"Endowing common sense with papal powers of infallibility isn't commonsensical. Truth defies our immediate intuition sometimes; and while it is to our benefit to find the truth this is not to say that the truth is there "for" us. It is not. Thus whether truth is simple or complex is a matter of chance. It has no inclination to be either."-Me
I've watched a small bit of the new series about the OJ Simpson trial. It's good dope. The fact of the matter is that Mark Fuhrman has probably jailed several innocent black men with glee but OJ of course wasn't one of them. The paths of a racist white cop and a black man who was indeed guilty of 'savagery' happened to cross and there is no force commanding that they shouldn't have. Crooked timber and all that. The series amply demonstrates how the American ideal of impartial justice is often hypocritical or willfully ignored but more fundamentally it is just that; an ideal. Coldly detaching an individual incident from one's larger understanding of society and the world is just not how the human brain works. The human brain seeks patterns and narrative and strains to find evidence that its presumptions are correct. It is thus impossible to quarantine any justice system from prevailing social biases. Or from attempts from victims of that bias to fight back for that matter. It is also quite bittersweetly funny to have my teenage concept of the nineties as a New Dawn of Hip revealed as no such thing at all; as no more than the backwash of the eighties really. But that's neither here nor there.
Without looking it up I know that Nebraska had a governor Thorne or was it Thorn at some point in the middle-distant past. For whatever the fuck reason I dreamed last night that he had been a semi-dictator from the thirties until the fifties; a great man who single handedly willed the Sod House republic into the modern age. I know of that is the least bit true and I have no idea what this dream "meant". I know that no one is wholly innocent of the fascist impulse or prevailing bigotries and of course I count myself among no one. A strong man who puts our doubts to ease and is always right by circular definition because truth is defined by the man strong enough to win the title of Father. Sometimes people wake up to the fact that their 5-year-old perception of a world safely controlled by Big People with Big Minds much greater than their own is not actually how the world works' nor has the world ever "worked" in any way at all. Others never wake up to this because it is scarwy.
I do know that there were Nebraskans living in soddies until well into the 1970's. I know that in Valentine the Norfolk Daily News is still more widely read than the North Platte Telegraph (though North Platte is a full hour closer) because the N/S highway for NP was not paved until the fifties and Norfolk is the nearest large town along Valentine's beaten path to Omaha. I know that the body of Nebraska is to this day that of an octopus; with multiple corridors filtering into the OmaLink and contact between these corridors being much more likely to come through Omaha's mediation than through direct north/south travel. (McCook is still faintly more foreign to me than Kearney is.) I know that the ether of grass between these corridors does effect our character greatly all the same. Makes the mindset of even our comparatively large towns and cities a bit more rural; a little more beefy, sourkrauty, light beerier, cattle tank canoeier. I am few generations removed from farms in that ether and so are many of us. There are a pack of Berans in the Ord/Burwell area; though in most cases the common ancestor is distant enough that we could legally fuck if we wanted to. It may even be as distant as Joseph the first American Beran who dodged the Austro-Hungarian draft and settled abouts Taylor.
My grandfather recalled the eight hour, 150 mile drive to Omaha in his father's Model F or whatever it was. To this day my relations and I follow Grandpa's secret shortcut from NP to Grandma's Lutheran folk in the Sioux City/Falls area; a Byzantine staircase pattern through narrowly paved state highways and county roads. It is faster than the interstate as a matter of fact though now that I think of it this largely depends on one's will to take advantage of 1 cop per 50 square miles country & hit the fucking peddle. The route could I suppose work the same for Denver-Minneapolis traffic just as well; and whether I am boring you with all this trivia or giving you something you may find useful I've no idea. RIP Thorne.
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