There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the women who toil for meth;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would freeze your living breath;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was under the lights in the parking lot of Sleazy Blights’s
When April Quill forgot her pills.
(Zepp Jamison's parody of The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service)
Right wingers are hypocritical, sanctimonious toads, and while this often makes them intensely annoying, it also makes them a mother lode of amusement, especially since they tend to be self-important and utterly humorless.In their intense efforts to bury questions about Bristol Palin and the baby Trig, they accuse everyone who asks anything of attacking “that poor innocent girl” and a disabled infant. Tch, tch.....................
If they ever did the results of DNA testing on a typical American small town, and released the results showing who was related to whom at noon one day, you would probably hear the first gun shots by 12:15, the opening rounds in a 300 year civil war with twenty sides.
It isn’t just American small towns, of course. They just tend to be deeper in Puritanical denial in the red states, is all.
But you have a relatively small number of people who don’t get to consort much with anyone other than the people they attended elementary school with, and marriages sometimes compete with friendships, or other love affairs, and of course, there’s always boozy nights at the local flat-roofed bar with the pickups in the parking lot, and the result is a lot of babies whose birth certificates have more fiction – and are sometimes more lurid – than a Stephen King novel.
I’m not judging these folks – they’re only human, after all. But I would be a whole lot more sympathetic if they didn’t spend the time when they aren’t fucking their cousin’s brains out lecturing us on how intellectuals, the media elite and big city folks don’t have any family values..................
There is one more element, and there’s nothing funny about this one at all. I’ve heard various people describe Wasilla, Palin’s home town, as a “meth town.” ....
Wasilla, semi-remote and with a played-out economic engine, sounds like a prime candidate.
Crystal meth has had an absolutely horrible effect on small-town America. The shit is easy to make, dirt cheap, addictive as hell, and incredibly nasty. It can take a high school prom queen and turn her into a toothless crone in five years.
The Republican economic miracle hasn’t helped. With no safety net or training, all a played-out small town has left is grudging charity, a circling of the wagons and subsequent siege mentality, and that gawd-awful stifling pseudo-Christian morality that sneers at anyone who isn’t well off or well adjusted.
So the next time red staters want to lecture on morality, and prattle on about Clinton or Edwards or whoever, they stand on notice: we know better. We know what they are. And we aren’t impressed with the moral chest thumping.
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