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They Teach Young Men to Drop Fire From the Sky

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strychnine

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Aug 15, 1996, 3:00:00 AM8/15/96

(Editor: due to tequila-induced brain failure, this article wasn't posted
to a.j.g at the original publication.)

SAN DIEGO, California (Tue, 13 Aug 1996)-- By the end of the second day of
enduring the steady stream of vicious lies and ignorant prejudice that
literally condenses out of the air whenever the Republicans pause to take
a breath, the psychological abuse had taken its toll on both me and Mojo.

It took longer for me to exhibit the symptoms, and my condition therefore
was predictably more serious. It began shortly after watching Joe
Slovenec explain to Mojo that he and the rest of his Operation Rescue
devil-worshippers basically have no interest in the political process
required to make abortion illegal, they just want to continue to do what
they do best: terrorize doctors and pregnant women, shut down women's
health clinics, and walk around with sandwich boards advertising their
gruesome product. This wasn't what he meant to say, of course-- it was
just painfully obvious that every wacked out Jesus-addled lizard-brained
attempt at spin he could muster was a transparent shellac over his naked
festulent lust.

By the time Shakes and Jester arrived from Orange County in the early
evening, I was a burned out freight car turned upsidedown and buried
underneath twenty feet of black viscous mud. I had watched some nameless
U.S. senator blow heinous screed during east coast primetime that, not
only was Oklahoma a southern slave state that joined the South in the
Civil War-- a bizarre and inscrutable fornication of the truth by itself--
but that this was something for which the people of Oklahoma should be
justly proud.

I had witnessed Alfonse D'Amato explaining that it took "the common sense
Republican congress" to pass the Clean Water Act. I wouldn't have blinked
if it had been welfare-- I'm that jaded-- but to deny the monstrous
obstruction of environmental legislation in general and the CWA in
particular was an act of hubris that shocked even me. Hearing the crowd
cheer and seeing them drink it in like fish in a poisoned pool was enough
to send me into orbit.

As the four of us marched from the restaurant in the gaslamp district
where we ate dinner, to the Hyatt hotel in the seaport where we knew the
candidate and the administration were staying, I had adopted the demeanor
of a robot with laser beams for eyes, vaporizing every impure thing that
crossed my path with the power of my outrageous contempt. Mojo and the
other two were beginning to think it might not be safe to try to smuggle
me across the police line. I assured them I was still essentially
non-violent-- just 'unusually impatient'-- and more importantly that I was
willing to buy the first round of drinks at the Elephant Bar.

The Elephant Bar. Oh yeah, that was a good idea. Four long-haired
wild-eyed freaks clearly marked for eventual roundup and termination with
extreme prejudice when the revolution goes public, doesn't much sound like
a group that would likely be met with outstretched upturned hands in a bar
like this one, full of drunken oversexed Republicans on a four-day bender
thousands of miles away from their spouses and constituents.

The Elephant Bar seemed like a good idea to Shakes however, and Jester
began egging Mojo on in his efforts to apply the necessary peer pressure
to lighten me up enough to make the U.S. Secret Service officers that were
crawling all over the hotel decide that it wasn't necessary to deprive me
of my rights as a security precaution. Fortunately the Feds don't hire
knuckleheads to do that job, so our concern was misplaced. They just
smiled and waved us through.

The Elephant Bar looked like a movie set. I assure you, the conclusions
you draw from its name will not be wrong. One look at the crowd and all I
could do was sit on the plush couch and watch the amphibians as they tried
to fertilize one another's eggs in the soft sand at the bottoms of the
ashtrays.

One by one, my three companions went off to curb-stomp delegates at
eight-ball, and eventually I was left to myself to contemplate the
question, "Why are the Republicans evil diabolical reptilian visitors from
Sirius B?" I pondered this for most of an hour and a little more than
three glasses of utterly ridiculously priced booze.

Eventually I acquired an important nugget of wisdom. I was asking the
wrong question. Very few of these people were evil. In fact, most of
them were not evil.
Here's what they were: wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The title of James
Carville's book is exactly correct. We're Right. They're Wrong. Talk to
the hand.

Illustration: shortly after midnight, the four of us noticed a man in a
suit accompanying a young woman in her twenties and wearing an impossibly
revealing dress. They made the rounds and he introduced her to a
half-dozen or so men in their fifties. An hour later or so, after she had
shown several of them the color of her underwear on the dancefloor, she
skulked off toward the elevator with three of them in tow.

Now you know what was going on here. I won't insult your intelligence.
At three in the morning as I wrote this, I was sure those three guys were
right that minute trying to navigate their way back to the Milky Way
galaxy before the convention session began the following morning. Some
would say this was an example of Republican evil. I disagree. These guys
weren't evil. They were simply wrong. Wrong, I tell you.

No-- here's who's evil: the guy who introduced her around. I fully expect
that the delegates she lead off to do the hokey-pokey with will be
approached sometime after the lab finishes processing the film by the
entity that paid for her services. They'll be making a proposal for how
they can show their loyalty to the party apparatus and avoid nasty public
inquiries into character issues at the same time. That's evil. Pure
fucking jam it into your ears and collapse on the floor evil.

Eventually, I will wake up from this nightmare of straw men with feet of
clay and realize that in the army of madness, the rank and file deserve
damnation for the crimes just like the officers. But right now, here in
the dark night of a land where the sun will never rise again, it's hard to
scrape together enough antipathy to distribute to everyone here their fair
share.

During the tribute to Ronald Reagan, while his wife Nancy was glitching on
the dais, I was in the Vision 96 Tactical Command Center watching it
through a stereogram of CNN and C-SPAN. I remember Mojo saying, "I hope
his senility is a waking nightmare of broken and maimed Nicaraguan
children, dead and dying AIDS patients, and the innocent civilians
terrorized with the arms sold to Iran. I hope the rest of his unnatural
life is one unbroken string of horrifying hallucinations that haunt the
empty rooms of what remains of his mind."

Harsh words like these stem from a mentality that good people cannot
sustain indefinitely. Oh sure, I've heard it said that simply failing to
vote against a Republican candidate is an act of reprehensible and
unforgivable sin. But to subscribe to that school of thought requires
that you believe that a majority of Americans are soulless creatures of
evil enthralled to a dark master and forever damned to Hell. I simply
don't have the capacity for that much irrational hate.

That's why I prefer to draw a distinction between evil and wrong. Wrong
people must be opposed, thwarted, perhaps even made to contemplate their
wrongness, if only for a cheap laugh, but they need not be punished
excessively. Evil people are beyond redemption and must be dealt with not
as one would treat a plague of locusts, but rather like we would treat
moneychangers in the temple. With severe prejudice.

And if there is a God who grants audience to the feeble yearnings of
wretches like me and works miracles on their undeserving behalf, perhaps
She will bestow upon me the precious ability to identify precisely the
truly evil among the multitudes of the simply wrong. And I will be
thankful beyond words.

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