In “Greetings from Idiot America”, Esquire columnist Charles P. Pierce said of the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky:
Inside it was impolite to wonder why our parents had sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants had sweated and bled so that their children could be educated, if not so that one day we would feel confident enough to look at a museum full of dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs and make the not unreasonable point that it was all batshit crazy, and that anyone who believed this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and their own money.
Dinosaurs with saddles? Dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark? Welcome to your new Eden.
Welcome to Idiot America.
***
It is almost five in the afternoon. November 6, 2024, further in, and farther along. The way a prisoner reckons time, or a child who is counting the days until Christmas.
I am still in pajamas. No breakfast to speak of. Lunch, I think, was a half a bowl of soup. Food has lost its appeal. I have accomplished nothing today. I have shuffled between rooms, shaking my head. Spitting out words I’ve not spoken in years.
Words I recall from my high school days. That I borrowed, or stole, from a guy named Chris Tibbs. Chris was good friends with my boyfriend, Dan. The three of us would go to the drive-in together, bring a case of beer and a bag full of weed. Watch scantily clad women in blood-soaked scenes, and Chris would always look at the screen, chuckle, or whistle, and say,“Shit Fire City.”
It's a colorful expression, “Shit Fire City." It can mean many things. I use it here to convey incredulity. As in “Shit Fire City, I cannot believe...
I cannot believe that a nation of supposedly grown-up people, who have jobs and drive cars and make babies and all, looked at President Covfefe and still put him in charge.
Not once, but twice; that’s the deepest cut. My friend Mr. Tibbs must be happy with the outcome. Chris was always a simple kind of guy. The good ol’ boy type Trump seems to attract. Also the type most likely to suffer when President Bobbitt tosses Obamacare out the car window.
Speaking of care, I’ve been dizzy, and lightheaded, ever since I learned…I need to lie down. But I know I won’t sleep. Thoughts march through my head like soldiers through fields.
In 2005, when “Greetings from Idiot America" was written, it seemed to me then like a scathing indictment. Now it appears Mr. Pierce was too kind. But you can't teach old dogs. You can't teach us either; virulent as the pandemic was at its height, what we have unleashed will kill more, in less time.
And what we have done will be our undoing. There will be nothing left but old postmarked postcards and tattered road maps with coffee ring stains. They will turn up somewhere in a flea market stall: Greetings from Shit Fire City, they'll say.