Wingnutistan

9/16/2012

Incurable curiosity and an explorer's heart once led me to Wingnutistan. But before I begin let me tell you, I've seen the Great Wall and the Taj Mahal; I've seen the eternally turbulent Norway Maelstrom and Little Egypt's granddaughter do the shimmy shimmy. I've seen the northern lights and caves of ice and eagles so high they were just a speck in the sky; but I've never seen anything like Wingnutistan.

It was approachable only through a lovely upland valley that seemed to get darker and darker from one end to the other. The color change in the leaves and the ground seemed to coincide with the abundance of dead trees. My first impression was maybe there had been a forest fire.

Then two days up the tire and trash filled Flaming Flamingo River; past some kind of burned out torch, through a place they call 'the settlers' gulch;' a treeless slag heap of empty soup cans, frying pans, caviar jars, depression era cars, a rusty Confederate sword, a leaky Mexican gourd, worn out high button Brunomagli shoes, and broken beer bottle dreams. All that was left of rich blowhards; many of whom died of starvation and exposure, having never learned to cook, mow grass, do laundry, lay bricks or any other useful chore that required tools other than a knife and fork. Sadly inhabited now only by a resident raven and cockroaches so big they could carry your backpack. But they regarded me indulgently while I gave the place one last lingering look behind.

I had only gone a short distance on when I saw the first living people. They were digging graves. Their greeting and salutatory standard consisted of variations of "Yargle Bargle Baugh." I took it to be functionally similar to Shalom or Aloha. We got to know each other as they escorted me on through the Grippen Mire. And as we made our way, one of the members of the work crew named Hank told me the history of Wingnutistan.

Everyone was supposed to adopt the unchanging, unchallengeable, tenets of Wingnutism. Those tenets were displayed on a vacant lot at the Gordon Gecko Gateway to Ayn Rand Road, where a capitol building had been planned but never erected because "Government is bad." was the first tenet of Wingnutism.

Everything had started out upbeat and productive but as time went by it became evident that some of the fundamentalists didn't really buy into that 'greed is good' thing and conversely some capitalists who had made fortunes finding minerals based on scientific knowledge, became increasingly open in their ridicule of the '6,000 year old universe' tenet. And there were people from both camps who didn't care for the variety of nasty aromas emanating from the sewage ditches that flowed through towns.

Anyone who dared to suggest changes in the tenets of unbridled capitalism was hunted down and killed by the Union and Worker Improvement League, a Somalian based spin-off of Halliburton. On the other hand anyone who dared to question creationism was hunted down by the Graham Cracker moral police and taken to a cathedral and they were never seen again. People often wondered what possible attraction could have kept them there so long.

So out of self preservation, people turned into willfully ignorant, thought free zombies. They apparently reached this state by degrees. In order to keep facts from eroding their delusions, at first they simply claimed that facts were not true. When the wheels came off that defenseless defense, they simply declared that facts didn't matter. But the fact that so many people died young from lung infections, did begin to matter.

Many others took denial to an art form. They were able to self lobotomize to the point where their dogma didn't have to be defended from facts and logic because they were no longer able to perceive facts and logic. This led to some bizarre outcomes. They could no longer win any argument even when they were clearly right, because their ability to use supporting evidence or logical conclusions had atrophied beyond recovery.

And there was one sad case of a wingnut who denied any fact that had a scientific origin. He took all knowledge from Einstein to evolution, from global warming to weather warnings, from vitamins to vacuum tubes, and he put it in a small cerebellum shipping container along with the reality section of his cerebral complex and shoved it out the back of his own brain. He became the ideal man; whose blissful willful ignorance of threatening facts was so comforting to him, he decided that pure happiness could be achieved by denying all dangers as non-existent. He crossed in front of traffic as people yelled, "Look out for that truck!" His last words were, "What truck?"

It became an all out power struggle between the capitalist wingnuts against the fundamentalist wingnuts. Neither side could gain total control so they devoted themselves to making life miserable for the other side; with endless declarations, each more extreme than the last. The capitalists reduced wages, reduced the amount of food for sale at sky-high prices and reduced workers to slave status. The poor fundamentalists workers responded by implementing a growing compilation of laws, rules and regulations regarding dating, marriage, sex and procreation that surpassed the federal tax code in complexity. The bedroom division of the moral police made sure nobody was getting any. Apparently that's when the guns came out again.

One guy said, "You people think you win something screwing each other over? Where is your trophy? Where is your prize money? Where are the cheering crowds?"

My new friend Hank told me, "We buried him over there near the people who got caught with science books; third offense"

To give you an idea of the detachment from the outside world Wingnutistanians exhibited, a few could remember M&Ms but the name Hershey was essentially lost to time. I was informed and impressed that they once had capitalist hero holidays celebrating the life of men like Forest Mars. (the first M of M&M) He left home at nineteen with the recipe for the Milky Way, with the clothes on his back, nineteen dollars and a dream. He rose to become America's richest man.

Another capitalist hero holiday was in honor of Harry F. Sinclair. A man so driven he shot his own big toe off in a Coffeeville, Kansas bar. Wildcatter injury insurance provided him the money to bring in a gusher.

Although they no longer were allowed holidays, they told me I was lucky to have arrived on a day that had been considered worthy of being a holiday, by one of the last factory owners, who was overjoyed after hearing that one of his workers on the factory floor had been substantiated, authenticated and autopsy certified as the first person in the world to die of excessive noise.

That owner was one of the eventual capitalistic losers however; he was crushed by a woman named Daphne, she owned everything, she controlled everything, everyone worked for her. She was said to be the world record holder for networking in her youth. She was famous for attending funerals of millionaires she never met. Ever vigilant in seeking someone who might be used as a rung on her ruthless social climbing ladder. She micromanaged a sales force of 4,000, refusing to use a phone, she wrote more than a half a million letters in her life using a quill pen even after fountain pens were invented.

Daphne, the puppeteer, hand picked the president, a man whose only known oration was a Jack Daniels fueled, fearsome rant; delivered to an enthusiastic but bleary-eyed, closing-time crowd leaving Heinold's First and Last Chance Saloon;* about the imminent danger of giving a hungry child a crust of unearned bread: According to him it constituted a communistic crime vastly more insidious than 'The Great Leap Forward" and "The Cultural Revolution" combined.

One day Daphne made a speech about how building the Union Pacific RR was the finest hour of free enterprise; and in honor of that accomplishment she reduced wages to fifteen cents a day and a bowl of rice. Horrified howls from the populace blew the wheels off her railroading railroad analogy from the bell on her smoke belching steam engine to her rattling red caboose. Apparently that's when the guns came out again.

The population dwindled; gun fire never stopped even at night. An expert pathologist said the level of lead in the dead was the highest ever recorded. Even higher than the ill-fated crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.* He was subsequently taken somewhere and shown the devices that would be used to torture him if he didn't recant his findings. After that he was on house arrest for the rest of his life. Another doctor was on house arrest next door who had claimed the percentage of gays in Wingnutistan was the same as every place else.

The tragic results of generation after generation of degeneration were apparent. Their pro-life ancestors were indoctrinated with wingnutism so thoroughly that they inescapably set in motion the exact policies that would result in the annihilation of most of their own descendents. Who in turn spawned passels of blubbering, beetle eating, birdbath bathers who seem only capable of ritualistic behavior like sitting five wide in a 1953 Packard, focused on the worlds first signal seeking radio, which I imagined had quit working in 1954. To my surprise it came on, powered by a coal burning generator that was fired up once a day for Limbaugh and Reverend Will B. Dunn.

A once confident beginning for Wingnutistan was flawed by ignorance, hate, greed and inflexibility; when exposed to a challenging breeze it shattered and fell. Post-bellum survivors like orphans of a storm; or like people down through time, begin building again with useful pieces of their cultural rubble.

The resulting architectural style of their cobbled together re-muddled hovels was like a shotgun marriage between Duncan Phyfe and Fisher-Price. It should have had a name of its own like neo-Creole or Early Goodwill.

Walking back down the valley I recalled as a kid seeing a half-ton hog with a dozen baby piglets. She adjusted her position in the mud and in so doing she squashed one of them and it squealed until it died. She never moved off of it. I wondered why after all these years I would think of that hog.

Seldom have we observed a culture; like the Shakers, who adopted policies that led to their own extinction, but even more rare is a culture that self immolates because of their fear of a changing world. In the end a case could be made that their fear of life was greater than their fear of death.

Before I left I tried to think of something cheerful to leave with my new friends and I thought of Bob Hope. The only man, sociologists say, who was able to journey from a birth in the squalor and poverty of the lowest cultural division, to the rarefied air of upper upper class wealth and social connections. He was once a boxer and joked about it, "They called me Rembrandt Hope, because I was always on the canvass." The living room in his home in Palm Springs sported a fifty foot ceiling!

I told the guys Bob Hope once quipped. "The population of my home town always remained the same. Every time a baby was born, somebody had to get out of town."

One of the last things I asked my new friend Hank was if they ever had athletic competitions in Wingnutistan? Like maybe basketball or track meets. He told me they once had a mini-marathon but the times got slower and slower, year after year, then he realized that anybody who could run had left Wingnutistan a long time ago.

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