12:11 PM

19
12:11 PM

     Margaret was frantic over the dispatch.
     "We found the address. It's in Louisiana."
     "Can you call my office and have them book a flight?"
     "I don't have your office number, Agent."
     "It's okay. I'll call when we get back to the Department."
     "On to Louisiana, then," Sheriff Donnelly noted.
     "Wherever the case leads me. Looks like you've got quite a bit to go through here, though, and you've got to follow up get the landlord's records. I really suspect the rabbit hole goes down pretty far with him, and you suspect that pastor and that woman."
     "Think I'll take direction from the Texas Rangers."
     "Yeah, I suppose that's best."
     "Well, I really appreciate it, Sheriff. You've been a tremendous help. You're a good lawman. And I'll be back real soon, I think, because there's a whole lot more to investigate here."
     "And who knows, could be a dead end."
     "Could be."
     They went back to the Department and Agent Danley called his secretary to make the arrangements and his secretary called the New Orleans field office to send an advance team to survey the situation.
     Agent Danley went back to the motel to pack up his things. He drove back to the field office and then got a cab to the airport. At the gate, he thought about everything, and realized that as much evil as he saw, he saw a lot more good. There was trouble brewing, and he didn't know yet how that would all go, but there were good people to try to thwart it. Agent Danley just hoped it would be enough to stem the tide.
     He wondered how things were back at the office. He highly suspected that Agent Harper was trying to undercut him, and he knew there was a lot riding on making one or several arrests to account for Agent Danley and his mission. In fact, Agent Danley high suspected that he was going to be reassigned regardless of the outcome of this investigation. It was a mission whose time had not yet come, and that generally meant, in a large and sprawling bureaucracy at the behest of political leaders, it just wasn't necessary.
     Then he thought about the trip to Palestine he had taken at the expense of the Department to learn from the Mossad about counter-terrorism. The Agent he had talked to explained some of the psychology of terrorism, and Agent Danley was thinking hard about what it may mean for the future of the American republic.
     Colonialism had stripped away the past of Arab people, through a series of convenient alliances to extract oil and revolutionary communism which expressly forbid the past to be expressed. When people's history is erased, they do not fail to yearn for it; instead, they make it up as they go along, and they become intolerant both of their parents, who they blame for not adhering to a version of the past which they invented in their mind, and outsiders, who they think are naturally intransigent to them practicing their "traditions." Ultimately, because they live in a fantasy world, in which the reality of the past must be erased to invent a new one that is ideologically pure, there is no way to reconcile them with a future of accommodation. They invent that their ancestors would not have accommodated foreigners or new ways of being, and they will never see any benefit to cooperation.
      That colonialism is, in many ways, still at work, precludes much popular support for a way forward for Arabs that involves accommodation with the West or with Israel. They still are being taken advantage of, in innumerable ways, and the socialist leaders are truly no better than the colonial overlords.
      To keep control over the population, in truth, both Soviet and colonial agents have encouraged proxy warfare between tribal groups, which has created a fractured landscape in which identity never has a chance to develop peacefully. It is constantly being manipulated and ethnic tensions are, when necessary to achieve geopolitical ends, exacerbated.
      America was a colony of Britain. The American South was set up for a rich and politically well-connected planter class to control all the levers of power. African American slaves were marketed by the Crown and then brought in in great numbers. To control the population, Britain encouraged reducing the status of African slaves until they were little better than animals. Other Southern Whites, especially those of the upcountry, found themselves left out of the privilege of their rich and politically well-connected "brethren" and, led by revolutionaries like Andrew Johnson, helped halt the advance of the Confederacy in the South, which fell on ethnic and class divisions created by the British to monetize their colonial possessions.
     Southerners in the years after the Civil War, searched for a Southern identity, embracing terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan rather than admit that their ancestors, like Jefferson, were reliant on but abhorred slavery, and well recognized the colonial imposition of slavery on the colonies, and the need to end it and find a way forward that was not so reliant on the domination of one group over another based on something as flimsy as race. That Jim Crow developed was predictable, and that the Civil Rights movement developed to defeat it was an equally predictable Federal countermeasure. Defeat of the colonial legacy of slavery and racism has always come from above and never included Southerners in either its drafting or implementation. This has caused Southerners to tug closely to their "Southern heritage" which shifts in meaning so often that it, like Arab identity, seems to have little meaning outside of terrorism against a maligned race that, lo and behold, was the assigned enemy by their previous colonial overlords.
     That being pro-life should have become inextricably linked to the formation of Southern identity perhaps is a recognition that it needed something which was not explicitly racist, though the interweaving of dreamed theocratic Christian institutions and a Master Race utopia are so similar as to really be one concept. The confusion of having had your identity stripped from you manifests as nihilism. Because the past and present cannot be reconciled into a workable future, all must be sacrificed to reflecting a vision of the past which vindicates Southern-ness. If need be, everything will be literally blown up rather than admit to a new Southern identity which is anything more than the concept of White Power.
     Ultimately, being understanding of prejudice is the first and most important mistake in finding an identity which does not rely on it. Too much systemic racism is allowed to persist in the South, and very little is done to train Southern institutions to function without it. Anything that is done is usually done without the input of those in charge, which gives citizens of those states the impression that the Federal government is really in charge of the situation, when it cares enough to do something about it, and when it does not, it will leave Southern states to their own devices, with inevitable consequences.
     The legacy of colonialism and racism will need to be dealt with at some point. Being Southern does not somehow necessitate being racist or intolerant in any way. That being Southern has been defined as such both by the messianic nihilists that claim themselves the defenders of the South and also by those in other American regions shows just how much work there is to be done to exorcise the demons of the past. Southern states are only places. A new identity is easy enough to craft. It was easy enough for those that claim they are recreating the proud history of the South.