“I think God will bless me to get the machine done” —Marvin Heemeyer
America is madness unfettered, and I have never been more flabbergasted in my entire supercalifragilisticexpialidocious life.
We seem to not be a divided nation, but a shattered one, like a disco ball that has been fired from a cannon by the ghost of Boss Tweed into the side of the Chrysler Building. We are a billion little gleaming and jagged particles of anger, disgust and distrust, ruled over by a heartless cabal of dried-out traitors who are in it for the money and the honey, and who are more than willing to roll each and everyone of us in flour and feed us to the dragon, if it will add even a single shilling to their coffers. These Benedict Arnolds are in collusion with the uranium-rich Angel of Death and if the bomb don’t get us our preexisting conditions will.
So we scream our grievances into paper bags and leave them burning outside of the front doors of these tormentors, only to have our feeble attempts at protest simply shrugged off by the master of the house as nothing more then a scatological involved adolescent prank, picked up with a dustpan and plopped into the waste bin.
Our demands are not heard because we, down here in the public pit, don’t matter — we ain’t shit and if you push back, they send the shogun to collect your fuckin’ head.
It’s more poor then ever before with more war on the horizon.
And I’m wore out. And I’m depleted. And I’m defeated. Everyone I know is scared. Everyone I know is scarred.
Everyone I know is confused and dizzy, a burlap sack over their heads, as they desperately hang on to clumps of wildflowers, the roots of which are coming out of the cliff, and in this trepidatious state, to my chagrin, everyone I know is arming themselves, like the A-Team, but without a battle plan, their empathy melting faster then the fuckin’ polar ice caps, and they’re demanding a sacrifice to set the record straight.
I told my brother last summer, in the heat and the stink of the primaries, that regardless of who won the election, we were headed for some Troubles of our own, but seeing as this ain’t Ireland, our troubles would reach unheard-of levels of carnage and insanity.
The whys of who got plugged, who got bladed, who got bombed, mobbed and bulldozed over will be cast in shadows, because when everyone is your enemy, you are operating in turbid waters.
And here we are. Sweating while standing still. Engulfed by a fever that has only just begun.
On June 4 in the year 2004, after having spent 18 months in a shed, building his ark of destruction, disgruntled citizen of these here United States, Marvin Heemeyer, unleashed his rage onto an unsuspecting public by tearing through his hometown of Granby, Colorado, inside of an eight-ton Komatsu-brand bulldozer, decked out with an armor-plated cab that was affixed with gun ports and cameras, making him completely impervious to law enforcement, as he ripped and rampaged for little more than a brisk two hours, during which he completely demolished 13 buildings, including the town hall, all because Marvin had beef. Beef with the government, beef with his neighbors and beef with life itself, and at the end of his little hissy fit Marvin, the single, middle-aged white man and former proprietor of a muffler repair shop, shot himself in the head with .357-caliber handgun, becoming nothing more then just another drop in the overflowing slop bucket of American madness — his Tonka toy of the apocalypse, dismantled and sold for scrap, all the buildings he knocked down were rebuilt like Lego castles, the events of that day uploaded to YouTube for our cheap gratification, his fire-and-brimstone manifesto exposing an extremely petty soul.
Kentucky boy Abraham Lincoln once said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.” Now, I know that’s not as cool as something you may pull out of Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War,” and I certainly don’t know how to implement ol’ honest Abe’s philosophy, but I think we need to start trying to figure it out before we’re wading in blood 5 feet high and rising. Let’s keep the peace, y’all. •
