The first time I heard system of a Down sing "Aya Fit Da Hey Vah!" it was a true political awakening. The first Kottenmouth Kings fan I met was a man named Keith who liked to huff duster in the absence of other drugs. He'd moved down to North Platte from Laramie where he had meth partied with the murderers of Matt Shepard among others. My girlfriend at the time was from Laramie too. She had known Keith from there and admitted to having a crush on him because of his piercing eyes, self assurance and 1999 special Slim Shady cigarette butt dye job. One day Keith got drunk at a festival in Hershey, (the first village westward) and parked some antique tractors on the railroad for amusement's sake. The combined damage was somewhere between half and a full million as I recall and Keith went to jail. My girlfriend and I turned his empty trailer into a squater's love nest for about a month. I was there alone and high one day watching an NET documentary called "March of the Cranes" which was climaxed by ten minutes of a man in a bird suit doing his own interpretation of this dance in downtown Omaha. There was no sound but the urban ambiance while this man acted the runaway from Parliment-Funkadelic and it was one of the most enthralling experiences of my life. Since then I've made no small effort to find this scene again on Youtube etc. but to no avail. All thrill of new experience is dead to me now. I could have a child and see this thrill secondhand but even then it would still be someone else's. BB King died eight years after I would have guessed but he is dead even so. My ex-girlfriend for her part tried to ditch North Platte several times but failed. She lives on the north side now with a man named Reuben not far from her parents trailer.
I suppose that Hillary's core problem is that she is a deeply conventional person and that just doesn't gel with the Idea of a revolutionary BIg Fucking Deal first woman. She's so conventional that she'd probably need a grander reason for burning a US flag beyond fire, drugs, 'it's the 4th of July let's burn a flag in front of the fuckin Normal's kids FTW'. The old problem I suppose of social minorities needing to be 'twice as good'. Hillary is simply not amazing in the way we half-consciously expect groundbreakers to be. She isn't even so much "good" really, more like mall food made tolerable with Sriracha doctoring. In an important symbolic sense she is the mall; and not one of those absurd new "town square" malls one finds in the exurbs but one of those busted old malls one finds in inner-ring suburbs that aren't that sub anymore. Hillary is Crossroads Mall and Applebee's is on the fade. There are to be sure the more straightforward sexists who cannot stand any woman being more powerful and admired than themselves; and I remember the 90's when they rorschached themselves into seeing a radical Druid priestess of some kind when there was really just a thoroughly standard white middle-class suburbanite grooving to Jackson Browne. This trope has dried out a bit over time but is still very much out there.
Those who rail most fiercely against the evils of cultural relativism or political correctness are the ones who are most in thrall to comforting non-truths. If a perfectly neutral Vulcan summoned by Dennis DeYoung came down from the stars and scientifically proved that our own culture was superior the real no-nonsense response to this would be 'So fucking what?' now wouldn't it? What terrible danger or hardship are we needlessly subjecting ourselves to by not agreeing to presume ourselves superior? There is none and you know this. What glorious good are we needlessly denying ourselves by not presuming we're the shit? There is none and you know this. Oceans of ink expressing very serious concern for the survival of True Western Values. It is very serious bullshit. A lust for effort-free ego juice wrapped in the gloss of patriotic duty.
My community college history professor had his own Geocities site. Red text on black, MIDI Verdi. On his office door he had posted that bullshit story of General Pershing dipping bullets in pigs blood to put down "Muslim Terrorists" in the Philippines. When of course these people had not been moved to fight by any religious motive at all. They were Philippine independence fighters who happened to be Muslim fighting alongside the Catholics who'd been fucking backstabbed by McKinley's decision to "Christianize" them. Neither were the rebels subdued by hellfire fears of dying with pigs blood in their systems, nor as Snopes points out was Ireland kept forever British through regular Friday steak bombings.
I've read that cooking pork smells similar to burning baby and if you've read Judges; well there are certain social conditions that lead to this smell becoming common knowledge. Beyond that I've my own religious heritage of dietary laws and you have yours. 'Cultural relativism is evil' right right. But I say again that I know you don't really think so. The blind spot in our thinking isn't necessarily that their dietary laws aren't superstitious and silly, but in presuming that our religious rules are wise and good Traditional values because I am good because I am good because I am me.
The Norfolk bank murderers are Latino. Their victims were of course white in keeping with the local demographics. The victims were "us" in this way. Teachers, plantworkers, the mid-level office workers of a prairie market hub transforming crops into finance. It seems clear that the assailants originally intended robbery and no more but they were high something panicked them and they took to slaughter without distinction leaving no one alive enough to hand over the money. There was something in Nebraska's execution guidelines requiring proof of 'special malice or depravity' or some such and so the local DA felt compelled to argue that mass slaughter had been the end itself all along. My dad expressed manful rage at the mere possibility that they wouldn't be executed some three or four days after they were arraigned. He had little more to say on the matter as of course there was no controversy over this being a bad and evil thing; though I've no doubt my dad strained hard as he could to imagine such a controversy.
I've heard that the killers are illegal immigrants, so that if only not.... fucking Clinton... I've also heard that they are actually citizens born and raised. It does not matter. What I do know is that they had all been raised in Nebraska since at least toddlerhood and are in fact 'from here' in all essentials. I know that the killers are fundamentally American and fundamentally Plainsmen; instilled with our own regional iconography, our scenery, our seasons, our own particular ideas of manhood, money, control, fond of the same drugs beloved by rural Midwesterners of all shades. I know in other words that the Norfolk killers are in all ways "We" and so do you. You may tut about what violent rap lyrics have to say about "Their"culture. You may insist that the exotic values of those who live on the other side of your own same snow bubble town makes "Them" uniquely prone to violence. You know it isn't true. You know that I say nothing outlandish when I say that Evil Is We, that if you insist on "believing" that evil is necessarily or at least inclined to be exotic than you are not 'strong' and you sure as fuck ain't no God-Damned Realist. You are a fool for whom lying to yourself is your existence entire. You are an obnoxious childling who play-acts at slaying dragons while covered head-to-toe in your own sour-milk smelling lunch.
You know that the Syrian refugee is neither less or more a potential source of harm than any newborn John Smith. You know there is no magic of rational civility in driving on the right side instead of left, miles instead of kilometers, football instead of football, one faith that declares itself universally mandatory instead of the other, beer instead of wine, baseball caps instead of lip plates, Law & Order SVU instead of naked news, cottage cheese instead of curds in the raw. You know that there are billions of complex minds humming at the same time, all of them the central character of their own stories and judging you from this perspective; perhaps unfairly, perhaps negatively with good cause. What you will never know with the certainty you would burn the world to have is that you and all who are comfortingly familiar to you are good. The sidewalk evangelist asks me if I know for sure where I'm going to go when I die. The answer of course is no. Maybe Wyuka if there's a plot in view of the Capitol. Or next to my mother instead, who made a truck stop hashers bastard and thus made me free.
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