The lonesome, crowded, rhinestone-studded West

The view from the Shell station in Beulah, Wyoming, approximately 600 miles from Missoula

The view from the Shell station in Beulah, Wyoming, approximately 600 miles from Missoula

Combat! blog is on the road once again, beaming its pirate signal from the utterly lawless Room 203 of the Days Inn in Gillette, Wyoming. Thanks to Google Analytics, I happen to know that no one in Wyoming reads this blog. Thanks to my rapidly-clearing nasal passages, I also know that the entire town of Gillette smells like that chemical they put in natural gas to alert you that you left the stove on. I’m not saying that these two facts are related, necessarily, but my mom reads Combat! blog every day, and her house smells like chocolate chip cookies.

Anywhom, I’ve got a solid eight-hour drive ahead of me and I’ve spent my precious pre-checkout time doing paying work, so today’s entry is more of an assignment. If you’ve got the same kind of news alert system going that I have (thank you Tyler, Christina) you know about [warning: massive tone shift] this utterly wrong and terrifying story out of Kentucky. News of a man’s death should not be immediately pressed into the service of a cultural-political theory, and this seems like one of those bizarre situations where one hopes for a suicide. If that turns out not to be the case, the implications are obvious and ugly. We will talk about them tomorrow, when hopefully everything seems sensible and a little rosier and we can go back to ragging on Michael Steele. Or, you know, take a long, hard look at ourselves and the implications of what we say. Read that article. While you’re at it, read this one, too. We live in significant times, despite regular reassurances to the contrary, and the things that happen on our television screens are more intimately connected to our actual world than we might think. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.

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1 Comments

  1. My problem is not that you’re going to press a man’s *death* into the service your your cultural theories, it’s that your overwrought, flip analysis of someone else’s subculture will be based on *a* man’s death.
    I’m glad I’ll never be able to convince you, if I didn’t have Combat to make me amused and cranky I don’t know what I’d do.
    For something that’s really gonna impact culture, check this: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/28/090928fa_fact_specter?currentPage=all

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