For the children, the environment and Wink Musselman

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Small-town America’s dirty little ‘Peculiar Institution’

DATELINE: ANYTOWN, RR4, box 32—I wrote probably my least-favorite column ever last week, exposing the endemic culture of childhood sexual abuse in my typical Red rural state. It was only meant to be a preamble to this piece, but I preambled all the way off the reservation. The whole subject really sticks in my craw. If I never talk about it again after this I’ll be a happier man for it.

“What does this have to do with my life in BigCity, California?” you ask, reasonably. 

I write because I care.

I write because it’s the only tool I have at my disposal.

I write because sometimes my thought process makes connections ahead of popular culture’s notice and when it’s a bad one, I turn to my toolkit and try to help by being the town crier. If I can’t solve said bad thing, and I almost never can, I can at least shine a spotlight on it and hope like hell that more powerful media entities pick it up from the Zeitgiest.

And if I can change one reader’s mind, un-harden one heart, compel even one person to take a more honest look at their own behavior and course-correct, I win at life that day.

This is the second half of last week’s minor epistle. But it won’t sound like it at first. Please bear with me as I try to hammer out my narrative without having to Google names and dates. Just hate Googling names and dates.

This column is mostly set in the world of national politics, but in the end it comes down to a growing threat to every community in America—ours included. 

First, briefly about my own prejudices and inclinations, necessary context to have if you choose to consider my prognostication. 

I am so not here to have a fight. It’s my opinion that The Fight is also The Problem. Not either side of the fight, the fight itself. So I took myself out of the ring. Off social media to the extent that I have a FB account, but it’s dormant and I keep it around only to be able to log into other, less evil sites. Also I’ve learned that in 2022, it’s suspect if one doesn’t have any social media presence.

Beyond that key byte of biographical data, I’m a disaffected former left-winger. I’ve always tilted towards helping out the underdog, even when it was inconvenient. That grew to mean I supported giving government money to people who had had the temerity to be born into the wrong family. Think about it. That’s the only moral failing most poor people are guilty of. “Whoops! Picked the wrong uteris, your life will inevitably suck. Tough break, kid. Next…!”

Anyways, when I got around to thinking about voting things, it became clear to me right away, even back then, that the Republicans were all about money. Specifically, their own money.

And the other guys were trying to pass bills to feed the hungry, house the homeless, etc. The Democrats were reckless with money in pursuit of social equity and that suited me just fine.

Time passed and politics changed from something only wonks and policy geeks paid any attention to, to big, big business.

I dropped out during the run-up to the 2016 election. I looked at both Presidential candidates and all I saw were variations on the same theme. Forget the fact that they’re both white and Hillary is a woman; this column doesn’t traffic in talking-points. What I saw that scared me were two wealthy, insulated, megalomanic narcissists battling it out for the same shiny object. Clearly they both felt like the job was owed to them; that it was theirs by predestined fiat. 

That shoulda disqualified both of them right there. It did for me. Couldn’t toss my hat in either ring anymore. I just had a crazy hunch that either one of them would be equally likely to throw the country under the bus if their egos required it.

Now we’re at what I want to talk about.

The GOP candidate (henceforth The Candidate) had lost me way back at ‘rapists crossing the border.’ Like a lot of people, I found almost everything about him dishonorable; I’m not gonna litigate that here or anywhere. I’m just saying I recognized him for the man he was and it wasn’t anything I was attracted to, nor wanted anywhere near the Oval Office.

Then there was Hillary and her inexhaustible, insufferable hubris. ‘nuff said.

But when The Candidate was elected, after a while the media and I both (me just a little first) noticed that whatever wickedness The Candidate accused anyone else of always turned out to be the same awful thing that he himself was accused of in a couple weeks and later found/will be found guilty of. 

Every time the former candidate popped off about something seemingly random and accused his enemies of doing it—just out of the blue—“Russia if you’re listening…”—was a ‘tell’ that he was talking about something that was gonna come out in about a week or two about him. Over and over and over again. For instance:

He cozied up to and shared private time with top Russian officials in the oval Office on Inauguration Day. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Hillary is in bed with the Russians and Obama is a “traitor.”

The Candidate—once elected—flagrantly, wantonly, publicly flouted his administration’s bacchanalia of abuse of power. He openly reveled in it. “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue…” he once gushed; you know the rest of it. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Hillary killed Vince Foster along with various other people, entities and newborns. Why, she’s still off a-murderin’ folks, btw.

Remember “Crooked Hillary”? How about “Lying Ted”? The Candidate had his rally attendees chanting that stuff back at him on the campaign trail, all while he has already been found guilty of criming and lying his way across America on the public dime, no less. HIS CAMPAIGN PROJECTION: Textbook narcissist behavior. Accuse the other guy—first—of what you’re guilty of. Then when Bombshell X hits the tabs, you’ve muddied the waters hopefully enough that you’re just another high-profile guy being accused of whatever the last guy (that he accused) was accused of. If it doesn’t blow over, do something even crazier. The new toy usually gets the most attention.

Google ‘narcissism’ and it reads like the prologue to an honest biography of the former candidate.

And here’s the thing; about a third of the country went along with him for this ride. And have since successfully adapted his methods, tactics and lack of constructive goals for America to their local political cesspool. Including one of his most pernicious traits, the projection thing. Accusing other people of what you yourself are guilty of. In the short run you muddy the waters of your own indiscretions and in the long run… in the long run, you normalize the aberrant behavior in question until it becomes part of the new normal. We’ve all watched as the formerly unthinkable metastasized into bitter but resigned new normals over the last decade. We swore at the time it wouldn’t happen, but it has.

And here’s my thought. What broad theme is the former candidate’s base—both on social and ‘professional’ media—currently going on about that sounds so evil as to appear ridiculous on its face? An obsession with pedophilia. A really lewd, detailed, overly-specific gusher of outrage about all things child sexual abuse. 

Do I even need to say it? I smell a projection. The kind of sexual predation hell that exists in my state must exist elsewhere too, and bringing it up out of the blue then accusing your political enemies of it? The way the national GOP is doing en masse right now? Emulating their leader?

In poker they call it a ‘tell.’ In this case it’s revealing a brazen attempt to normalize the cherished small-town ‘tradition’ of inevitable childhood sexual abuse.

The GOP has somehow not yet sunk to its lowest moral depth, nor scaled its highest height of infamy. 

God help the kids.

Where have all the fast-food workers gone?

WARNING: This column discusses the horror of child sexual abuse. If you don’t want to read about any of that, I don’t blame you and please don’t! With my blessing, as well as my best wishes personally.

DATELINE: ANYTOWN, RR4, box 32—There are some abysses even I’m afraid to stare-down. Stuff I absolutely don’t want to be writing about. I’ve waited and waited for some major media entity to put together what seems obvious to me and make clickbait out of it. And this is national-level stuff I’m about to plow into, thus the whisper of patriotism in my conscience, urging me over another cliff.

I’ve gone out of my way to not reveal which rural Red state I live in. That’s because I assume that, for the stuff I’m writing about, my state is representative of ‘the rural red state culture’ and to cite it by name would be to unfairly single it out among its equally ghastly brethren.

The town I live in is hundreds of miles away from any city of commensurate size or population. Before the internet, in most of our lifetimes and dating back to literally forever, living hundreds of miles out in the Boonies meant you were a cut-off, cloistered community. The invention of the telephone lessened some of that social isolation, but the geographical distance remained daunting. Over the decades and generations, this isolation created a climate locally of, “What happens in Anytown, stays in Anytown.” And it implies exactly what the Las Vegas Tourist Council ad did in its day.

Due to the factors contributing to the Petri dish in which this particular depravity thrives, it’s impossible and foolish not to extrapolate this paradigm to other isolated communities. In America. In the world. Throughout history. 

I’ve lived in many cities, towns and states of various configurations, and this rural backwater is the first place I’ve ever been where I’ve experienced this phenomenon on such a massive, socially-accepted scale. It’s everybody’s little open secret.

I was on a gig the other day, talking to a born-and-bred Anytownian Grandma who was in the park with her three granddaughters, aged 7 and under. Five minutes hadn’t passed before she was spilling her guts to me about one of the girls’ dads, and what happened to all 3 girls when they were left in his care recently. I felt dizzy and sick, even though I’d been queasy ever since Grandma mentioned ahead of time that she had 3 grandkids under 10, all girls. I knew the odds were stacked against them, living in this state, but oh Lord my God.

As the Grandma sought to comfort me [oh brother, I know] she mentioned as if to soften the blow somehow that the same thing had happened to her, and when she spoke about her own childhood abuse, she shrugged. She glanced at me briefly, sadly, then went on talking about the weather or something. But the guy who hurt her grandkids? She wants that SOB DOA. 

The phrase I’ve been dancing around, trying to avoid, is rape culture. And Anytown is neck-deep in it. None of the adult locals, my peer group, want to have anything to do with talking about it. The men get defensive and play dumb and the women get worried and suddenly look older. But my gig brings me into contact with college-aged locals, townies, and they’re willing to talk about, what to them, are still relatively recent events. The wounds haven’t calloused-up yet.

I had one young woman tell me, “I think I was raped yesterday” in a small voice, mid-conversation. She thinks? Another mentioned, in the course of telling a longer story, “…and I got raped by my [dealer] a couple days ago…” and blew right past it in her narrative. I have scads of such stories.

And it’s never just them, it’s always their sisters, too. Somebody in the family is always at the age mommy’s boyfriend is looking at. And Mommy? Also a childhood abuse victim. She should know better, but Mommy is broken. What she knows better than to do is go the police, the good ole boys in blue. Daddy will be very angry when the police drive them all back home.

Because the police, the born-and-bred ones? Most of them have been there themselves, doing the abusing, and didn’t suffer any consequence at all. Hell, they’re policemen now lol

It would be dirty pool to wreck this poor fella’s life for the same thing. This is part of what “holding onto traditional values” looks like out here. Systemic childhood sexual abuse is one of the traditions they simply don’t want to let go of. 

I’m gonna go take a shower with pumice soap and lye, then come back and unleash my couldn’t-be-more-obvious revelation.

The big reveal, Part One: The reason why minimum wage employers can’t find teens and 20-somethings to fill their open positions? Friends, this generation of Anytown townies (at least) is graduating from high school and going straight into DIY, from-home online porn production. A McDonalds paycheck just can’t compete, even at $15/hour. And the boys? They act and treat their girlfriends like they’re pimps. They don’t need to work either, just hang around with and commoditize and mooch off their girlfriends. A more despicable bunch of young men I’ve never met, the townie boyfriend class.

Why hasn’t anyone with a higher-profile and higher IQ than I puzzled this out yet? All kinds of well-coifed media dolts everywhere are bleating in confusion and wonder about all the mysterious trouble that minimum wage-payers are having with hiring, but no one is asking, “Well, then what are this generation of kids doing for money instead?” Kids still want and/or need money, these days more than ever. How can they afford not to jump at big-city minimum wages for what’s always been reliable, steady fast-food work?

Yup.

And it’s not just the ‘bad’ girls either; the ones with the lurid reputations in high school. The lure of ‘easy’ money plus internet adulation cuts across all class lines. I guarantee, if you’re reading this, you know someone—or more likely, their kid—you’d never suspect in a million years is making big bank selling fantasies online. 

Dang it, this is gonna have to be two columns.

The thing happening culturally, nationally, that (apparently) it falls to me to point out connects directly to this, but it requires more column inches than I have left this week.

I usually try to end on a positive note, or even a suggestion to fix the problem, but all I got right now is two different crises that are feeding off and amplifying each other and nobody else has picked up on it yet.

Putting off finishing this for a week won’t make a damn bit of difference. Hopefully CNN will beat me to the scoop. 

Nothing would make me happier.