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You’ve probably
read The Divine Comedy. If not, I’m sure you at least heard about it in
passing during some college lit course, that is, if you were paying attention
to the professor instead of eying the curvy blonde coed or muscle-bound jock in
the next row.
In case, however,
you have forgotten the book entirely, let me provide a brief refresher:
Dante
Alighieri was born in Florence, Italy in May 1265. He finished The Divine
Comedy shortly before his death in 1321. and the poem is divided into three
parts: Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso). “The
three divisions of the poem correspond in number to the Trinity, and nine, the
square of three, figures centrally in the interior structure of each of the
three divisions” (Norton, 1987, p. 753). Finally, in the Inferno, there are
nine different circles, most of which are subdivided, and progression is from
the least to the greatest type of evil. So that means after you die, the more
serious your offenses were while you were alive, the lower the circle to which
you are condemned.
Got that? Okay,
then here’s the point I want to make: Although Dante came up with some pretty
chilling ideas for punishments in his various circles of hell, which are described in the Inferno, I think if he
were living in the here-and-now, Dante Alighieri would definitely include a
trip to Walmart, possibly making it the lowest circle and, therefore, the most extreme form of
punishment to which any poor, tormented soul could ever be subjected.
“Why?” you ask.
Well, in return I ask, "Have you ever been to Walmart?" Then again, I guess that’s a foolish
question, for who among us has not been to Walmart?
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Anyway, I shop at the local Super Walmart here in Lafayette. You know, it's one of those stores that's the size of a small city. In fact, come to think of it, we have three Super Walmart stores in town, since Walmart is like kudzu (Georgia’s state flower, or at
least it should be), which begins as a solitary patch of green and, before you
can say, “Jack squat,” has covered not only the surrounding fields and
woodlands, but your house, your car, your dog, and even you if you didn’t have
since enough to run when you first glimpsed it. By the way, my daddy called kudzu the "mile a minute vine," and for obvious reasons.
I shop at Walmart because the prices are lower than at other stores and I’m not rich; but
whenever I walk through that entranceway and the Greeter says, "Welcome to Walmart," I cringe because I feel like I am journeying into the
deepest, darkest bowels of hell. There are wall-to-wall shoppers, half of them
yakking, texting, or surfing on their cell-phones; screaming kids with runny noses
and germy hands (That’s why I use a sanitizer to wipe down that nasty buggy); acres of
under-stocked shelves; a noise level several thousand decimals above a 747 on takeoff; people blocking the aisles with those aggravating motorized shopping
go-carts; employees who don’t know where anything is, say they'll find someone who knows, and then leave you waiting for help that never appears; and only three out of two
dozen checkout lines open for business, which means the shoppers who are waiting to checkout are lined up halfway across the store.
Each time I make
a trip to Walmart and finally stumble out dazed into the Louisiana sun, I feel
like I have just run a gauntlet. I am exhausted. My feet hurt. My head aches.
My legs are weak. My stomach is churning. I am also deaf and so frazzled that I’m
on the verge of a meltdown. And that’s why I think that the employees who stand
there at the doorway to welcome you as you enter then check your receipt as you exit (They do this to make
certain you aren’t walking out with something you didn’t actually buy), should
hand you a button that says, “I survived Hell-Mart." It’s also why I think Dante
Alighieri would include a trip to Walmart in the Inferno
if he were writing The Divine Comedy today.
Source:
Norton’s Anthology of World Literature (1987) New York: Simon & Shuster
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