Ye gods.

Nazi infiltrators, anarchy in the streets, a city on fire.

And I'm going out to mow the lawn.

Absurd, or profound? Wisdom, or folly?

Oh well. My city is on fire. The head of state is a blustering incompetent. My country is tearing out its own heart. Right now, those are things that I can't do anything about.

But at least the yard will look good.

 

The stories going round here at Riot Central would have it that the worst of the mayhem that has dogged the heels of justified protests like a fell shadow—the arson, in particular—is the orchestrated work of out-of-town...well, I'm just going to say Nazis.

(You can go all polysyllabic here if you want to. For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to call a Nazi a Nazi.)

There would seem to be a certain amount of evidence to back up such stories. I've seen the trucks with the gun racks and the out-of-state license plates—or no license plates at all (talk about cowardly)—in my own neighborhood.

Since the police didn't have to waste their time and energy on protesters Saturday night (take heed, O ye self-righteous), they actually managed to nab a lot of these f*ckers by closing the freeways and, in particular, barricading the main drags.

This latter move is very clever. Locals who needed to, could still get around because we know the back ways, but the out-of-towners were stuck like roaches in a roach motel. A lot of those trucks, I hear, had lots and lots of weapons in them.

Well, the stories may be true. But of course, we all have both gods and monsters inside of us, and we're every one of us capable of all sorts of behavior, of the best and of the worst. (We're certainly seeing plenty of both.) Right now, I just don't know.

But here's something that I do know. If the “It wasn't our people that did the bad things, it was the evil Nazis/out-of-towners/'proudboys'” story is the one that we need to tell ourselves in order to get through all this together, then—as mythic history, at least—I'm for it.

All for it.