ILL HUMOR | BY IAN SHOALES NORTH DAKOTA: STATE OF SECRET SIN The Kelly Flinn saga was tailor-made
My new retainer firmly in place, I was taken by my parents to Minot's own "Marshall Bill Show," where I appeared on television in my Cub Scout uniform, and was given an ant farm and a special badge. Marshall Bill was really the local weatherman and the ants all died, but hey, that's North Dakota -- kind of like Chinatown -- with the fatalism, but without the movie stars. North Dakota is not the sort of place we'd expect hotbeds of controversy to erupt, but that's just because we're all media darlings now. Our expectations are higher. If it doesn't happen in a penthouse, Hollywood or the White House, it's not a true scandal at all. When it comes to what we now consider outrageous behavior, we're much more shocked by the antics of Dick Morris than Tonya Harding. That's because we consider him a fully networked urban sophisticate, and her white trash. But there are a lot of psychodramas seething under the Dakota ice. I could tell you stories! Adultery, suicide, murder, you name it. North Dakota is actually tailor-made for the saga of Kelly Flinn. The media are downplaying the North Dakota angle, but that's because Lt. Flinn's story has too much juice as it is. Class issues. Gender issues. Morality issues. Sex. It has everything the '90s seem to require. Grand Forks offered more of what America expects from the Dakotas -- stoic small-town dwellers battered by blizzards, fire, floods, mud and ice. In less than a month, Grand Forks was visited by almost every disaster nature held in her pretty little hand. Grand Forks' interlude of tragedy proves conclusively, as far as I'm concerned, that North Dakota, like California, is not a habitat ideal for human occupation. The scandal at Minot just clinches it. Air Force personnel aren't supposed to fraternize with each other; since they can't discuss their top secret missions, they can't really fraternize with the civilians. For most of them, their only job is to sit in a bunker next to a missile silo, watching blips on a radar screen, wishing they had some Fritos and a beverage, forbidden under Article 59. The pilots are glamorous enough, I suppose, but jeeze, they're stuck in Minot. What's the use of being a swaggering Top Gun when there's nobody around to appreciate the swagger? Even Tom Cruise's toothy grin would have frozen into a grimace. What the hell do they expect a normal gal to do? Potential war heroine or not, a girl's got to get laid sometime. OK, she lied to her superiors about her affair. But if people can't lie about their sex lives, what can they lie about? It's no big deal in California. Aside from Fatty Arbuckle, nobody in California has ever had a career ruined because of sexual escapades. Today we have people to prevent that sort of thing. And Fatty Arbuckle was innocent! How innocent is Michael Jackson, I wonder? And how innocent was that chiropractor who lost his house to a pharmacist in an illegal poker game on the border between North Dakota and Montana in 1966? Hell, I don't know. California is a land of earthquakes, wildfires, drought and flood. I won't even mention its drive-by shootings or its contribution to the corruption of American culture. Delete the earthquakes and media hustlers, factor in winter, and it's obvious: North Dakota and California are pretty much the same place. We spend most of our time denying it. San Francisco, where I spend my non-formative years, considers itself a harmless, wacky kind of place, where naughty things used to happen. Every once in a while, to remind America and ourselves that San Francisco is not Grand Forks, a naughty thing will erupt once more. Most recently, national attention focused on Jack Davis, a local spin doctor spearheading a move to get San Francisco voters to help pay for a stadium/mall, allowing the 49ers to remain in the Bay Area. For his 50th birthday, his friends threw a party. Many local luminaries were there, including Da Mayor, 49ers management types, members of city government and various weasels wishing to appear important, in a local kind of way. The nameless hosts of the party decided, in their wisdom, to employ a reportedly Apache Satanist named Steven Johnson Leyba, who, after being bled and pissed upon by a dominatrix, drank the subsequent mixture of blood and urine and rapped some kind of diatribe against the Declaration of Independence. Then a vampire stripper attempted to sodomize him with a Jack Daniel's bottle, from which Mr. Leyba drank, ending the presentation. This spectacle attracted national attention, and it created quite a stir locally. Some locals were upset because they considered the behavior sordid and distasteful; others were upset because the party may affect the vote on the new stadium. One editorial I read referred to Davis as "the core of rot" at the center of San Francisco politics. Local columnist Jack Boulware, bemused, said the incident contributed to "San Francisco's over-documented Kooktown reputation." Me, I take the long view. If North Dakota's chief points of interest, culture-wise, are craggy farmers, drunken oil workers and shamed adulterous dentists, shoe salesmen and Air Force personnel, we must consider bad performance art as one of the prime reasons people come here. Oh, I'm not talking about tourists. I'm talking about the glum young people who serve us our mochas. Without bad performance art, they would all just stay home. And we truly would be Grand Forks. I mean, what's the sense in getting the hell out of North Dakota if there isn't a vampire stripper at the end of the road? Or, at the very least, a mocha.
Merle Kessler's CD, "I Gotta Go," is a collection of commentaries that in the author's opinion sounded best when read really fast into a microphone. It is on the 2.13.61 label (Henry Rollins' label) and theoretically available in fine record stores everywhere, but it can also be ordered through Steve Baker at 1-800-989-DUCK, or through 2.13.6's Web site. |
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