I side with those of my fellow citizens who hold that a great being, rather than a mere idea, created our nation, and inspired every principle by which it was then codified and rendered explicit, and tinted every aspect of its rampancy thereafter, from the beiges and greens of its squared georgic cells to the tars and grays of roadways made to circulate the bumper crop of idiocy grown out there; from the rainbow varices of urban centers where that idiocy is then repackaged as American pride to the domed white skull in Washington where our elected minds think no better than to turn that pride into law; from the bright red stumps of the once proud and now foreshortened soldiers formerly charged with the enforcement of said law to the duller red bricks of the country high schools where so many of these victims are recruited, and the slicker red (or orange, or black, or blue) of the paint jobs on the pickup trucks these children bankrupt themselves to buy at sixteen, and the rusted green or silver beneath which they pray at night but neglect to make a go at their homework, and the stained-glass wonders behind which they are dependably led to believe that what set the national color wheel in motion was not their own delicate pride but rather the divinity of a preacher just as prideful, and just as delicate, two millennia previous on the far side of the Mediterranean.
Of all this wheel’s tinctures, I say that there is none so bleak, and so powerful, as the vitamin-rich urine backing the black symbology on those enormous metal bees that continue (despite, or in possible collusion with, the pickup trucks) to ferry our sacrificial nonvirgins from home to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to patriotic field trip, and from patriotic field trip to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to pregame prayer circle, and from postgame prayer circle to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to Bible retreat (is this legal?), and from Bible retreat to hamburger joint, and from hamburger joint to high-school parking lot, and from high-school parking lot to military base (has this honestly never happened?), so that the flower of our native ignorance might be pollinated and multiplied, and its rancid dust might forever rain down upon the world.
Bloodless composition
Do I go too far? Is it wrong for a grown man, no longer a boy, to argue that the American schoolbus has been cruel to humanity when in fact it has not been wholly cruel to him, and regularly got him away from a panic-stricken home, and drove him on occasion to a teacher of some worth, and once even showed him an uncalled-for mercy that altered and perhaps even bettered the course of his life? What consideration is then owed this vehicle, and this situation, by one who to this day blames the vehicle, and the situation, for the very peril from which it eventually delivered him? what praise should he bestow upon an entity he knows full well to be a destroyer, by proxy if not by nature, when he finds that he himself has not been destroyed?
Marijuana first entered this boy when he was thirteen years old, and for that I might in good conscience blame the schoolbus, or at any rate its back-road emanation. I might upbraid it as well for the fact that the boy began to attack girls a year or so after the plant’s first attack on him. A familiarity with alcohol followed the onset of the girls (or, from their perspective, the onset of the boy), and this too I lay at the beast’s accordion door. Were it not for the constant watchfulness required of him between home and school, on top of what vigil he was forced to maintain at either destination, he might have adjusted to his lot with less grief and more grace. He might have understood that in the country, and possibly even in town, alcohol was meant to precede relations between the sexes (and certainly relations between the same) and that anyone who did not know this had failed to approach either hobby soon enough. He might have understood that such a child was bound to be left out when better-prepared students snuck off to drink in the woods that surrounded the elementary school and just about everything else in that insipid county, or when older girls, the ones who had flunked, grabbed boys of his acquaintance and forced them to simulate (or, rumor had it, actually to perform) intercourse on the multihued yet drab bathroom floors. He might have understood sooner that a natural life, such as the naturalists promote and fail to comprehend, has little to do with a moral life, such as the moralists promote and fail to comprehend. He might have understood that ten or eleven, and not a hopelessly retarded thirteen, is in fact the proper age of introduction to dope.
I did not meet the hydroponic kind but rather what bored country children will cultivate in a clearing out back: small and pathetic plants, without sister or brother, that seemed well acclimated to the dew and the mist but surely found the sky’s unregulated heat lamp a hindrance to maturity, as did we all, and were anyway slaughtered well before they amounted to much, yanked from the earth to be dried and chopped up and fired and inhaled by higher beings whose boredom and desperation could not be undone by so spindly a remedy and could only (the boredom) be enhanced by what lethargy as the plant had to offer, or (the desperation) by what whiff of paranoia had crept up into the twigs and seeds from the awful clay below. Later encounters with industrial improvements to this weed would impress upon me the value of basic environmental controls and would secure in me the notion that I might not have troubled with the outdoor stuff at all.
I saw no natural prototype, though, beyond the berry or the nugget of gold, for the pills these children passed among themselves, and bragged about, and fought over, and built great reputational fortunes upon, and eventually gummed and swallowed, just as I could see no rustic model, beyond the leather saddlebag or the tin bucket, for the plastic containers in which these psychotropic treats were kept. Identified from without as aspirin or Tylenol, and from within as dosages lifted from a parent’s understandable attempt to overcome the realities of the simple life by an appeal to what complicated illusions could be manufactured in town, these pills, and their counterfeit drugstore coffins, rode to school in the pockets of Levi’s jeans and the folds of Bermuda-bag purses and the anklets of Frye boots or Chuck Taylor sneakers, the idea here being not subterfuge of the usual type but rather a coyly conspicuous display such as Mr. Veblen might have appreciated, had Mr. Veblen been forced to spend two to three hours out of every day trapped with his subjects on a country schoolbus.
Proud of their bounty, and beholden to the relief it promised from the tedium of the day, larger than I was but not correspondingly so stupid as to assume that their shoes and their purses and their jeans would be free from investigation by weary and pissed-off administrators once we got to school, these children were forever on me to act as their surrogate and their stooge. Although a refusal to smuggle their bottles risked further bodily insult, and although a pill or two gone missing would have been considered no more than fair payment for a morning’s servitude, I turned those offers down, and for that I am almost sorry. With little effort I might have cornered the pharmaceutical traffic in that sad little county, and branched out into more fetching goods, and arranged things with the idiot fat boys who were even then expanding into idiot cops, and made a place for myself in the hormonally overburdened high school, and married and impregnated (in either order) the captain of the cheerleaders, or else her best friend, and bought up one of the nice plantation houses out there, and joined a political party or both, and subsidized new uniforms for the football team every five or six years, and shaken hands at the homecoming games, and made increasing reference to the importance of Jesus Christ in my life, and paid for the upkeep on several pink churches and the biggest brown one, and so achieved a sufficient majesty, elected or appointed or stolen outright, as to allow my wrath to encompass the whole of that abominable county, the better to tax and incinerate it.