Where’s Cricket? The sadistic reveries of the American right wing

Authentic frontier gibberish from vice presidential aspirant Kristi Noem:

“I hated that dog,” Noem writes, adding that Cricket had proved herself “untrainable”, “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless … as a hunting dog”.

“At that moment,” Noem says, “I realised I had to put her down.”

Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit.

“It was not a pleasant job,” she writes, “but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

Incredibly, Noem’s tale of slaughter is not finished.

Not by a long, somewhat inaccurate shot:

Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she “dragged him to a gravel pit”, the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down”.

At that point, Noem writes, she realised a construction crew had watched her kill both animals. The startled workers swiftly got back to work, she writes, only for a school bus to arrive and drop off Noem’s children.

“Kennedy looked around confused,” Noem writes of her daughter, who asked: “Hey, where’s Cricket?”

The key detail here is putting in that her daughter got off the school bus and asked where Cricket was. What kind of a psychopath adds that rhetorical flourish to the story?

. . . Commenter Uneekness:

That telling the daughter is the literal crux of the story. The conservative mindset right now is one of existential panic – they are about to be subsumed under woke culture/browns and blahs, etc. (and the unspoken part – will therefore have to endure the kind of treatment they have done to those ‘others’)

So what you need is a person willing to shuck aside all the formalities and niceties and simply take care of the problem (via violence, natch). Her kid represents the squishes, those GOP voters who are still uncomfortable with the idea of going full fash.

The most mordantly amusing part of this sadistic little reverie is that Noem presents her willingness to tell it as an act of praiseworthy but career-damaging candor, so unusual among those clowns in Washington being clowns. She claims that “a better politician . . . wouldn’t tell the story here.” But she tells it, “she says, to illustrate her willingness, in politics as well as in South Dakota life, to do anything “difficult, messy and ugly” if it simply needs to be done.'”

Of course what’s really going on here is that these two stories, which very well may be wholly or partially invented, given their provenance, are presented to sell Noem to Donald Trump, as being Trump’s next vice president offers a variety of delightful demographic and epidemiological vistas to the lucky winner of that particular horrorific.

Hey let’s violate an Internet law or three:

Most of you here know what it means when 100 corpses lie next to each other, when there are 500 or when there are 1,000. To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.

Heinrich Himmler, speech to 92 SS officers, Posen, Poland, October 4, 1943

In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Falangists was Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live Death!”). In non-fascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

Umberto Eco, Ur-Fascism

Every day the bucket a-go a-well

One day the bucket a-go drop out.