I traveled across country yesterday, from Morris to Seattle, and the first stop on the journey was a truck stop in Sauk Centre, where highway 28 merges onto I-94. I gassed up the car, and then wandered in awe-struck wonder through the display of stuff you could buy if you wanted more than a tankful of gas and a cup of coffee.
There were pewter crosses that you could buy with your name embossed in the middle. There were racks of flag-adorned knick-knacks. There were toy trucks and tractors you could buy for the kiddies. Was drawn to the wall of inspirational art, which all had a theme: farming and patriotism.
I could have got myself a metal wall hanging with two pistols, and the words, “In this home we don’t call 911,” which had me wondering…if Ralph nicked an artery on the hay baler, what are you going to do with those guns? If little Edna wandered off in a snowstorm, who you gonna call?
There were very colorful paintings/prints, all in a hyper-realistic style. There was one of a charming farmhouse with a green grassy yard, and five different tractors parked on it, dominating the scene. I guess in this world, prosperity is measured in how many tractors you own. There were so many pictures of eagles, with American flags worked artfully into the background.
But my eye was most strongly drawn to these two pictures.
There on the left was Donald Trump, riding his flag bedecked motorcycle into town, with Melania, and spectators in red MAGA hats cheering him on. On the right, Donald Trump crossing the swamp, in a boat full of poses stolen from a better known painting. We know it’s Donald Trump, not because the figure actually looks anything like the fat old man, but because of the weird candy-floss hair or the bright red tie.
My eye was drawn to these absurd pictures only because I was so repelled that I wanted to slash them. I resisted.
Anyway, this is the Trump cult in full flower out here in the rural midwest. It’s all tangled up in agrarian fantasies, religion, and trucks, tractors, guns, and motorcycles. Good luck rooting it out.
One of America’s most deeply rooted cultural issues is the totemic worship of weapons. In modern america (and sadly, creeping into Canada as well), people are taught to prize ‘independance’ and to tie it inextricably to the ownership of firearms. To many people, guns=freedom=safety=independance=power=jesus=whatever.
This creates a problem for these folks, many of whom invest staggering amounts of money into their firearm collections. The problem comes when they realize that these expensive items don’t actually do anything for them. Maybe they enjoy taking them to the range and firing off a couple hundred dollars worth of ammunition, some few of them hunt (but modern military-esque rifles aren’t really great for hunting).
Eventually the person becomes frustrated that they can’t actually use any of these weapons to gain the things they were promised. Guns don’t make you free, because you definitely can’t fight the government. Despite the power-fantasies created by hollywood action movies, individual armed action is essentially negligible on the scale of even a municipal government. You won’t accomplish your policy goals just by owning six AR-15s.
Guns don’t make you safe, because the vast majority of people aren’t routinely confronted with the kinds of threats that you can solve by carrying a gun. Even police officers, who are routinely asked to place themselves into dangerous situations, rarely find that they need to resort to using firearms. And as PZ noted above, you can’t sixgun yourself out of a serious injury or find a missing child by shooting into the air. Guns just aren’t useful for much.
So this sad-sack gun-owner is left frustrated. And they begin to fantasize, to imagine all the scenarios where they could finally use their guns to really do something important. Instead of abandoning their totems when they prove useless, they start to dream of a world where they could use them.
If the person acts on it, that’s how you get a Rittenhouse. These are the people that form the ranks of the various random shooters, when they attach their fantasies to some radicalizing agenda. Almost certainly this is the genesis of the first would-be trump assassin. It’s likely where those people who end up in stories about “black teenager knocks on door of house, gets shot by owner” come from. People who sit and stew in a self-created miasma of fear and firearm-related power fantasies, who finally lose touch with reality to such a degree that they commit some heinous crime.
I’m really not sure what can be done to help these people. They need more community and fewer guns, but how do you pry them loose from Facebook/Telegram?
This is in…Minnesota.
Imagine what a truck stop must be like in Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota, Idaho, or any where in the South and the rest of the midwest.
Left: no crash helmets Right: heavily overloaded boat
I find it oh so reassuring (not really) that I can travel to one of the ten or more gas station/convenience marts nearest to my rural Missouri home and buy konfederate flag-adorned merchandise to hang on my wall, drink coffee/beer out of, or plaster to the tailgate/back bumper/back glass of my vehicle in a proud display of which side actually won our bloody civil war.
I seriously doubt that Trump knows how to ride a motorcycle…. or row a boat.
I’ll never understand people voting against their own self interests. Life will be worse for these agrarian small town folk under Republican rule yet they keep on voting for them. I’ve read endless books about it (the most enlightening being “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” by Thomas Frank) and I still don’t get it. Maybe because I was raised (ostensibly) atheist?
I recently binge-watched all the “Murder in a Small Town” episodes and so many of the murders were committed by pastors or cops yet they were all, “We never suspected anyone in our town, let alone the pastor/neighborhood policeman!” So many of them brought up their immediate suspicion of Mexican cartels which was alarming/amusing to me.
I guess it’s more important to them that LGBTQ/immigrant/”other” people suffer than they be able to get dental help. (What is wrong with the U.S. that people can’t have teeth? I am American but have not lived in the U.S. in 15 years and I’ve had a shitload of dental work done covered by my $144 yearly health insurance which is probably why I’m fixated on teeth nowadays. It should be a given especially from the “richest country in the world”. Sorry for my rant!)
@#1 snarkhuntr
Excellent insight on gun owner’s psyche. When you limit your information sources to Facebook and Twitter this is what can happen, and our Republican friends are taking advantage of it. Our free speech and thus control over these mediums is the real war. I’m apprehensive the left is not fighting this war aggressively enough.
It’s just some crap that the owners hope will sell to their long-haul truck driver customers. I would be too concerned that the kitsch includes some terrible art featuring the orange one. Patriotism on its own isn’t problematic. The cult is a different matter, but the rural population has been heavily subjected to right-wing propaganda via the radio. There are plenty of quiet people who live in rural areas and hate MAGA just as much as PZ.
Tractors are nice, and Hank Williams Jr is not a problem, but it’s a good indicator that the owner of the gas station is very old.
How many people under the age of 60 are fans? How many under the age of 40 have ever heard of Hank Williams Jr or his Dad?
Who buys wall art in a truck stop?
Those Trump paintings are from Trump fanboy Jon McNaughton. He had one recently that crammed in a huge bunch of people crowded around Obama, and he actually had to put out a numbered key to tell viewers who they actually were. There was also a rooster, who apparently has appeared in other McNaughton paintings. One of his “classics” is Trump as a ’40s football player, about to make a running touchdown while outrunning his enemies.
And you can bet every single piece in that shop was imported, mostly from China, but any other country where labor costs are essentially nothing.
I’m sorry, English is not my first language, so it’s possible I misunderstand, but with Trump in the picture shouldn’t it be “in a boat full of poseRs…”? ;-)
Sauk Centre has always been a strange place.
…As if he could get his fat ass on top of a motorcycle.
@1: re: guns
Remember when right-wing gun-owners used to say “An armed society is a polite society”?
Funny how you never hear anyone saying that anymore…
If there’s one culture war this country needs, it’s a war against gun culture.
@7, stuffin
There’s a pretty interesting book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313990.Warrior_Dreams" Warrior Dreams. That discusses the cultural shift in the USA in the post-vietnam era through a lens of popular culture. It is quite dated now, but I think the bones are still quite good. I would love to see it rewritten in the modern context, since so many of its key observations have only gotten more true as time passed.
As I recall it, one of the examples was the way that war/action movies were made. Pre-vietnam, the war movie protagonist was a civilian reluctantly called into war, who fights alongside his teammates to overcome the enemy, and winning meant going back home to his family and community. The through-line being that war is a neccessary and unpleasant duty and a diversion from the hero’s real life. The hero leaves his community and with his new community of soldiers fights the enemy. The war ends, the hero returns to his original community – changed perhaps, but is able to resume his life.
If you look at modern movies, this is rarely the case. Our ‘war heros’ now are more likely to be people who exist – however reluctantly – in a state of permanent war. Many movies start with the trope that the soldier, previously having served with distinction is dragged unwillingly back for one last mission of some sort. The hero is likely to be sent into battle solo or with a very small team of supporting characters. The through-line is that for a Warrior, war is a neverending state and any non-war-life the hero might atttain is simply a temporary respite between engagements. The hero is a unique individual, different from other people, and his unique talents are required to solve the world’s problems. He can never truly form community with non-warriors, and attempts to do so will often end tragically when his warrior’s life intrudes – frequently with a dead wife or child to give quick cheap motivation and stakes.
I don’t know why this shift happened, but I think it’s toxic as fuck. The worship and near-fetishization of the special forces, for example, almost entirely through unrealistic hollywood/video game depictions of their role is a part of it, either cause or consequence.
Look at the way police officers have changed as well – every year their garb and demeanour grows more and more into a parody of special forces/operator/warfighter/whatever the fuck term culture. They demand (and receive) more and more advanced weapons of war to adorn themselves with. Much like the sad-sack gunowners I discussed above, I think the obsessions with these weapons and accessories of war causes problems…. “Why do I lovingly select this stuff, carry around all this stuff, train with this stuff, but never actually get to do anything with it?” Combine that with the racism and other negative elements of cop culture, and you get the modern SWAT-larping phenomenon. (see also: Acorn cop, who was previously a member of the US special forces, before retraining as a police officer and engaging in a two-on-one battle with his own squad car)
Dangit! Sorry for the italics… .if there’s a way to edit, I don’t know what it is.
The motorcycle one is new to me but, that second is the famous “Draining the Swamp” from early in his only term.
In the 1970s, I had a PE teacher who fetishized the green berets, built around the mythology of John Wayne. Every day we’d change while listening to the “Ballad of the Green Berets”; afterwards we’d shower to the same. This toxic crap has been around for a long time.
God, but I hated that song. And that coach.
Gah how tiring this is, more reality denial.
– guns are dangerous things to own, and having them in your house will shorten your life expectancy – and that of your family,
– life in conservative states is shorter, given how health care has been and is being gutted, plus the guns don’t help,
– Trump is no hero.
Looks like a cupio dissolvi thing, or similar… vote red, end up dead.
PZ wrote: Anyway, this is the Trump cult in full flower out here in the rural midwest. . . .Good luck rooting it out
I reply: We have seen, first hand, how deeply ‘rooted’ cult beliefs are. These cult members would not change their minds even if jebus appeared and demanded they stop drinking the tRUMP koolaid. Others here have added helpful details to this observation. And, from experience with family members in the mid-west, their beliefs are ingrained, even from generation to generation; they are ‘accepted societal doctrine’. Almost all these people won’t ever question them, let alone, apply any critical thinking to them.
Oh, and the picture of ‘tRUMP’ crossing the Delaware river in the 1770s: he was obviously going to defend the airports he talked about earlier. ROFLMAO
The McNaughton Swamp painting was probably going for cheap. Just consider the caricatures populating the boat, L to R: Nikki Haley, James Mattis, Ben Carson, President Trump, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence, Melania Trump, Mike Pompeo, Sarah Sanders, Ivanka Trump, John Bolton, Kellyanne Conway (peeking her face out above Bolton’s knee), and John Kelly.
How many of that group openly oppose him now? Haley ran against him (but stupidly supports him now), Mattis, Sessions, Pence, Bolton and Kelly have all denounced him, and no one is sure about Melania.
Oh, by the way, as one of our members reading this said, “That stuff is not kitsch, it is schmutz”.
(translating from the Yiddish, not ‘cheesy trinkets’ but ‘tacky filth’.
PZ, the paintings immediately struck me as being by this guy. Talented and repulsive in equal measures.
https://jonmcnaughton.com/
How has such a civilised cultured intelligent man as yourself managed to live in Trump’s America, and indeed mid-west America generally?
@1 I think part of the fetishization of guns, despite their being mostly useless for anything practical, is that people want to believe that their problems are simple enough that they can point a stick at them, push a button / pull a trigger, and they’ll go away. If you feel powerless, and have no idea how to fix things, someone telling you that a magic wand will make you powerful enough to sort things out is mighty heady stuff. Still don’t feel powerful? Well clearly you didn’t buy enough / big enough guns!
And of course the whole industry and wing of politics pushing that narrative for their own profit doesn’t help any.
@24
Spot on. It’s a talisman more than anything else. Just one that comes with a hell of a lot of personal and societal downsides.
I think the current state is the result of a lot of different currents flowing in american society such as gun manufacturers realizing that the general public is a lucrative market for military-lite firearms – but only if you can convince them to keep buying more and more of them. Fear, FOMO, fashion and other means are used to drive this as well.
The video-games-to-gun-ownership pipeline is also pretty real, at least in my experience. As an occasional shooter myself, I definitely know people who picked out specific firearms because of their depiction and ‘coolness’ in video games. The Kriss carbine, for example. It’s expensive and not really a practical gun for anything – but it looks cool and spaceage and it works well in games. I know two people who bought them. Likewise the Tavor (Israeli army service weapon, somehow legal and nonrestricted in canada if Semi-automatic). People don’t buy them because of what they’re going to use them for, they buy them because they want them, for some quality other than utility.
Fascism has always been like this incredibly kitchy and sentimental but also married to extra legal violence. It’s part of their delusional idea of a paradise lost, stolen from them by the other and only reattainable by violence.
A few years ago my wife and I were in Pigeon Forge. There was a “patriotic” store. Full of flags and eagles and such. Playing religious music as the background. Gahhh
As for the “Ballad of the Green Berets”. We had to play that in high school band in the ‘60s. I hated that sing as well.
@25: Fear is definitely a big factor in the civilian gun market. Remember in 2017, gun sales dropped so sharply as a result of gun makers no longer having a Democrat president to scare people with that several of them were forced to file for bankruptcy.
@6 Dagmar Dollmaier
When people are doing something seemingly illogical don’t try to find a logical framework for it, instead look for what emotional need the action satisfies. We don’t reason from first principles, we start from an emotional core and then justify the actions needed for that.
With conservative stuff it’s often a (combination of) need for stable social structure, a fear of change, and a fear of others. Trump says there is an enemy we can fight and creates an impression of strength. The actual problems are due to complex systems, and talking about the solutions there requires change in ourselves and dealing with the complexity, both of which are not fun.
As an anarchist the emotional need in me is often a rejection of authority and a need for justice. I’m doing the same sort of thinking, but starting from a different emotional point
A certain idea from PZ Myers past springs to mind for what could be done to those religious Trump kult paintings – feel like repeating the crackergate incident of old this time with something that deserevs destructuion even more? These are, after a form, religious icons aren’t they?
No.
Current term for it is “merch”.
@31, StevoR
I think you’ve nailed it. The exaggerated depictions – clearly false and ‘enhanced’ versions of the holy idol. These are acceptable to their buyers because they represent the Trump they wish to see, the saviour who will personally deliver them from whatever they individually fear or hate.
Just as depictions of Jesus are almost never likely historically accurate, so too the depictions of trump do not need to be realistically accurate. The consumers of this schlock know that it’s not real – it doesn’t represent the real world, it represents the hopes of their hearts. They know that real-trump is an old man in poor health who has trouble even lifting a water glass, but they envision a trump with a body like Schwarzenegger in his prime, smiting woke leftists with the jawbone of an ass – or driving the woke capitalists from the temple of moneychanging – this isn’t about what actually is, it’s about wishing.
And after all, what were religious icons but the original merch? The churches of times past made a good profit selling holy items – or even just charging to view them, in an era without mass production. Perhaps in 2000 years, the reformed church of MAGA will schism with the orthodox church of MAGA regarding the proper use and purpose of such images of the Holy Saviour (soon to come again and finally get around to draining the swamp), and a future Iconoclast could gain some temporary fame by publicly destroying an image of the Saviour – maybe burning a printed out trump NFT or somesuch.
Holy items.
Heh heh heh.
Heh.
Back in the real world I was able to see bald eagles eating roadkill this weekend.
Or presenting his alternative to Obamacare. There will also be annual two-week celebrations of Infrastructure Advent.
TIL that Pharyngula has a fandom wiki.
@30 dangerousbeans – Thank you so much for this enlightening reply. I think I can’t wrap my brain around it because I don’t have a fear of change nor of others. My friends have always mocked me for my overt willingness to jump into new life situations with both feet, not always to my benefit but always to broadening my horizons.
My deep-seated emotional need is fairness/equality in the world, I’ve come to realize. That’s never going to happen.
Very similar to the reason people would rather believe in young earth creation fantasies rather than realities of science. Because it gives them what the Christians want to see, hear, believe, and wholeheartedly embrace in despite such scenarios being non-existent.
Why do authoritarians always have such bad taste?
snarkhuntr@25 I’m sure you’ve run across the argument from some gun fans that people only want military style weapons banned because they’re scary looking. Made without a hint of irony by people who buy those guns in the first place because they do look like military weapons. Give them the exact same mechanism in an old style wooden stock with a fixed 5 round magazine and they wouldn’t be interested.
Sometimes supposed professionals can fall for this. Last week Eric Trump was made a Special Deputy Sheriff in St. Lucie County in Florida. With a badge and the power to arrest people. In a couple of the pictures released you can see a Barrett .50 caliber rifle. I really can’t think of a need for a sheriff’s department to shoot at people a mile away, or for antimaterial work like shooting holes in radar equipment on missile sites. I would imagine the sheriff had an interesting story to convince the county officials to let him spend 5 grand on one.
Guns will be a interesting issue in the upcoming Canadian federal election. On the one hand Pierre Poilievre will want to somehow appease his supporters who are gun fans. On the other hand when many people in places like Toronto think of guns they think of the latest use of them by criminals.
If you want revolting kitsch, try German stuff from the period 91-79 years ago…
The rural kitsch in Scandinavia is generally milder, with annoying pictures of members of the royal families. As we do not have any parasite named “Andrew” I can live with it.
.
Porcelain cats are not kitsch, they are useful totems in case I journey to Ulthar in the Dreamlands.
In the two cartoons that were part of “MTV’s Oddities” there was one called “The Head Saves The World” (a friendly alien took up residence inside the enlarged cranium of the protagonist).
In one episode they were driving through the midwest, noticing weird stuff like “The World’s Largest [insert random object]” along the way. Also, weird music on the radio.
@18 PZ – In 1975, when I was 10 years old I had to learn “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and “Rhinestone Cowboy” in music class (remember those? Do they have them anymore? Rhetorical.) not only on my violin but singing it, in a school presentation to our parents whilst dressed as a 1920s flapper and doing the Charleston. This was in Tempe, Arizona. I have no idea what sort of fetishes were running amok in the adults in charge at the time.
I do have to say that I had awesome teachers at Curry Elementary School and they probably had no input into this bizarre spectacle.
Raven @#2
I lived in Texas for way too long. There is a truck stop called Bucee’s that has gone viral across the entire state.
The one redeeming characteristic is that every one of them has nice well-maintained restrooms.
Otherwise, each of these huge stores contains many aisles of rural kitsch, exactly like the junk that PZ describes.
The food that is sold in those stores is also as bad as you might imagine – everything sweet, fatty and fried.
When we traveled to see kids and grandkids in Houston, Bucee’s was the only place to stop.
I am so glad to not be living there now!
Sauk Centre resident here and at least Trump has his shirt on in these portrayals unlike some of the large banners north of town that have him posing like a shirtless Rambo.