Chicken fried information...

Back when I was a young lady, growing up in the South, I knew there were people who used words like nigger and kike, and who thought that beating a nice gay man between pinball machines constituted civic activity. And I was also aware of churches where people handled rattle-snakes, drank poison, believed in demons, and flopped around shouting in tongues. Even vacuum-sealed and plastic-wrapped in my middle-class Episcopal world, I bumped up against tabloids full of exciting stories about commie infiltration and the dangers of fluoride-treated water. And I was not exceptional in my awarenesses. Check out any Southern writer of the mid-20th century.

Fortunately, I was brought up by people who were big on manners, a good education, and FDR-style liberalism. Early on, I was taught that when someone in your vicinity either cut a fart, or expressed their views on the social advantages of lynching, you politely ignored them. You did not despise them or consider them moral warthogs. They were unfortunate souls who, as my mother gently explained, didn't grow up in as lovely a home as you. My more robust father, informed me that such folks were the products of pig-ignorance due to lack of vitamins, incest, bad schools, and deluded religions. However, both parents agreed on this: whenever you encountered these sad-sacks, you didn't entertain their addled notions or attempt a reasoned debate.

Ah, but then the sixties happened, didn't they? During this period, thanks to heavy use of the chronic and some very good music, a gentle spirit of tolerance settled over the land like parachute silk. During this heady era, a variety of exotic ideas were written about and discussed, some worthwhile, like civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and some not so much, like psychics, Peter Max, levitation, and unicorns. But under our peace and love banner, plus it being the Age of Aquarius, we smiled our spacey tolerant smiles no matter what we encountered. This is how Charles Manson made his bold unlikely inroads into the mainstream consciousness. In an earlier age, he would have been shunned as the criminal imbecile he was, but back in the day we tolerated all comers.

This over-eager acceptance of the clearly deranged seems to have stuck with us. Why else would we listen to the creationists, the Rapture believers, the Hitler fans, the Joe McCarthy devotees, not to mention unconscionable fools who are given mainstream air-time?

As I puzzled over the ignorant armies loose in our land, I decided the Middle Ages had again descended like a thick sullen blanket, blotting out all sense and logic. We certainly had all the symptoms of a hefty Dark Age: a belief in irrationality, the faulty assignment of causality, a terror of learning, the denigration of the individual and the rise of a faceless mob, the worship of brutality, and a general unschooled intolerance.

Given this, I continue in my ink-stained scrivener ways, while I wait out the folly. No sense in arguing with a jack-ass, as my daddy used to say. Even less sense arguing with a huge sprawling herd of them, so say I. Sooner or later, the witches will flee, as Thos. Jefferson remarked during a similar time. But in the meantime, it's hard out there for an 18th c. Enlightenment girl.

Probably time to scope out some monasteries. Maybe illuminate a few manuscripts, or chisel some gargoyles.

And that sound of iron-clad hooves, ringing on pavement?

It's the sound of hard times coming, coming fast.