January 6th - Diary Of A Deep State MAGA Crazy

Henry Lofton lived in a cabin in the north woods of the Idaho panhandle.  He and his three friends - Billy Bob Frank, Kissy Marden, and Upton Blair - had lived there since Sleepy Joe Biden had stolen the election from their man in 2020, and since then had plotted and planned and conspired to do whatever they could to see that the faux president would never stay in the Oval Office. 

Henry was a Westerner, born and raised in Livingston, Montana, an old railroad town turned quiche and post office box income. His father had worked as a telephone lineman and part time on the cattle cars when the Union Pacific needed extra help.  His mother, originally from Wyoming had come to Montana with Henry's father whom she had met at a Cody rodeo.  

Henry had worked since the age of eight when he swept out the barber shop on Saturday mornings when the cowboys came in to get a trim. Life was hard, especially in winter when it was hard to heat their railroad flat by the tracks; but he never resented it, and in fact felt it made him the tough hombre that he was now.

Billy Bob was a Georgia cracker and proud of it, native of the backwoods hill country, Southern as shit, Confederate to his boot tops, mad as a bit cougar at the Washington fools who had been after him and his family since the War. His father was a moonshiner who had upped the ante and got into crystal meth, got busted in Macon, spent eight years at the federal pen at Baldwin, and got right back into business, this time armed and ready. 

  

Kissy was a groom on a Central Florida horse ranch owned by his uncle.  The uncle had done two tours in Nam, came back completely fucked up, took his army pension and disability and put a thousand down for three horses and five acres in Ocala.  Kissy had been on his own since his own father had been killed in Khe Sanh and his mother ended up in West Texas with a trucker. Ever since the government repossessed the ranch and evicted his uncle, the stink of horses, old leather, and rat poison were the only things he remembered - that and a visceral hatred for Washington. 

Upton Blair was the son of itinerant street preachers who had moved from North Carolina to Philadelphia with the notion of converting the North Philly slums into havens of God; but after beatings, robberies, and years of insult, they returned home to piece work, tarpaper shacks, and chicken feed. 

The four of them just happened on each other at Pete's Bar in Coeur d'Alene, broke, drinking cheap beer and looking for the shit, but it was an alliance made in heaven.  Four rejects with nothing to lose and an abiding hatred for the government that had wronged them all independently decided to migrate north. 

Trump was their man, their hero, their Achilles, their surrogate who would not only drain the swamp but build a bastion of righteousness against the socialist bottom-dwellers who had spawned and bred there; and here he was, robbed of a second term and determined to get his job back and save America from the buggering fools trying to take it over, and needed all the support he could get to make America Great Again.

 . 

Henry had heard of some kind of march on Washington, and without a second thought decided to go. They would ride the rails, cadge their way East on big rigs with American flags, and come hell or high water make it to the so-called Capital. Money was no object because they had none, but the Deep State was a community, and would take care of its own. 

It was a thing of passion, this ride East, and the first time they had felt anything like eagerness, let alone hope; but there it was, picking up steam and comrades every hundred miles, men as angry as they were scuttling about, picked on, forgotten, and resented their whole lives.  They were the true bottom of America.  Forget the inner city.  That was a place of order, and purpose.  Women, dope, bling, and power; and the communists in Washington gave tax dollars to them? while Henry and his buddies had gotten nothing but swill and leavings, shit from straw bosses, and beatings from railroad bulls.  If there was a disenfranchised, beset upon, relegated group of Americans, it was them.

Henry, his crewe, and the pick ups from Boise eastward had no idea about the workings of government, the tripartite division of powers, the Constitution, or the machinery of government.  They knew nothing about interest rates, debt ceilings, or the stock market.  They had no clue about enterprise, start-ups, or the working of the economy.  They were headed to Washington with nothing but a rabid, inchoate anger in their heads.  A colony of losers, a nation of incoherent, unfortunate semi-beings.

Like the doped-up child soldiers of Sierra Leone, they dressed in fright wigs, crinoline, and stockings and added Viking helmets, Irish shillelaghs, and Vatican robes.  They had raided dumpsters and trash heaps and found wild treasures, and by the time they had reached Pennsylvania Avenue they were decked out in discards from tattoo parlors, brothels, dance halls, and pawn shops. 

The rest is history.  This wild bunch of crazies marched on the Capitol in their wigs, Viking horns, clown suits, and Frankenstein masks and they called it insurrection.  Insurrection? Revolution? Where had 'they' been hiding? Where were they when Jonas Savimbi took on the Angolan military, or when the Right Wing death squads in El Salvador disemboweled the entrenched bureaucracy, or when the Sandinistas ran amok, or when one African tribe after another slaughtered each other? 'They' - the whole lot of government shills and do-good wannabees who had never been outside the Capitol or their safe districts - ran at the first sign of a crowd.  

Henry, Billy Bob, Kissy, and Upton were in the middle ranks of the clown parade on the Capitol on January 6th. They got pushed to the curb by Alabama hillbillies with dildo clubs, lost in the shuffle of ten-gallon hatted bullies from Abilene, and kicked aside by white hoodlums from Gaithersburg. They had done their bit, the Capitol was a long way off, and there was still no money to be had. 

By the time the affair was over, and the campus police had jackbooted their way into the crowd and locked up the front runners, Henry and his crewe were on their way back to Idaho; but their interest in returning there was nil.  They had shot their wad and wanted to fish someplace nice and quiet, maybe have a girl and some home cooking. Someplace flat.  

And so it was that they stopped in Bolivar, Ohio, made a go of farm life and as far as anyone knew, had given up politics altogether.