Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Fired By The Arkansas Chamber Of Commerce

Memo to Arkansas - YOU ARE ARKANSAS.
But first, I'd like to share a headline with you for those of you who read yesterday's column. If you haven't read yesterday's column, go read it, then come back. From today's Minneapolis Star-Tribune web site: Three Marines killed in first fatal post-sovereignty attack. See? If it hadn't been for a super-secret signing of a piece of paper on Monday, those three guys would have just been the "latest". But now, they're the "first"! Yay sovereignty!
Anyway, Arkansas. You don't hear much about Arkansas these days. What with Clinton out of office and all the book talk focusing on Monica, it's off the radar. There's a good reason for that. Today's top ten results, by relevance, in Google News covering the great state of Arkansas deal with the following topics:
  • Federal money for a dam
  • College sports
  • Methamphetamines
  • Libraries getting compact discs with music on them
  • Methamphetamines
  • Presidential election polling
  • Homophobic redneck vandalism
  • Insolvent campgrounds
  • Best Corporation doing OK
  • College sports
In case you're taking notes, today we will be making fun of the seventh item on that list. In Conway, Arkansas, for Gay Pride Day, the planned parade was almost interrupted. Luckily, town officials were able to clean up the dump truck full of manure that the fine, worldly, modern people of Arkansas spread all over the parade route early in the morning.
Yes, a dump truck full of manure. Which, looking at it, seems almost redundant. Any truck, once filled full of shit, becomes by definition a "dump" truck. As protests go, this has got to be about the single saddest, most pathetic thing I've read in weeks. I mean, how much more fucking Hee Haw can you get?
First of all, apart from a bit of shouting in St. Petersburg, this was the only incident I could even find reported of people making a fuss about Gay Pride Parades. In the entire country. I'm sure there were others, of course, but within the limits of my patience and research tools, the shit-spreaders were the ne plus ultra of right-wing idiocy. Congratulations, Conway.
And, of course, there's the whole shit thing. Homophobes are the most fecally obsessed people on the planet. They'll be the first to shout about the "filthy" homosexual behavior, going on and on about the whole anal sex thing. And when it comes time to send a message to those filthy homosexuals, well, they get up first thing in the morning, fill a dump truck full of shit, and spend all morning flinging it around their town like monkeys with tools. That'll show 'em.
And, of course, there's the fact that they could lay hands on a dump truck full of shit on relatively short notice. Now, I'm a pretty smart, resourceful guy, but I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a truck of dump before this weekend. Which means either the people of Conway, Arkansas are either brilliant procurers, of they have a whole bunch of extra poo lying around. I know where I'd place my bets.
But the topper, the best part of the whole thing, is that they went to all that trouble, and rolled around in all that dung, for hours, and thanks to the magical technology of SHOVELS AND HOSES that the town was able to marshal, the parade went off as scheduled. Nothing worse than waking up early, spending the morning covered in shit, and at the end of the day, not having it be worth a damn thing. But I suppose, after years of living in rural Arkansas, they're used to that.