(DIRECTOR'S CUT)
Meet Mr. and Mrs. America. . . . . your core Red-State constituent. Perhaps a little bit more well-off and gentle then most, but a bellwether of what a good portion of the country is probably thinking at any one time, if you chose to ask them personally.
Out here in the farmlands of southern Illinois, Uncle Ben lets the absurdity of nature's silence take over for dramatic or even comedic effect as he tells story after story, a winding, wending melody of pioneering lore, "Founding Fathers" principle, and "Field & Stream" adventure. It's the stillness of God's providence and what man will do with his own two hands, up against the elements. This is not the land where government looks over your shoulder, regulating your every move with measuring tape and handing down petty writs of injunction. The spaces are too big to be policed, and one relies on neighborly trust and if all else fails, "the peace-maker". . . . . the good old-fashioned firearm cocked for effect, but seldom used because "Men of the Lord" don't murder unless they absolutely have to.
A brilliance of a thousand impulses and thoughts-- a deluge of sentiment from a bright teenager too verbose and citified for his own good, and he'll only pause, reflect on time-tested country wisdom (-- arms crossed over the gut of his flannel shirt with suspenders), and deflate your confidence with a steady gaze that nary conceals a hint of bemusement. He'll look away, as if the absurdly correct answer is held in the pastoral silence (-- "what, did my log-home business fall out of the SKY?") and your only reply is the flies buzzing over the sauce-soaked barbecue. Government or romanticism doesn't build; man does.
The courage of the sterner considerations. . . . .
Aunt Barb busies herself in the kitchen, short and portly with blond hair in a brushed tangle and gild-rim glasses. In their 60's, Ben was the first man who ever took her out on a date. She tosses the salad with two dark wooden spoons, a pan full of biscuits on her right. What matters to her is Christian radio and saving the unborn. It's not a question of rigorous thinking, but a gut sentimentality that finds the counter-arguments so frightening that she "shuts down" and has to leave the room. Atheism and moral relativism doesn't play large in her world of grandchildren running around the property with Easter baskets. The soft, white light of Jesus and hugs around family gatherings makes this grassy earth-ball better instead of anti-war protests in the urban centers, as far as she can see-- and besides, we had to get rid of that horrible murderer, Saddam Hussein.
Expressions like "The Butcher of Baghdad" resonate deeply with these folk, because it hits you square and cowboy-like, like a pot of meaty chili. Life was like a Western where the gun-slingin' sheriff wore a white hat and the low-down cut-throat wore a black one. The hero walks into the saloon, makes a cool, collected speech where he gets across that "he doesn't like bad men in these parts". Before the final reel ends, the "white hat" is carrying the draped body of the villain over the back of his horse, "Trigger". Even after Vietnam, that was still the American movie-line in the minds of many. . . . .
Aunt Barb and Uncle Ben don't take well to ambiguity or pseudo-sophistication, because it's only going to come off as either silly or ridiculous or evil. Though they may be let down when promises don't come true, they patch up their wagon-wheels and roll on to God's promised country.
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Or at least that's what it looks like when you pull in the gravel lot, on this side of pastoral quiet. Drive back to St. Louis, and you face a harder life and the more rotten, jellied considerations of modern existence that strikes one like a water-logged corpse floating "face-down" in the Mississippi and then half-rolling over when you cross the Eads bridge with the thrusting "super arrow" of traffic that is as concrete and pitiless as an auto accident, honking horns and rolling rims.
If that was not jitters-inducing enough, you had the liberal "baby-boomers" who have long since hijacked "THE NATIONAL CONVERSATION" in the print, movies, and television of record and frames how our lives our interpreted to "the diddlers" who don't know the difference. For years, the paradigm was "the humble pie of comfort food" and consensus, trotting out bright, cheery girls with 10,000 watt smiles that would would warm the heart of any curmudgeon. But then came "the age of irony" and the era of extreme media rising out of the ashes of what the first George Bush termed "a kinder, gentler nation". The petty joys of "comfort food" snatched away, the media presentation hardening like sand fused into black glass in the aftermath of the Gulf War and the recession and the fall of the U.S.S.R and then breaking up into a million pieces like a bunch of squiggling worms as the nations turned to democracy, the power went to the people, the free markets set up shop, and corruption set in. For every set of chains a society busts, another pair sneaks up to entangle you link-by-link that are even harder to break.
Whatever the squabbling over "the crumbs that remain", it is a bleak picture. Sunny rhetoric is either for "shills with an agenda" or "true believers" who will soon fry in their own juices.
But beware of doom-mongering. . . . . like hooded fanatics from the Middle Ages rolling down a road in an ox cart, waving a cloaked arm up and down and squawking at the masses "to repent and follow them". Down here on the AM radio dial, they try to palm off on you a sales pitch for "patent medicine" energy potions, deregulated herbal supplements, or there's those skittery New Age chiropractors in ponytails trying to turn you on to alternative medicine, life insurance for the morbid, gold investments for the crackpot, Y2K doomsday conferences for the woeful, and other flighty, seat-of-the-pants stuff that wouldn't appeal to anyone successful and "in their right mind" because the Alpha males are too busy making money and fucking like a lord in a castle with his wenches and mounted pennants. It's the stuff of road-killed dogs and bald-headed cancer patients and shrugging impotence in front of a prostitute and geek shows and squid-eyed misfits standing around in a dirty "Tasmanian Devil" t-shirt.
This is a land where "Dubya" routs the cattle with the talk of "Tearer", a streak of lightning up in the sky as you had two cowpokes, Cheney & Rumsfeld and why, even throw in a hard-core black woman, for the sake of down-home "equal opportunity" , who ride along on horses and guide the American people through the swollen river. With a shining star of American/Israeli destiny shining up in the heavens, and some bad-ass Hebrews "holding the line" in the Middle East's "arsenal of democracy", you might even throw up your hands "for Deliverance" down at the electronic self-help church of "Dr. Phil".
There he goes over his pop-psychology brand of "tough-love" A-to-B talk therapy as he coaches over the simple 1-2-3 principle and raises his hands up and down before "his patients", who look more like a family of none-to-eager Pavlov dogs being directed by a stern, unforgiving faith healer before an applauding studio audience.
To get from Dead City to Covenant, you lay down a train track. Point, line, point. 1, 2, 3-- 1, 2, 3. Simple. Good. Got it. Repeat 10,000 times. . . . . But what this confounded, blow-hard Texan had never counted on was the very depths of dysfunction-- the cloud-eyed, flab-chinned, emotionally-stunted nature of the unsophisticated walking along, waddling side-to-side, staring down at their tattered shoes, and shaking their head at their lot in life.
Why, then the very ground opens up in a giant sink-hole and swallowing the train, the track, the station, and the entire "pop psychology" miracle business that would make this "hard-hitting" gimmick look no more consequential than three girls sipping a strawberry milkshake at the soda parlor with their leg raised back like teeny-boppers. With a rumble, the earth would split open and take them down in a belch of flames and a "EEEEEEAHHH!" as a voice cackled from the depths.
The devil of deep-seated family dysfunction can't be exorcised in ten minutes, not even if you put a turban on your head like Johnny Carson. Or "that sand-nigger", Osama-- channeling demons that tell him to kill just like another devil-possessed PED-o-FILE, Mohammad.
The fierce American Eagle had a pea-shooter shot at it's ass and jumped with a squawk of feathers. And it ain't never gonna forgive. . . . . That's like telling the office of "Solider of Fortune" to host a baby-shower with little pink frills and baby booties. A man needs that like he needs a Democrat in office. . . . . but you know how THAT goes.
There was my old bear of an athletic director, "Coach Larry Frost".
His baseball cap, blue like his canvas windbreaker, nodded and resonated with porky authority as he barked after the players "to get a move on". He wore garish orange track pants, with a white stripe going down the side, hearkening back to the 1970's of national destitution and the robo-"hump-a-rama" of "Debbie Does Dallas". Perhaps he never really left the late '60s, the golden age of his manhood, and the era of original Super Bowl's despite the fact that times had changed.
He sits in his shadowed office
, the annex apart from the main building that's slated to be torn down in the near future. You enter the room like a soldier standing at attention and he looks up from his graded papers, like a military man from the 1960's with his thick, furrowed forehead, blue eyes, and uncomprehending jowls, and you can't help but feel out of place for a second as a tame, half-Jewish kid who took gym as "independent study" instead of "going out for football". You were required to fill out the same fat, elementary school ledgers that invariably came in yellow, like something you'd deal with back in the 3rd grade. Big thick spaces, for big fat thumbs, and pencils with worn-down erasers.Notwithstanding the fact that he can't even read my handwriting with my struggling, illegible scrawl, he demands that you translate. I felt like Forest Gump who had yet to find "his secret talent" in the world of the 1960's "southern Gothic". The world didn't understand one bit and there was that saying, "stupid is, as stupid does". The coach looked at me, big and clumsy as an ox, and eyed me like prized beef. . . . . stroking his chin and reckoning I could play football.
Tawny fields of grain, that's what he understands. Tractors, basketball hoops at the end of a dirt driveway, gun shows. A barbecue shack with a sanded porch railing, festooned with red, white, and blue frilly decorations. Air Force shows on Labor Day weekend.
Super Bowl Sunday; a reclining easy chair, hot wings, a bowl of pork rinds, and a sack of "White Castle" hamburgers. The little wife washes dishes as he hollers at the television in the other room, raising a paw in frustration like a bear.
In his office, coach Larry Frost fulminates at academia. Sure, he understands the importance of education, but didn't take it seriously unless it imparted something practical-- like car maintenance. Back in the late '60s, he majored in agriculture and sports science, with a minor in American history. Before then, he enlisted in the army and served in Vietnam. In the intelligence tests, a barn illustration with pictures of animals. It asked you how many pigs and chickens there were. By God, you didn't need to know much to lumber forward and fire a gun!
But football, for him, was as much of an art as a science. Chalk boards of X's and O's and scratched-out arrows, play-by-play film-strips, and classic anecdotes. What he had to show for it was orange and blue banners hanging on the gym wall like a series of medieval tapestries, whose dates went back into the mists of near recent history. It rubbed off him, the coach. The glory, the importance.
When the stakes were big, he was not unknown to bellow and holler like a gelded bull-- throwing down his clip-board and kicking over the red water cooler. The team kept playing the best they could, visibly dispirited. But he clapped his big hands when they finally did something right and carried the football across end-zone, like sled dogs eagerly carrying their master forth across the Arctic waste-lands, doing their best in devotion. Such straining heroism!
The star quarterback smiles, a thin blond mustache, and holds the can right in front of him and crushes it in his strong, under-aged hand. Coach Larry Frost will eventually confide in him his conspiracy theories, the cabal of international officials and businessmen who plan all the wars and the economic down-turns. In any case, the team definitely do not chuck their cans into the blue recycling bins. That was for liberal pussies.
Meanwhile, my perky French teacher sung to herself with a sweet, melifulious stream of French words, ensconced as she was in the world of computers and technology and "human resource" training that everyone on this side of red-blooded manhood found adorable as they watched her attractive, perky little ass walk by with approval.
When I eventually tried to seduce her, I thought of the sound of "jungle drums" calling my cat, Boo-Boo, whose pelt made him looked like a governor decked out in a tuxedo as a rather large, glad-handing politician whose instincts called him-- primal and true. Yes, tamed by the cities, but rustling through the shrubs like a panther, a puma, toward this beautiful, sing-song woman's boudoir-- the singings of sweet French nothings, the soft patter of the most refined European civilization, and the animal must be UNLEASHED.
A prowling "pussycat" in search of pussy, the mysteries of the female vagina laying out before like a primal, unexplored river as an explorer would paddle up the canal that in a word, spelled the key to his origin. The birth mother. . . . . the earth-mother goddess, primal and yeasty with pendulating cantaloupes of pale breasts that would fit so perfectly in my mouth.
"Uncle Ben" is looking around with a face of absurdity, like either the chili's "on fire" or his nephew who used to be waist-high and run around with a cap-gun yelling "Bang! Bang!" has just crapped in his pants. "Somethin's not right with with that boy", and Ben would tack it up to his liberal arts upbringing before slapping his knee and bustling forth with heaving laughter that clears the air.
But deep down inside, I knew he understood. . . . .
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"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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