Dirt Behind the Daydream

More plotting on how to bring the war to the warmakers. Anyone who's read this space before knows I mean the NRA. What's left to illustrate the carnage that this lobby glorifies as the ultimate democratic freedom; the ability to end someone's life with a gun?

Watching the War at Home documentary for tips in the Vietnam-era protests in Madison, where protesters put a huge coffin on the steps of the Army Math Research Center (later blown up with a huge homemade bomb) and planted a field of fake World War I-style cemetery crosses on the hill in the center of campus to mark the war dead.

How to choke the entrance of the NRA with homemade coffins for all the gun-murders of a certain year? How to make their immaculately manicured grass spring thousands of grave markers? The NRA property is doubtless private, unlike a state university in Wisconsin.

Then the exhibit at the Woodrow Wilson school of public policy at Princeton. Photos of what was claimed to be the 39 percent (!) of the population that has guns in their households. NRA members are only 1.5 percent of the population, so I need to double-check this statistic (it may be 39 percent of households, but that's still a huge number).

What got me were these kind of punk-rock dudes that enjoyed owning and brandishing guns for the camera. Here's a communique to you, assholes. You are not being a rebel by owning a gun in America, you are being the worst kind of conformist jackass.

Right, I get it, when the squares want to crack down on your "lifestyle," you'll be able to respond in kind. You and the middle-aged, pot-bellied Michigan militia. Real hip dudes.

The other thing that struck me was how many people (often women) who got turned on by being brought to a shooting range. It's the feeling of power that surges through you, I know.

The (gay) reporter who sat next to me at the Trenton Times told me he felt like God when he fired a gun at a range. This was a guy that suffered HIV symptoms and was as gentle and funny a soul as you can imagine. Still, even him.

May God strike us down for stealing his fire, just like the ancient Greeks and their Gods. See the ruins of their civilization on top of the Acropolis. Looks just like Capitol Hill.