The baby handed to her isn't hers.

Granted, without deception and bad decisions, horror movies don't get off the ground. Still the idea that father knows best, that (the former) Atticus Finch, for godsakes, is willing to fake out his wife because he believes it's for her own good (that phrase), is business-as-usual in this movie classic, as if Lee Remick were being served rice pudding instead of jello, well, it sticks in my girlish gaw.

The movie came out in 1976 when feminism (whichever wave) as a concept was no longer novel, though the struggle was still raw.

Peck's decision to lie may seem less strange because they are in Italy, not America. I wonder if that's why director Richard Donner or screenwriter David Seltzer chose Rome, because of its direct link to "mysteries." Obviously near the Vatican is a good place for the Antichrist to hang out.

I stray. And while I'm here let me commend Jerry Goldsmith for an Oscar-worthy score. That chanting: Sanguis bibimus, corpus edimus, tolle corpus Satani (We drink the blood, we eat the flesh, raise the body of Satan) [tra la] and Ave Satani! Ave Versus Christus (Hail, Satan! Hail, Antichrist!) [yo ho].

Back my point. Peck didn't believe his wife could handle the truth, when in fact she couldn't handle the lie. Nor could he; a photographer; at least one priest; the "this is for you, Damien" nanny; and a few assorted others (not to mention prospective victims, to wit, everyone in Christendom and onward).

It's a sweet idea, that women are innately sensitive in various degrees. That our lives best be determined by the men. (Hey, I just turned my head and there on a shelf is: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich.)

The conflict that male caretakers like the Gregory Peck character have is within: They are as afraid of the truth as the women they purport to protect. I wonder what the construct would be today. Would Peck and Remick be replaced by a Santa Barbara couple who adopt an infant they think is a Romanian orphan born in an Italian refugee camp (plausible). I don't see why the far right doesn't finance a version in which the Antichrist is raised by a lesbian or gay couple using surrogates. Or maybe the Antichrist could be Chinese and adopted by a single mom.

While it makes sense that the living opponent to "love thy neighbor" manipulates, it doesn't make sense when husbands do the same, easy breezy, in a plot premise.

What's a Poet to Do? (Against a cry of marginalization)

I read Canadian author Carol Shields' novel Happenstance when I was in graduate school. This was a recreational venture, although, yes, my graduate degree, an MFA, is in fiction (one workshop plus two weeks of a second workshop; two "craft" classes in poetry).

This was around 1995 and memory starts to fail within two weeks of my reading anything, sometimes within two hours; diminishing returns. So the novel was about quilters, but I can't be too specific. I recall there being a convention or assembly of quilters, and the book's focus and tension came from characters' interests and attractions. There was a wry acceptance on the part of quilters that their art, or craft if that's what you want, was not mainstream. That's what really stuck with me.

Granted Happenstance is by a Canadian, a peoples, I am led to believe, with fewer assumptions about the right to life, liberty and fame than Americans have.

One of my poetry "craft" professors lamented the place of poets in society. It wasn't the first time I'd heard that Wagneresque aria and certainly not the last. But I had to wonder why this was so typical a complaint of poets, and one I heard before the publishing industry crashed in (about) '95 (and every year since them).

I would love my poems read by many people. When I write a poem and sense it is nearing completion I get excited. I go to an open mic or submit it to a journal. I've posted a few here. Poets are convivial people, in general, so there's that - we have a desire to chat about what we're doing.

Poets are also a tad egotistical. It is far more common for a poet to think she or he's better than the next, than it is for a fiction writer. The poet who complained has received big grants, is represented by a speakers' bureau and so on. The complaint was luxury, unless this poet expected the same attention as given to Don DeLillo or Susan Sontag. Or Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep.

As vile as the past year as been financially, for this country, and as strong a witness as the AIG, Lehman and Bernie Maddox crimes have been to American greed and ugly inevitabilities of capitalism, I still kind of trust the market. Because the market is people, and while I don't understand people, I love them.

Yup, you got it; don't like individuals but love the group. Sure there's all kinds of brainwashing and the system (pick one, pick any) isn't simply imperfect - it is often corrupt. But the poetry market has bourn Adrienne Rich and Czeslaw Milosz quite well, to name two. Not that they make the bucks from writing, but auditoriums of great and loyal fans turn out for them.

Are poets "marginalized"? I'd like to think of myself as a deliberated scribble in the margin of a high school or college student's class notes. My intelligence marginalizes me. My ordinariness marginalizes me. Writing poetry is what makes me a little different.

Thank you, poetry. I matter.

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