Short Stories, Long Odds

In east Texas, a dead horse in a yard. At a Pilot gas station/Arby’s, Ray Parker Jr. on the radio, singing “Ghostbusters.”

The Best HAM-Burgers Come from Milwaukee’s Canning District

This Is My Milwaukee

I was in the middle of a serious WiiFit session when the door bell rang. I picked Molly the Corgi up because she is crazy and I walked over to the foyer. We don’t have windows or a peephole so I couldn’t see who it was before I opened the door.

Standing there was a man in a suit and a woman in a dress. They had literature. As we are coming up on a national election, I figured they were either Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Republicans, or Democrats. Or possibly Obamacans. They were too old to vote for Ron Paul.

“Oh, you have your little puppy there,” the man said, obviously offput by the fact that I was holding a dog. It may also have been my appearance. I hadn’t showered yet and was in my workout clothes, and if you’ve ever seen what my hair does when I sleep, you would know that if not for the fact that I answered the door from inside what is ostensibly my home, I appeared to be homeless.

“We just have some information for you,” said the woman. They were both kindly enough up until this point, but the woman thrust the pamphlet into my hands and said, too loudly, “Who really rules the world?!” Those words were printed on the pamphlet, but her verve told me they were also in her heart and mind.

“Okay,” I mumbled, looking at the pamphlet and seeing Jesus throwing up the dis to a pair of obviously malevolent, disembodied hands trying to fork over the National Mall.

“Just an interesting question for you to ponder,” said the man.  “Could Satan  have offered Jesus all the world’s governments if they didn’t belong  to him?”

“Belong to Satan?” I asked.

“Yesssssss,” intoned the woman. “The world’s governments are in Satan’s hands!”

Maybe they are voting for Ron Paul, I thought, and smiled a little.

“Does what we say ring true?” the man said, encouraged by my facial expression. He took a steep forward, making his best Barry Sanders break for daylight.

I said, “Let me leave you with this, wanderers. I’d like to give your church $30,000.”

The woman gasped. “How wonderful!” exclaimed the man.

“I also have bad news for you. I just offered you something that I don’t have, and can’t actually give you.”

The silence was stony, and I sensed any shot I had at a free copy of The Watchtower slipping away.

“We’ll just leave that with you then,” said the man.  I closed the door.

I have discovered an odd truth about violent risk in the United States, particularly the South and West.  In the course of my work as a risk analyst and a political scientist studying terrorism, I read a lot of news stories every day about suspicious packages, hazmat responses to weird mail, and pipe bombs.

The pipe bombs end up in abandoned fields, or on streets, or (more rarely) in peoples’ yards or mailboxes. Usually they are a prank and sometimes they have an actual sinister intent; no matter the intent though, they are always incredibly dangerous, and people always get hurt. Stuff always gets damaged. And people always go to jail.

I don’t know why anyone would ever think making a pipe bomb was a good or fun idea, but it happens. People get curious, I guess, and end up making one. Sometimes they blow their own hands off or die in the process. Sometimes they successfully make one and then accidentally blow up a car at a picnic or something.

So the strange thing I have discovered is this: whenever anyone gets arrested for detonating a pipe bomb seemingly out of curiosity and away from people and things, it is almost always two white guys in their early thirties. Additionally, it almost as a rule happens on Sunday afternoons.

So is it just that the weekend spirals out into the ether and there aren’t enough activities to keep everyone interested? So that by the time you get to Sunday afternoon, the only thing left to do is to whip up improvised high explosives?

Illegal wiretapping. Selling operational control of six major ports to the UAE. Valerie Plame. Tom DeLay. Abramoff. Isn’t this enough to deal with?

Apparently not, as about five hours ago South Dakota’s state senate passed a bill banning abortion. The House will too (they already passed one last week with slightly different wording) and the Governor will shock me if he vetoes it, which may not matter. If you want an abortion you’d better go out and get one, like, tonight.

With the ports, I find it hard to believe that no american companies or workers are capable of handling that job. I know plenty of guys who would work out at the docks if that was what there was to do. With the rampant corruption, well, we did that to ourselves. With the abortion issue, I will say this: I’ve been talking about the slow, slight decline for a couple fo years now and tonight the dropoff began in earnest. Its going to get a hell of a lot worse before it gets better.

The punchline? Justice John Paul Stevens has been kicking the old peanut around about retiring.