america

 I'm not surprised. This is, after all, the good old US of A, and a frontier anarchy is in the nation's DNA. Not to mention frontier "justice." I arrived in Guns and God Land in the 1990s, when Ruby Ridge and Waco were battle cries against the republic. The government had tried to take their guns away, and in retribution, Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck full of explosives in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.

On a Sunday in August 1997, I was sitting in a borrowed skirt in an old clapboard church full of "Christian Patriots" listening to a sermon inveighing against "mud people," i.e. nonwhites. And then the congregation started attacking a local judge and a newspaper editor. Both my friends. Both still my friends. And then I learned that Princess Diana had just been killed by the the evil media. 

And there I was, a card carrying member of the evil media, a woman married to a Jew and, perhaps worst of all, a New Yorker. I felt like I was in an alternate reality.

It was and is an alternate reality, and every so often it erupts into ours. And it's always the same: The government is evil, people of color are the enemy, liberals are trying to install communism and take our guns. And god is on our side. We are going to save the nation from these forces of the devil.

The thing that's different this time is that we had a president and a whole political party playing along, reinforcing such beliefs and whipping up anger. And that does surprise me. Or it did, five years ago when they carried an election. I have watched it building since. And here it is. And here we are.