satan's handiwork

The hand of Satan is alive and well in Senator Rick Santorum's commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Bob and I personally witnessed the expanse of his power over the Presidents' Day weekend. Apparently, while Santorum was off divining homosexuality and natural disasters, Satan was undermining human goodness by far less predictable means. Driving through the suburbs, country roads and antique malls of Eastern Pennsylvania we saw with our own eyes the following insidious tools used by the Prince of Darkness to destroy our American culture and way of life:

• Suburban Housing Communities: a multitude of identical houses, with identical off-white siding, punctuate what once were pastoral hillsides, in tight, treeless rows like giant tomb stones. Apparently, Satan does not want individuality or creativity, and is stipulating the sameness through developers and community boards. Most Demonic Feature: giant two-car garage doors looming forward from the front exterior of each home nearly obliterating any other recognizable front entrance feature of the house.
  
  
• The Cell Phone and the Automobile: Satan has sent the cell phone to make traffic even more deadly. Every bad driver we encountered, from the slow poke in the passing lane to the idiot pulling into traffic without a glance in the mirror, was on his or her cell phone. Most Demonic Feature: hands-free headsets. This is Satan coming as an "angle of light," convincing drivers that not using their hands to talk on the phone frees up their brains as well.
  
  
• Strip-Mall Cuisine: it is damn near impossible to find an old-time dinner these days, much less a restaurant that doesn't think of wings as a salad and fries as a side vegetable. Most Demonic Features: the endless repetition of Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesdays, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Dunkin Donuts and any Chinese restaurant with "Buffet" in its name.
  
  
• Post-eBay Antique Malls: there is nothing there there. Senior citizens have found a way to avoid the high cost of self-storage units by simply dumping everything they don't want in antique malls. The malls are now full of nothing more than discolored afghans, dinged up wagon-wheel coffee tables, church or bank calendars from the early 1990s and hand-painted garden art (e.g. the wooden jigsaw cutouts of the woman bending over or pipe-smoking yokels leaning on the porch rail). Most Demonic Feature: those scary dressed up porcelain dolls that these old folks bought in five easy payments from a Reader's Digest advertisement.
  
  
• Wal-Mart: Entire hillsides have been deforested, not just for the Wal-Mart itself, but its parking lot the size of a small town and the symbiotic clingers, like dollar stores, car washes and fast-food restaurants that ring the lot. Most Demonic Feature: the small road that connects the Wal-Mart lot to a similar giant parking lot for Home Depot, ringed by a small video store, gas station and a one-hour photo hut.