Here it comes. It's coming soon, after the shouting "God bless George Bush"s and "God bless America"s finalize the bloated Republican victory speeches and hypocritical right-wing prayers, coming downward, sliding down the manque gospel road of unborn humanity to a drag show with southern-red-state male impersonators. It's coming like some unforgotten childhood fantasy sabotaging Yalies in midlife. And it is what every southern state-college girl fears, the sudden kudzu-like growth in number of men masquerading the dumbest kind of machoism in history. It's Huck driving a tank through Fallajuh, dreaming of Missouri, and Tom yucking it up on Fox News, and good old Jim sitting in prison, counting the only thing he knows society will be honest about, the number of years he's got left to serve hardtime. Jim can be sure of one other thing: His family and friends will never have their votes properly counted.
It's our sandstorm season of staged elections and imperialist comic testosterone, an American pre-ejaculation of evangelical antic anger, our delicious scamming of red-state robber CEO-ism. Who cares that former Fed Chief Volker says the country's sinking fast into an
economic quicksand? My goddamn blessed southern college students yearn for something--as long as they don't have to read much. They haven't read Hemingway or Owen or Arcos or much of anything else about war. Their context is complacency and a church pew. They've got the Lord on their side.
They see little parallel between Oedipus Tyrannos and Bush Bellicose. No, daddy has nothing to do with it. Neither do drugs. I swear the neo-cons are trying to catch up for missing all the drug and sex experimentation of the sixties: Hey, let's fucking make a fantasy that even those stupid hippies would find hallucinatory. Let's bomb the hell out of a little sand kingdom and then democratize it. And so the unreality of military madness dreams itself into a nightmare reality because they have keys to the kingdom of god.
So the imperial jest that power is good because you've got it--like owning ten credit cards--reigns. Banker, Oil Man or Joker--what's the difference? And the South? What a bunch of dumb asses! First to war, last to join the union. You've got to appreciate the south for one thing, however, and that is they'll never be smart enough to take over the world. Now carpet baggers--like W--will attempt a conquest or two but never a civilization. And that's why these southerners, signing up daily for the military, won't succeed--because they have that brain-addling deficit of turning themselves into sons or daughters wherever they go, as if incest hung on them like grapes to be plucked and unconsciousness surrounded them like a heavy coastal fog.
My college students trail into the classroom, wondering why they're there. Why be at college when there's so much of Iraq to see? Many of the young women, on the other hand, grin at the growing redneck cocks because they know they have these boys by the balls. These girls hear and see machisomo daily--gun toters and homophobic poke-alongs. And they let it be while finishing a degree and raising a dadless kid. One of these days they'll just be fine, for secretly, very secretly, they want the boys to grow up quick or go to hell. Jerks like them can die.