Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

What escapes this flytrap of a county allowed those boys I cannot say, nor do I recall which one of them was later executed by better-prepared criminals in a Richmond warehouse once the degreed hippies had either cured him or inspired him to run away. Certainly no delinquent of my acquaintance chose to settle in Goochland afterward, though that may have resulted less from a hatred of the degreed hippies than from a fear of the weedy and wooded tick nursery in which troubled teens, and troubled midwesterners, were meant to be reborn. At any rate the place tended to breed its own delinquents and had no need to adopt. It tended also to grow its own hippies, albeit of a sort who romanticized non-nonviolence, and owned guns not to hunt but because there was “a government conspiracy against pot,” and made use of their freedom from society’s “hangups” (and of their jobs at town sewage-treatment plants) to buy great heaps of cocaine and pornography and automotive equipment that almost demanded resale, and who considered bluegrass “too classical” (and the blues itself “nigger music,” where not interpreted by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers Band) and were ever eager to “fight for” what they believed in, though I noticed that they kept no muscle and trusted more in mandalas and spirits than in soap and simple medicine to ward off the “bad energy” they and their college-pressed counterparts alike believed to radiate solely from town.

The county produced its own cops too. I am told that the fat boy with whom I fought on the bus became one.

Only a dull allegiance to fashionable notions of the truth could convince me to argue that these hippies and delinquents and fat future cops and sad future relatives were somehow responsible for what befell me on my long ride through that excuseless desert. Excuseless because the sun had never managed, for all its effort, to turn the soil there entirely to ash, and so had never managed to impoverish Goochland’s impoverished to the degree one might ignore in, say, Ethiopia or the Sudan. Excuseless because the storms drawn there did not pinpoint and obliterate trailer homes as one might laugh at in, say, Missouri or Kansas or Oklahoma. Excuseless because the River James, although it made an effort to flood whenever the air warmed and a sun shower came near, displaced mostly cows and not people, and kept at all times a Richmondly course, and despite a full complement of deadly potions did not sicken and destroy the county’s residents, or deform their children, with enough enthusiasm to rival a Bhopal or a Love Canal.

At a certain point the Goochlander comes to accept that no great drama is likely to arise and give form to the evil he perceives all around him, not because such a drama is impossible but because it has been staged already, so immense and unfinished that the eye is unable to see it for a breach or a flood or a storm or a sun. Grateful for the fact that the mosquitoes there impart nothing worse than sluggishness, and that local snakes and spiders rarely kill, and that something like water can usually be sucked up out of the gault, he seldom looks up from his toil, or from his trip to the gas station or the convenience store or the clinic or the courthouse, to consider that although this maelstrom has long since wandered off, across hills and plains and oceans and decades to claim its countless, nameless victims, the conditions under which it was whipped up in the first place still apply, and find him in the fields, and work themselves upon him as they did upon those who gave succor to this hypnotizing force in its infancy, and preached that it would be a boon to our world and not a burden on it, long before anyone thought to call it the United States of America.

I hardly mean to imply here a regret over the foreign lives ruined by my native arms and industry, for I understand that a brown belly distended by hunger abroad allows a pink one at home to be swollen by gluttony. I understand that a piece of shrapnel through the brain of a sand dweller’s child allows a subdivision dweller’s child to acquire a piece of parchment it has not earned and probably cannot read. I understand that for every outlander tortured to death in a faraway jail cell an American retains the freedom to announce that he has taken Jesus into his heart and will not release Him until all the homosexual abortionists have been killed. My purpose is not to belittle these gains: I aim instead to shriek and point at what made them possible, to show that they are not the product of a notion one group says has been wisely expressed and another says has been utterly betrayed but were in fact spawned by something older, and hideous, and considerably more real.

I side with those of my fellow citizens who hold that a great being, rather than a mere idea, created our nation, and inspired every principle by which it was then codified and rendered explicit, and tinted every aspect of its rampancy thereafter, from the beiges and greens of its squared georgic cells to the tars and grays of roadways made to circulate the bumper crop of idiocy grown out there; from the rainbow varices of urban centers where that idiocy is then repackaged as American pride to the domed white skull in Washington where our elected minds think no better than to turn that pride into law; from the bright red stumps of the once proud and now foreshortened soldiers formerly charged with the enforcement of said law to the duller red bricks of the country high schools where so many of these victims are recruited, and the slicker red (or orange, or black, or blue) of the paint jobs on the pickup trucks these children bankrupt themselves to buy at sixteen, and the rusted green or silver beneath which they pray at night but neglect to make a go at their homework, and the stained-glass wonders behind which they are dependably led to believe that what set the national color wheel in motion was not their own delicate pride but rather the divinity of a preacher just as prideful, and just as delicate, two millennia previous on the far side of the Mediterranean.

Of all this wheel’s tinctures, I say that there is none so bleak, and so powerful, as the vitamin-rich urine backing the black symbology on those enormous metal bees that continue (despite, or in possible collusion with, the pickup trucks) to ferry our sacrificial nonvirgins from home to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to patriotic field trip, and from patriotic field trip to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to pregame prayer circle, and from postgame prayer circle to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to Bible retreat (is this legal?), and from Bible retreat to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to military base (has this honestly never happened?), so that the flower of our native ignorance might be pollinated and multiplied, and its rancid dust might forever rain down upon the world.

Do I go too far? Is it wrong for a grown man, no longer a boy, to argue that the American schoolbus has been cruel to humanity when in fact it has not been wholly cruel to him, and regularly got him away from a panic-stricken home, and drove him on occasion to a teacher of some worth, and once even showed him an uncalled-for mercy that altered and perhaps even bettered the course of his life? What consideration is then owed this vehicle, and this situation, by one who to this day blames the vehicle, and the situation, for the very peril from which it eventually delivered him? what praise should he bestow upon an entity he knows full well to be a destroyer, by proxy if not by nature, when he finds that he himself has not been destroyed?