I traveled across country yesterday, from Morris to Seattle, and the first stop on the journey was a truck stop in Sauk Centre, where highway 28 merges onto I-94. I gassed up the car, and then wandered in awe-struck wonder through the display of stuff you could buy if you wanted more than a tankful of gas and a cup of coffee.
There were pewter crosses that you could buy with your name embossed in the middle. There were racks of flag-adorned knick-knacks. There were toy trucks and tractors you could buy for the kiddies. Was drawn to the wall of inspirational art, which all had a theme: farming and patriotism.
I could have got myself a metal wall hanging with two pistols, and the words, “In this home we don’t call 911,” which had me wondering…if Ralph nicked an artery on the hay baler, what are you going to do with those guns? If little Edna wandered off in a snowstorm, who you gonna call?
There were very colorful paintings/prints, all in a hyper-realistic style. There was one of a charming farmhouse with a green grassy yard, and five different tractors parked on it, dominating the scene. I guess in this world, prosperity is measured in how many tractors you own. There were so many pictures of eagles, with American flags worked artfully into the background.
But my eye was most strongly drawn to these two pictures.
There on the left was Donald Trump, riding his flag bedecked motorcycle into town, with Melania, and spectators in red MAGA hats cheering him on. On the right, Donald Trump crossing the swamp, in a boat full of poses stolen from a better known painting. We know it’s Donald Trump, not because the figure actually looks anything like the fat old man, but because of the weird candy-floss hair or the bright red tie.
My eye was drawn to these absurd pictures only because I was so repelled that I wanted to slash them. I resisted.
Anyway, this is the Trump cult in full flower out here in the rural midwest. It’s all tangled up in agrarian fantasies, religion, and trucks, tractors, guns, and motorcycles. Good luck rooting it out.
One of America’s most deeply rooted cultural issues is the totemic worship of weapons. In modern america (and sadly, creeping into Canada as well), people are taught to prize ‘independance’ and to tie it inextricably to the ownership of firearms. To many people, guns=freedom=safety=independance=power=jesus=whatever.
This creates a problem for these folks, many of whom invest staggering amounts of money into their firearm collections. The problem comes when they realize that these expensive items don’t actually do anything for them. Maybe they enjoy taking them to the range and firing off a couple hundred dollars worth of ammunition, some few of them hunt (but modern military-esque rifles aren’t really great for hunting).
Eventually the person becomes frustrated that they can’t actually use any of these weapons to gain the things they were promised. Guns don’t make you free, because you definitely can’t fight the government. Despite the power-fantasies created by hollywood action movies, individual armed action is essentially negligible on the scale of even a municipal government. You won’t accomplish your policy goals just by owning six AR-15s.
Guns don’t make you safe, because the vast majority of people aren’t routinely confronted with the kinds of threats that you can solve by carrying a gun. Even police officers, who are routinely asked to place themselves into dangerous situations, rarely find that they need to resort to using firearms. And as PZ noted above, you can’t sixgun yourself out of a serious injury or find a missing child by shooting into the air. Guns just aren’t useful for much.
So this sad-sack gun-owner is left frustrated. And they begin to fantasize, to imagine all the scenarios where they could finally use their guns to really do something important. Instead of abandoning their totems when they prove useless, they start to dream of a world where they could use them.
If the person acts on it, that’s how you get a Rittenhouse. These are the people that form the ranks of the various random shooters, when they attach their fantasies to some radicalizing agenda. Almost certainly this is the genesis of the first would-be trump assassin. It’s likely where those people who end up in stories about “black teenager knocks on door of house, gets shot by owner” come from. People who sit and stew in a self-created miasma of fear and firearm-related power fantasies, who finally lose touch with reality to such a degree that they commit some heinous crime.
I’m really not sure what can be done to help these people. They need more community and fewer guns, but how do you pry them loose from Facebook/Telegram?
This is in…Minnesota.
Imagine what a truck stop must be like in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota, Idaho, or any where in the South and the rest of the midwest.
Left: no crash helmets Right: heavily overloaded boat
I find it oh so reassuring (not really) that I can travel to one of the ten or more gas station/convenience marts nearest to my rural Missouri home and buy konfederate flag-adorned merchandise to hang on my wall, drink coffee/beer out of, or plaster to the tailgate/back bumper/back glass of my vehicle in a proud display of which side actually won our bloody civil war.
I seriously doubt that Trump knows how to ride a motorcycle…. or row a boat.
I’ll never understand people voting against their own self interests. Life will be worse for these agrarian small town folk under Republican rule yet they keep on voting for them. I’ve read endless books about it (the most enlightening being “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” by Thomas Frank) and I still don’t get it. Maybe because I was raised (ostensibly) atheist?
I recently binge-watched all the “Murder in a Small Town” episodes and so many of the murders were committed by pastors or cops yet they were all, “We never suspected anyone in our town, let alone the pastor/neighborhood policeman!” So many of them brought up their immediate suspicion of Mexican cartels which was alarming/amusing to me.
I guess it’s more important to them that LGBTQ/immigrant/”other” people suffer than they be able to get dental help. (What is wrong with the U.S. that people can’t have teeth? I am American but have not lived in the U.S. in 15 years and I’ve had a shitload of dental work done covered by my $144 yearly health insurance which is probably why I’m fixated on teeth nowadays. It should be a given especially from the “richest country in the world”. Sorry for my rant!)
@#1 snarkhuntr
Excellent insight on gun owner’s psyche. When you limit your information sources to Facebook and Twitter this is what can happen, and our Republican friends are taking advantage of it. Our free speech and thus control over these mediums is the real war. I’m apprehensive the left is not fighting this war aggressively enough.
It’s just some crap that the owners hope will sell to their long-haul truck driver customers. I would be too concerned that the kitsch includes some terrible art featuring the orange one. Patriotism on its own isn’t problematic. The cult is a different matter, but the rural population has been heavily subjected to right-wing propaganda via the radio. There are plenty of quiet people who live in rural areas and hate MAGA just as much as PZ.
Tractors are nice, and Hank Williams Jr is not a problem, but it’s a good indicator that the owner of the gas station is very old.
How many people under the age of 60 are fans? How many under the age of 40 have ever heard of Hank Williams Jr or his Dad?
Who buys wall art in a truck stop?
Those Trump paintings are from Trump fanboy Jon McNaughton. He had one recently that crammed in a huge bunch of people crowded around Obama, and he actually had to put out a numbered key to tell viewers who they actually were. There was also a rooster, who apparently has appeared in other McNaughton paintings. One of his “classics” is Trump as a ’40s football player, about to make a running touchdown while outrunning his enemies.
And you can bet every single piece in that shop was imported, mostly from China, but any other country where labor costs are essentially nothing.
I’m sorry, English is not my first language, so it’s possible I misunderstand, but with Trump in the picture shouldn’t it be “in a boat full of poseRs…”? ;-)
Sauk Centre has always been a strange place.
@1: re: guns
Remember when right-wing gun-owners used to say “An armed society is a polite society”?
Funny how you never hear anyone saying that anymore…
If there’s one culture war this country needs, it’s a war against gun culture.
@7, stuffin
There’s a pretty interesting book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313990.Warrior_Dreams" Warrior Dreams. That discusses the cultural shift in the USA in the post-vietnam era through a lens of popular culture. It is quite dated now, but I think the bones are still quite good. I would love to see it rewritten in the modern context, since so many of its key observations have only gotten more true as time passed.
As I recall it, one of the examples was the way that war/action movies were made. Pre-vietnam, the war movie protagonist was a civilian reluctantly called into war, who fights alongside his teammates to overcome the enemy, and winning meant going back home to his family and community. The through-line being that war is a neccessary and unpleasant duty and a diversion from the hero’s real life. The hero leaves his community and with his new community of soldiers fights the enemy. The war ends, the hero returns to his original community – changed perhaps, but is able to resume his life.
If you look at modern movies, this is rarely the case. Our ‘war heros’ now are more likely to be people who exist – however reluctantly – in a state of permanent war. Many movies start with the trope that the soldier, previously having served with distinction is dragged unwillingly back for one last mission of some sort. The hero is likely to be sent into battle solo or with a very small team of supporting characters. The through-line is that for a Warrior, war is a neverending state and any non-war-life the hero might atttain is simply a temporary respite between engagements. The hero is a unique individual, different from other people, and his unique talents are required to solve the world’s problems. He can never truly form community with non-warriors, and attempts to do so will often end tragically when his warrior’s life intrudes – frequently with a dead wife or child to give quick cheap motivation and stakes.
I don’t know why this shift happened, but I think it’s toxic as fuck. The worship and near-fetishization of the special forces, for example, almost entirely through unrealistic hollywood/video game depictions of their role is a part of it, either cause or consequence.
Look at the way police officers have changed as well – every year their garb and demeanour grows more and more into a parody of special forces/operator/warfighter/whatever the fuck term culture. They demand (and receive) more and more advanced weapons of war to adorn themselves with. Much like the sad-sack gunowners I discussed above, I think the obsessions with these weapons and accessories of war causes problems…. “Why do I lovingly select this stuff, carry around all this stuff, train with this stuff, but never actually get to do anything with it?” Combine that with the racism and other negative elements of cop culture, and you get the modern SWAT-larping phenomenon. (see also: Acorn cop, who was previously a member of the US special forces, before retraining as a police officer and engaging in a two-on-one battle with his own squad car)
Dangit! Sorry for the italics… .if there’s a way to edit, I don’t know what it is.
The motorcycle one is new to me but, that second is the famous “Draining the Swamp” from early in his only term.
In the 1970s, I had a PE teacher who fetishized the green berets, built around the mythology of John Wayne. Every day we’d change while listening to the “Ballad of the Green Berets”; afterwards we’d shower to the same. This toxic crap has been around for a long time.
God, but I hated that song. And that coach.