The Anchoress
I am looking forward to reading Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny, but I am a little embarrassed to hear how some Levin fans are treating my Elder Son’s Sweet Girlfriend, and her co-workers, when they cannot find the book.
Sweet Girlfriend works in a franchise bookstore, and she works very hard. She is a very fine and fair-minded person who makes a point of treating people with civility, particularly at work. When Levin’s book came out, her store received 20 copies. That’s all. They were sold very quickly, and word came that the store would have to wait a few days to receive another 7 copies. Just 7.
From the time of the first sell-out (the book has sold out each time they’ve received additional copies) SG and her co-workers have been accused of “hiding” the book, of deliberately not selling it. “It’s the number one book in America,” someone complained to her, “what do you mean you are sold out?”
Ummm…we laugh at the NY Times when it runs headlines announcing that jails are overcrowded and crime is inexplicably down. Cause and effect.
SG has heard of customers telling book store employees, “I want to read this thing before the revolution!” Others have accused her store of deliberately setting up “giant displays for Obama,” while hiding the Levin book.
“We don’t decide on the displays, corporate does,” she tells me. “We just put the books where they tell us to. And a lot of Obama books are in the discount bin, now. And believe it or not other customers will move books they don’t like and hide them.”
Apparently we would be amazed to know how many people on both the left and the right will passive-aggressively turn books face down, or hide political polemics in the Mexican cooking section. And someone has anger about vegetarian recipes and keeps putting the vegan books where vegans would never want to go. These kids have to go through the store each night, find the misplaced books and put them where they belong. So…satisfying as it might be to put a Saul Alinsky book in the Bible section (you people on the left) or put a Bible in the Saul Alinsky section (you people on the right) you’re just making more work for people who are tired at the end of a long day, capiche? So, don’t do that.
I know it is tempting to believe that bookstore people – who are probably majority-liberal – are hiding your copy of Liberty and Tyranny, but as you can see, even Amazon is saying it will take 1 to 3 weeks to get the book. It is selling like hotcakes, “United Hotcakes Preferred,” as Kurt Vonnegut would say.
As conservatives, it behooves us to remember that the people working in bookstores for $7.25 an hour do not get paid enough to take abuse from anyone, and moreover – why would we treat people differently than we ourselves would wish to be treated. The book is a runaway best seller, and not every store gets the 50-100 copies you might imagine. But believe me, it’s not the prospective grad-student-who is -working-all the -hours she -can for – low-wages’ fault.
Come on, now. We’re respectable people conducting respectable business. Act classy.
And excuse me if this makes no sense. I had to take a muscle relaxant and I’m a little doped up just now. Do you know what’s weird? If you mistype Amazon.com into a header, logic seems to dictate that the internet should know what you mean, anyway because after all Amazon is the biggest thing in the world. But it doesn’t work that way. The computer still does not think. Silly. Silly computer; Trix are for kids.
And I am sure Mr. Levin, who is very smart, would not like to know that his readers are abusing nice kids who work in bookstores.
UPDATE: Orson Bean reviews the book here.
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