George Saunders - The Braindead Megaphone

“The thing about people from New York?” says Shannon, founder of the Texas Minutemen, who has been smiling at me in passing all day in a way that manages to be suspicious, deferential, and welcoming all at once. “Is they’re rude.”

“It’s the way they talk to you,” someone else says.

Has he, Shannon, ever been to New York?

“Haw haw! Yeah, right!” says Shannon. “Like I’m going to that crazy place without my guns.”

They honestly don’t go anywhere they can’t bring their guns?

Nope. The world is too insane. It would be irresponsible to put themselves at that kind of risk.

Chicago?

Haw.

Boston?

Please.

How about Mexico? Have they ever been over there?

The most enthusiastic guffaws yet. Am I kidding? The cartels, they say, have a bounty out on them: twenty-five grand for any Minuteman. And for Shannon: fifty grand.

“Shannon’s a star,” someone says.

Being called a star seems to rev Shannon up. He takes the floor, presents a discourse that might be entitled: “My Thoughts on Bitches.”

He has a friend who once lived with two lesbians and slept with them both, together and separately. However, problems developed when this friend, unwisely, “started hitting one harder than the other.” Shannon has to admit it: Girlwise, the only thing he really likes? Is dominating them.

There was this one gal, for example, who kept being uncooperative. Finally, she, kind of uncooperatively, more or less cooperated. To celebrate his victory, he stole her bra, then hung it from his car antenna. There’s nothing like it, he says, like dominating them. Then he emits a phrase so crude, so poetically dense — it combines images of (1) a small furry beast and (2) two swinging-down thingies — that I want to get out my notebook and ask him to repeat it, but I chicken out, and the exact wording is lost forever, but suffice to say: What made that particular furry beast/swinging thingy combo so delightful to Shannon was that, although towering over Shannon, it had consented to be dominated by him.

Ah, but that’s all in the past, he sighs. Of late he’s gotten “some sane wisdom.” He knows what he looks like. These days if a woman says she finds him attractive, he just asks how much it’s going to cost him. Or he looks behind him to determine who she’s really talking to.

This makes me sad. Under the bluster, he seems like a nice guy, a gentle guy, even, a doting husband waiting to happen, possibly, capable of loving and being loved in return. If only he could just—

Wait, wait, I think, why are you being such a sucker? Did he or did he not just say the things he just said? Stop trying so hard to be Johnny Compassion. Why is he talking such rude shit?

I turn to Lesley, the lone Minutewoman at the table.

“Is this guy a misogynist or what?” I say. “You don’t find this offensive?”

“I’m not easily intimidated,” she says, laughing. “Do I look like I’m easily intimidated?”

Some National Guardsmen come in and sit nearby, and this gets us on the subject of Iraq. Brian, a smart, articulate Minuteman, originally from Massachusetts, who has traveled all over the world — Brazil, Japan, India — says Fallujah should have been leveled. He sends this out like a blustering trial balloon. Is he nuts? I ask. How many women and children would that have required killing? Well, he says, that happens once, it doesn’t happen again. Hello? I say. Are you really saying that? Little kids, old ladies? Well, he says, you order them out first. Come on, I say, think about New Orleans. People in Fallujah are much poorer than that, how do they “get out”? What do they do, rent cars? Call taxis? Could you give that order? I don’t think you could, and I don’t think you would.

He looks chastened and does a remarkable thing, given that he’s arguing with a Liberal, in front of his people: He reverses position.

“You’re right,” he says. “I wouldn’t, no.”

Through it all, our Mexican American waitress, resembling a pretty Delhi street waif courtesy of her thick mascara, comes and goes, being spoken gently to by Shannon and the others, in the courteous quasi-military tones favored by the Minutepeople.

LOST PATROL THAT CAN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT FAILS TO FIND ASS WITH BOTH HANDS

Next morning we “go out on recon,” meaning we walk around the ranch we’ll be guarding later tonight.

An upbeat guy named Curtis, president of U.S. Border Watch, leads us Media around, pointing out evidence of illegals (a tamped-down human-size nest in some reeds, a fence-cut, some garbage) and marking several “possible deployment spots” using bits of a cow skull he’s found: The white bone will be visible later in the moonlight. An irrigation ditch running parallel to the border is a plus; the sound of the illegals wading the ditch will serve as a kind of early-warning system.

We walk the fence line. The neighboring rancher isn’t on board, so the Op will be confined to about a three-hundred-yard stretch of this ranch.

“We’re in a real rat race here,” Curtis says on his cell, as we start back to the cars. “The Media’s pounding us.”

We Media look around, puzzled. We’re not pounding anybody. We’re just walking quietly behind Curtis, having our little Media thoughts.

We take a shortcut back through a grove of mesquite. Shannon says this reminds him of a forest near the Knights of Pythias home where he was sent to live during his parents’ divorce. Soon it becomes clear we’re lost. The cars can’t be more than a hundred yards away, but we don’t seem to be getting any closer. Curtis suggests somebody send a radio message to base camp, i.e., the cars, see if somebody can honk a horn or something.

Radio contact proves problematic.

From the front of the group, some grumbling: Ahead is a creek. There’s much concern, shouted optimization instructions, extended hands, some awkward scrambling up the opposite muddy slope, good-humored postcrossing comparisons of soaked pants legs, Media and Minute-persons united as one.

Then the group bunches up. Again, a surprise: There’s a barbed-wire fence ahead, literally five feet from the lip of the creek, and as the front of the group struggles through the fence (coats snagging on barbed wire, on mesquite branches, raindrops plopping off trees), a cry goes up: Jeez, another fence!

Besides this one?

Yes, yes, a whole other fence.

We are, like, caught between these two improbably close-together, nonparallel fences, in a forest no cow could ever enter. How odd. What a perverse rancher.

“Makes you kind of respect the illegals,” a Minute-person says sweetly.

Suddenly: shouts of consternation from the front of the group, which has freed itself from the two-fence trap, only to find—

“What you got?” Curtis shouts.

It appears there is a second creek, which may even qualify as a small, deep river, beyond this second fence, which is proving even stouter and more gnarly than the first. Jesus, where the hell are we? Who designed this freaking ranch, Escher?

“I thought all y’all media were supposed to be neutral,” smirks Shannon. “Not so neutral now, are you?”

This is so nutty as to be hilarious.

“We’re being neutral,” I say. “By not making fun of you.”

“Attention all units!” Curtis cries out, to those of us still on this side of River Two. “If you have not crossed the ravine yet, do not cross! I repeat, do not cross!”

I can see the headline now, if anyone escapes to write it: “Minutemen Die of Starvation in Tiny Thicket, Comically Close to Own Cars.”

A photographer with bad knees goes down, is lifted to his feet by Brian, the guy who last night advocated the annihilation of Fallujah, whose face, as he goes to the photographer’s aid, is transformed by a look of sudden radiant concern.