Today, in accordance with my daily routine, I woke up, made coffee, and turned on my computer. I sat at my desk, amongst all my daily news papers and online editions (Onion, Huffington and NYTonline) to internalise my everyday intake of fear propaganda concerning the economy, Obama's candidate for Supreme Court Justice, and the other rigid postures of politics that inform this year of our lord two thousand and nine. The top story of the Huffington post, and several other publications, involved the block letters in red that are so often used to encourage that old innate, intuitive panic, that works best for the functionality of our political schema. "Abortion Doctor Shot Dead at Church In Kansas" the headline read. What troubles me most about this story is its lack of shock value; is it at all surprising. I mean, it's fucked up, but it's by no means bewildering. In fact, this particular doctor had been shot in a previous political/religious aimed assassination attempt. There are just some areas where the proliferation of ignorance and incoherent hate is simply common place. We take the old guard stupidity and decadence of the south for granted, because that is the status quot behavior, and we appreciate it as a cultural phenomenon that we do not subscribe to - a different world, inhabited by another breed of human entirely. By making a state like Kansas seem so other-worldly, basically intrinsically separate from what we might consider mainstream North American society we avoid paying tribute to the real horrors of a story like this. We let the ideologues have free reign. The Governor of Texas recently put forth succession as a possible option for Texas in the face of the Obama administration's fundamentally altering implications for the current American social-political system. Although this seems politically insane, culturally, this has happened to some degree, albeit subconscious and unspoken. By thinking of the south in a kind of civil war sense, as a nation unto itself, wholly incapable of adapting to 'mainstream' North American behavior, we make it, at least partially, the stomping ground of the hyper-conservative, the religious fanatics and flagrant bigots. I'm not implying that this is what the South is entirely, but it seems undeniable at this point that those characters are at least very identifiable stock characters in this southern tragedy. And it is a tragedy. When a doctor is shot dead in a church and it isn't even surprising, something is terribly wrong.
Kansas
I was in the cold-room
When they killed the doctor
On the church floor
Blood on the alter
Depraved the preacher,
And national secret,
no disbelief at
the news this morning
suits' hearts that rust
when we're water pouring
Oh Kansas,
Transient sinners
Mould country canvas
Oh Kansas,
Oh vigilant place
Startling pictures
Out of Kansas today
The shifting face
Of God’s good people,
The depressed city,
The new country evil
Brings about the red dusk
Painted with blood and rust
Enter reporters,
Sharks in red water
Instruct new order
Scared sons and daughters,
Of Kansas,
Transient sinners
Brave race winners
Oh Kansas,
The Vigilant South
Won't go without
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