Okay, so if you hear this rumor, I have to apologize...I did that one.  My bad.  Mea culpa.  Whoopsie-daisy!

Via a class reunion email list originating back in small town North Dakota, I ended up on another list intended for tea-bagging Glenn Becksters. The list wasn't BCC'd!  What was I gonna do, NOT reply to all?  Pfft. Like I'm even capable of that kind of restraint.

So my alter ego, Mr. Chnaang, explained to his new paranoid and delusional pen-pals that he works as the night janitor for a secret division of the CDCC (the extra "C" is for chutzpah!) which specializes in fighting Seasonal Airborn Pink-Eye.  Chnaang (which actually means "your food is delicious" in Khmer) explained that he'd found in the trash a memo to managers from a very high-ranking official that "all genuine and verified scienticians" are to be directed to ensure that only Democrats get the Swine Flu shot this fall.  They are to give Republicans shots of "Whooping Cough Stage 2B and/or Whooping Cough Classic (not 2B)" and that "if these deadly viruses were not available to just go ahead and give them AIDS and socialist literature."  I added that, prior to administering shots for the H1/N1 virus, all verified and genuine scientianists are required to cross check voter registration rolls with their state's "Registry of Voters and Communicable Disease Desk Reference" at their local library and/or ACORN office.

You see, I assumed it was obvious that I'm a reform supporter taking the piss.  I should have known better.  I received two letters asking me to come out with this information and to scan the internal memo and "get it out there so people hear the truth."  Another person had replied to all, urging them to forward my email to "the ranks." 

Oh, and yes, I also got letters accusing me of being a liberal asshole! That just isn't true.  I'm not a liberal asshole, I'm just a liberal behaving like an asshole.  There's a difference.

So there it is.  Again, mea culpa, my bad, whoopsie-daisy, that smell was me.

It's like the question in that old song, "how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen Paree?" You can't. Not me, anyway. You see, I am an escapee. I have been on the lam for over twenty years. Were I to turn myself in now, I fear I'll be sentenced to live out the life originally intended for fellas of my ilk. Had I not gone on the run, had I stayed and done what was expected of me, I would not be writing this in my little flat in Hyderabad, India (there would not be a monkey with a staring problem just outside my window); instead, I would now be bellied up to the bar after a hard day's work at the grain and feed elevator. I would drink Pabst Blue Ribbon and shots of Old Crow whiskey. I would sport an unseemly large belt buckle. I would be convinced my president isn't really the president because he wasn't born in the U.S.-- and I would have seen the proof of this on the internet. Finally, I would wholeheartedly subscribe to a brand of religion which allows me to take comfort in hatred and xenophobia, to blame liberals and Mexicans for falling grain prices, to sneer at those Democrats who are destroying my America.

But I escaped. 

This is part one in a short series about life in Small Town U.S.A. -- rather, Palin's America.

Part One: Abortion

As the snow mercifully began melting in the spring of 1984, I didn't yet know that I'd made her pregnant. Around the same time -- maybe the exact same time -- we freshman boys were forced to abandon our usual fifth-hour period of machine and woodshop class to enroll in one full quarter of Home Economics. Though this was a requirement to graduate high school, walking into that classroom with its sewing machines and cooking stoves was nonetheless humiliating; everyone knew that shop class was for boys, Home Ec. for girls. The first few weeks of class were as one might expect: baking pies, sewing patches on our Wranglers, doing household budgets...you know, girl's work. Then came that week where our good-humored, matronly teacher told us to sit as she pulled out a large jar from deep in the cooking apron closet. This wasn't a jar of raspberry preserves or pickled eggs, this one contained a human fetus floating in amber liquid.

We were fourteen-year-old boys from a rural community. Most of us lived on farms or had at least worked each summer and fall in the vast fields and countless barns yards of the North Dakota prairie. I doubt there was even one among my class of 19 boys and 8 girls who had not at least helped in delivering a calf or gutting a deer. We'd all seen, at one time or another, a lamb born with two heads or the gruesome manner in which a feeder hog is neutered. We were accustomed to such things.

Still, our eyes grew a little wider at the site of the kid in the jar. Mrs. Olafson said to pass the container around the table, that each of us should look closely at the thing and decide for ourselves whether or not the object was indeed a human baby. I inspected it carefully. It had fingers, thumbs, and toes; eyes, a mouth, and a nose. It was a baby, all right. After the jar had made its way around the table, the teacher switched off the lights and clicked on the projector. The film was newly released and it was titled, "The Silent Scream". We would be quizzed and graded afterward.

I grew up in two small towns in opposite corners of North Dakota. A "small town" in my home state isn't fifty or a hundred thousand residents. Rather, a small town population numbers somewhere between fifty people and upwards of five thousand -- though until I went to college in Fargo, I'd personally never experienced life in a town anywhere near as big as five thousand people. In fact, that was the kind of city we'd drive to each fall for school shopping.

(Once, after moving to Los Angeles years later, I was sitting in rush hour traffic on the 405 and suddenly realized there were more cars on L.A. freeways at that very moment than there were people in the entire state of North Dakota. I thought of Grandpa Art's oft-repeated reasoning for why we lived in North Dakota: "Because no one can sneak up on a guy that lives on the prairie."  That day, amongst all those honking horns and all that smog, I had my first anxiety attack.)

In our little corner of the world, there were of course many endearing, Rockwellesque pictures of small town life painted throughout the year. There were hayrides at Christmas, ice fishing in February, and tractor pulls in the summer. We dialed only four digits in order to phone others in or around town. Folks liked to joke that if you dialed a wrong number, you'd talk for twenty minutes anyway. Bringing guns to school was perfectly acceptable simply because our pick-up trucks had gun racks in the back windows and in gun racks there are guns. We were given three days off school each November for deer hunting season. We didn't shoot each other (never on purpose, anyway...I had a minor, Cheney-like accident with a kid named Dwayne once, but that's another subject entirely). The crime rate was virtually non-existent; my step-father never locked the front door to our house when we'd go on holiday. The lone police officer was also the city maintenance man. There was one traffic light outside of town at the intersection of two county highways. It flashed yellow in both directions. The only paved road was Main Street (yes, that's actually the name of the street). Though it's much smaller now, in 1984, there were six hundred people living in this town of five churches, three bars, two grocery stores, and one hardware store. It was not unique as small towns go. Palin's Real America is dotted with thousands of these one-horse hamlets that openly pride themselves for being populated with regular folk, nice people, and average Joes. The welcome billboard outside my home town reads, "Stop in and have a cup of coffee. We're waitin' for ya!"  It's a quaint but simple life. And therein lies the rub.

Those unique facets to the small town -- the hayrides, the gravel roads, the sheer "Northern Exposure-ness" of it all -- these things were as much to blame for a fetus being passed around by an anti-abortion teacher in a public school classroom as any definable ideology. True, those Saturday Evening Post images were commonplace, but we were all too aware that these things were not "city things."  Walter Cronkite (R.I.P.) had for years been telling us about the evils of the big cities, the power outages and riots; the robberies, rapes, and murders. Our men who'd joined the Army came home with amusing but disturbing anecdotes about the behavior of black people and homosexuals. The seldom spoken but obvious sequitur to the stories was that we were better than city people; we had horse sense and they did not. "City people" itself was a term to be uttered with disdain; names like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City were used as derogatory adjectives or thinly veiled code words in coffee shop gossip: "Oh, I wouldn't know if her nephew is a troublemaker or not. He did go to school out in California." "Oh, okay," was the proper reply, "gotcha."

"The Silent Scream" opens with an ultrasound image of a fetus in the womb. The narrator sounded a bit like Rod Serling or, at least, he should have, "Now we can discern the chilling silent scream on the face of this child who's now facing imminent extinction."

The floating fetus in the jar was at the center of the table. Several of us glanced at the thing throughout the film -- it was impossible not to. Even in the hyper self-indulgence of the 80s, we could step out of our Air Jordans for a moment and see that this goddamned abortion thing was obviously murder, that it was pure evil. A few minutes into the film, after explaining these new imaging technologies, a grave-faced doctor speaks to camera, "Now for the first time, we are going to watch a child being torn apart, dismembered, disarticulated, crushed, and destroyed by the unfeeling steel instruments of the abortionist."  And that is exactly what followed, replete with slow motion zoom-in on the open mouth -- the silent scream -- of the fetus as it was sucked out of the womb.

We would be quizzed. Home Economics. A requirement to graduate. I got a perfect score on the quiz. I also wanted to kill the abortionist who performed the procedure. I doubt I was the only one who felt that way. My fourteen-year-old mind couldn't comprehend how this horrific act could be legal. Even President Reagan was saying it was wrong and he was America personified, a real everyman, a cowboy hero.

Of course, Mrs. Olafson did not follow this with a film about back alley abortions. No stories were told about coat hangers employed as medical instruments shoved blindly into a young woman's uterus to remove a baby put there by her uncle. Mrs. Olafson didn't talk about impoverished mothers or disparate philosophies on when life begins. And she most certainly did not talk about a woman's right to make decisions about her own body. Nineteen boys in their early teens sat in that publicly funded classroom and had the beliefs we'd already been taught in church reaffirmed by a woman we knew and trusted. Make a household budget. Bake pies. Sew clothes. Watch the disarticulation of a fetus.

The pregnancy was an accident. We weren't like those people in the cities using abortion as birth control. You see, thing is, in between the ice fishing and tractor pulls, there isn't much to do in a small town. Our winters were often 20 and 30 degrees below zero, minus 60 with the wind chill. There was no movie theater to attend on Friday nights, no video game arcade in which to loiter. Booze, however, was easy to find and because we got our driver's licenses at the age of fourteen (farmer's permits at twelve), everyone had a vehicle. By the time we saw "The Silent Scream," most of us were drinking like sailors and fucking like bunnies...especially me and Mrs. Olafson's daughter, Lilly. And we had an accident.

Condoms were available at the Cenex gas station, but Mr. Silbernagel wouldn't have sold a condom to me if my life had depended on it. Had I somehow, by the grace of God, been sold a box of rubbers, everyone would've known within an hour or two. Certainly there were a few fathers and brothers in town who would've gotten wind of my purchase and beat the ever-living-shit out of me before I could make it to the barn dance with jimmy in hand. No. I had to rely on the "promise method" of contraception: promises and swears-to-god that I would pull out and that if "something" did happen, I would stand by her and marry her. I was 14 years old, she was 15. (We were, perhaps, born far too early; had we had the benefit of hearing Bristol Palin speak at our school beforehand, I'm just positive we would have said no to sex and that I would've kept it in my parachute pants for Jesus.)

The nearest and, to my recollection, only abortion clinic was in Jamestown, a city of about 16,000 people and a hundred miles away. The plan was to take Lilly out for the day under the guise of going to a friend's farm for an all-day, junior/senior barbecue. The previous two and a half months since she'd missed her period -- three since the "accident" -- had been a living hell for both of us. Neither Lilly or I told a soul. She did her best to hide the crying and I did my best to act like everything was okay. Fact was, I did my crying at night when I closed my eyes and thought of that baby being torn apart, the "silent scream" its mouth made as it happened. I'm not sure which was scarier for us: the abortion and our probable appointment with hell at some point in the future, or the chance that we might get caught. If anyone found out that she were pregnant, it would've ruined the lives of more than just she and I. My step-father sold crop insurance for a living and there would have been customers lost. Lilly's mom would've quit the church out of embarrassment, her dad would've beaten his daughter up and good. And in all seriousness, there was a strong chance the man would've put a bullet in me for having defiled his daughter. He was not a kind man.  

The clinic in Jamestown was in a suite of offices on the second floor of the Buffalo Shopping Mall. We hadn't made an appointment because we didn't know anything about clinics. The only reason we knew the place existed was because Lilly's mother had told us all about it, how they murder babies at the shopping mall in Jamestown. I expected a woman like Beulah Ballbreaker from "Porky's" to greet us at the door, someone real ugly and mean, someone who enjoyed killing babies. It was a strange sort of guilty relief when the woman who answered the door was a receptionist in her mid-twenties, soft-spoken and warm. She put her arm around Lilly's waste in a fashion that made me think she'd once been through this herself; for a moment, I judged her harshly for it. After all, our situation was different. Lives would be ruined if we didn't go through with this. Lilly was not a whore. It was an accident. We were not city people.

The two of us in that waiting room...I remember it feeling a little like playing house, like we were pretending to be adults. For a moment I even felt like I was an adult. In fact, I was a man, goddamnit. I crossed my legs and began casually flipping through a Family Planning brochure and nodding my head as if I understood. Then that manly feeling ended. Too many cross-section drawings of women in various stages of pregnancy; I felt I'd vomit at any moment. Lilly asked me for the hundredth time if we were gonna go to hell for what we were doing. I didn't know, I told her, but probably, yeah.

When Lilly emerged from the doctor's office sometime later, she was crying and laughing all at the same time. She wasn't pregnant. The nurse told us it's not uncommon for a teenage girl to go that long without getting her period. After she gave Lilly a long hug, the woman gave me a quick shot of the stink-eye, then handed me a box of Trojans. Much to my embarrassment, she proceeded to pull out a lifelike, rubber cock and showed me how to put the thing on, how to stretch out the little receptacle at the end. When I couldn't take it anymore and looked away, she gave me a stern yet friendly talking-to about the need to do this correctly, about taking responsibility as an adult if I were going to engage in adult behaviors. Neither Lilly or I had ever been talked to by an adult this way -- and certainly not about sex. Not once did the woman say, "now don't you fuck anyone ever again, you godless heathen boy!" (It would've been easier if she had. I was used to such admonishments and my replies were practiced.)

I'd like to say my views on abortion changed then and there, that the kindness and wisdom bestowed upon me by that woman made me see the light. But that wouldn't be true. Becoming pro-choice was a slow process of learning by osmosis which didn't begin until my college years. I came to know many women who confided in me that they'd had an abortion. I was at first surprised that these women -- some of them, indeed, from big cities -- didn't seem evil or whorish at all. With time, I simply grew up and shed the remaining vestiges of that small town "horse sense" like a snake does its skin. It'd been a low-level brainwashing by an entire village and escaping their clutches brought a lot of inward shame as I came to realize the horrible things I'd once thought about liberal people (not the least of which my belief that a person could be 'evil' or, for that matter, a woman a 'whore'). And when it came to abortion, I never again had to worry about whether or not a girl was pregnant because I knew how to use a condom. A very smart and understanding woman had taught me early on.

I never again saw Lilly after high school graduation. I heard she married a farmer from a nearby town. During last year's election, every time a rally took place in the Upper Midwest, I'd scan the pictures of the crowds, expecting to see Lilly and her mom waving a McCain/Palin pennant. I couldn't help but wonder how close I came to waving one myself.

*Note: names were changed in this essay

If Spuds McKenzie had fallen in with a pack of Young 'Publicans and Campus Crusader dogs, he undoubtedly would have eaten Freedom Fries.  But even with the endorsement of such a huge celebrity, Freedom Fries were nonetheless destined for the trash heap of pop culture and would still have gone the way of Joe Camel or pondering life's riddle about the location of the beef.  I think that's a shame...about the Freedom Fries, I mean, not the stupid dog in a football shirt.

Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox (whom I have a crazy crush on and I think maybe Rachel does, too) discussed Freedom Fries recently.  I'd already forgotten about that wave of anti-French populism on display in 2003.  Again, I think that's a shame.  So I propose we make every 3rd Tuesday in June our official "National Freedom Fries Day." Rather than just another bank and school holiday, we'll close only those mini-marts and bottle shops which cash paychecks, we'll eat only that food which is served on a stick; these things we'll do to commemorate those heady times when the right wing was in full swing and we could do nothing but stare at the telly,  awestruck and mouths agape.

Freedom Fries Day will of course mean different things to different people.  25% of America will use the holiday to mourn the loss of having their ignorance personified at the top of its game and bully-ruling all branches of government. Much of the rest of us will take the opportunity to look back and chuckle at those ridiculous, knee-jerk nationalists strutting down the catwalk of yet another Emperor's Clothing Fashion Show. 

Regardless of our reasons for celebrating the day, we must never forget those Freedom Fries or the ugly American exceptionalism for which they stood.

Face it, they're right, we're wrong. It's time those of us on the left side of the torture debate concede on the ticking time bomb issue. I propose we immediately give absolute approval -- through a congressional act if necessary and directly to Cheney if asked -- to torture the hell out of a terrorist. I know this concession will win me no fans among progressives, but bear with me; there are a few minor stipulations involved...

In order for the torture to be completely legal, Grand Inquisitor Dick and his harem of screaming ninnies at Fox must first prove the case meets the very criteria that they themselves have laid out...ad nauseum. In this Hollywood bullshit scenario, there is a ticking time bomb -- but where? Only the terrorist can say. (Knowing these arch villains as well as Dick does, he figures the nuke is on one of several school buses filled with unsuspecting children singing summer camp songs, but damnit, which bus?!)

So are you with me? In order to save the children - the precious, singing, American children -- we need to give our opposition the legal cover they'd been previously forced to fabricate. The ex-veep, after all, simply wants to keep America safe; the last thing he needs is a bunch of liberals getting in the way and demanding to give aid and comfort to the terrorists (which does happen, actually; I'm a raging liberal and each winter I send hand-embroidered, matching Christmas pillows to Zarqawi and bin Laden). Fair enough, if we have a terrorist in custody and as long as we have proof there is, indeed, a bomb ticking away somewhere in the city, G.I. Dick has the authority to go all Torquemada on his ass.

Simply as a curiosity, though, let's look at what must happen to make this Republican wet dream a reality.

First -- and oddly enough -- our terrorist-in-need-of-torture decided to buck the time-honored methods used by 99.9% of all 21st century terrorists; the suicide bombing. I guess ours is the one terrorist on the planet mad enough to smuggle in a nuke and arm it in order to kill millions of innocent people, but he just ain't radical enough to buy into that whole 72 virgin martyr thing.

So then he set the timer on the bomb for, what, an hour? Is there a reason why he'd set it for more? I'dunno, maybe he needed to pontificate about his plans to some meddling kids before the bomb goes off? Let's say an hour. So now we have our Jack Bauer hour and -- amazingly! - the guy is caught just after he set the bomb but, obviously, before it goes off.

Even more fantastic, but exactly as our friends on Fox News have frequently described and therefore integral to our torture loophole, we know this hardened criminal has the bomb's location somewhere in that thick skull of his, but the son of a bitch is just too stubborn to say which bus the nuke is on (even when Paul Krugman asked pretty please, which really pissed off G.I. Dick; worse, Agent Hannity kept demanding to know if another nuke could be planted in San Francisco or maybe Shy-Town). Ah, but here they catch a break; we on the left have just now passed the Ticking Time Bomb Act of 2009 which finally gives them legal cover to save America. (We totally would've had it done sooner, but there was a heated argument over what to name the piece of legislation. Kucinich held the floor for a really long time, demanding to know why we call it a "ticking time bomb" and what other kinds of bombs tick besides time bombs, so why bother saying both "ticking" and "time," blah blah, no more war, blah blah.)

Okay? Seriously, Dick, if this scenario that you and your evil little minions have so often described actually plays out, I say fine. Torture the hell out of the guy. It's still a waste of time, but we're all going to die in a nuclear blast anyway, so let Dick have his sadomasochistic kicks.