Bomb Idaho

There are lands filled with gun-toting religious fanatics who live in compounds where they sit around talking about nothing else except their extremist view of the world and how they want to destroy the American government forever and set up a new one based on their own ideas of how a society should be run. They’ve already launched several attacks on the United States which have left their people living in fear.

I speak, of course, of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. These sparsely populated, remote, and generally out-of-the-way American states have been a refuge for Americans with a particularly extreme view of the American constitution which considers any attempt to restrict gun ownership as an assault on their civil liberties but don't hold much truck with the whole all-men-are-created-equal-thing.

Many off them keep their vast arsenals off ammo because they think the United Nations wants to take over the US (I’d Love if that were true) but many of them want to go on the offensive against namby-pamby liberal types like George W Bush and John Ashcroft who they believe are turning their country into a pluralist multi-cultural one. Again, ILITWT. The Oklahoma city bombing was one such incident, the anthrax attacks that followed were probably also.

Of course, this doesn’t make them terrorists. Oh No. Oh no, no, no no nooooooo. After the World Trade Centre was brought crashing to the ground by two highjacked airplanes (What day was that again?) one typically well-thought out American article argued that the reason that Britain and Spain were the countries most eager to help America were that they had their own experiences with ‘murderous terrorism’.

Never mind that Timothy McVeigh killed almost as many people as my drunken, monkey-faced compatriots killed in bombings in England over the last 40 years - more than ETA did in their entire history - that still didn't make him or any of his ilk a terrorist. After the Oklahoma city bombing, people assumed that Arabs were to blame, therefore the incident, logically enough was labelled a ‘terrorist’ attack. When it was found out that the perpetrators were ‘home-grown’ they suddenly morphed into ‘extremists’ or ‘radicals’.

I love that term ‘home-grown’. It seems to imply that if you settle people in a remote area where they won’t meet any foreigners and give them lots of guns, they turn into terrorists, they same way weeds grow on soil that’s upturned and then ignored.

But terrorists is what they are, even if McVeigh was befriended by Gore Vidal while the people who didn't have anything to do with 9/11 but were arrested anyway are forced to listen to Barney the Dinosaur music all day, in spite of the amendment that forbids cruel and unusual punishment.

So why aren’t the Bush junta taking the war on terror to these states? It’s probably a good thing that they haven’t, as since they responded by an attack by predominantly Saudi terrorists by attacking Iraq, the war on extremism would probably take them to Washington State, where they’ have to face wealthy masterminds like Bill Gates, not to mention young leaders with fanatical followings like Eddie Vedder.

The reason they haven’t, though, is certainly not because Dick Cheney comes from Wyoming himself, after all he gave $42million to the Taliban to compensate for loss of earnings from opium production in June 2001. It’s that many on the right of the Republican party sympathise with the radicalist compounds and their gospel of self-sufficiency, which is an unholy myth as most of the big ranch-owners in the area are totally dependent on federal subsidies. So next time there’s an anthrax attack, the CIA will find some way to link it to Bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout.

The good news is that these states are slowly depopulating themselves. Mostly they were settled in the first place by people who were heading for the coast in wagon trains but got fed up. In fact Wyoming is actually an old Cherokee term meaning “Oh, fuck, I can’t be arsed.” The land is pretty poor as far as agriculture is concerned and the only thing that makes farming there economically viable is the fact that Americans are all lard-asses who eat far more than they need to.

So most of the sane people are heading to the coasts and as they do, supermarkets will pull out and the radicals will have nowhere to stock up on oreos so they’ll have to move to places like Seattle, where they’ll be introduced to Starbucks de-caff lattes and arthouse movies and eventually become liberals who read the Guardian via their firefox browser on an iMac that uses linux.

Meantime the states they leave could become one giant nature park where the deer and antelope run free, where the entire permanent human population will consist of park rangers and naturalists who tend to vote democrat for all sorts of reasons.

This won’t happen overnight, though, so there’s plenty of scope for anthrax attacks in the meantime. But anyone who loses a friend or family member to this deadly form of biological warfare will at least have the consolation that they weren't killed by terrorists, who all live in places like Fallujah which brave American soldiers are bravely destroying.