With the holidays nearly over, this Sunday I depart a county in Southwest Missouri known for its foreign color — that of a Maine lobster. I write of Stone, whose 2024 presidential results were a trifle lopsided: 80.3%, Trump; 18.9% Harris.
I once lived in Stone County, as I did its 79%-20% neighbor of Taney, locally mispronounced with a long a; named after the Supreme Court's chief justice who presided over the infamous Dred Scott case, Roger B. Taney, pronounced tawny.
Depending on one's point of view, Stone possesses either the dubious pride or unspoken shame of being less red than Niobrara County, Wyoming, possibly America's reddest, going 90.1% for Trump.
If depending on my point of view — its body hatched and raised in Kansas City — the entire state has turned shameful. Democratic presidential nominees haven't bothered contesting Missouri for roughly a quarter century; it now routinely embraces and re-embraces Harry Truman antitheses such as Josh Hawley and Donald Trump.
Another point remains to be viewed, objectively if possible. Before I left for this Trump county and model microcosm of a self-debased country, my good friend Norm Sibum, poet extraordinaire and prophet of Ephemeris tucked safely away in Canada, asked for a dispatch from my southbound environs.
The essence of his request: How are the Trumpers doing? No sociological treatise, just a note should I have the time, he wrote. I do have the time, although a bit late in the day. (As I now see from the clock, more like early into the next day.) What I lack is even one reportable 
encounter, let alone any political brushes, with the natives — evidently, 80% of whom are of a Trumpian mind.
I can, however, brief you and my maple-leafed hyperborean on the perfectly rancid on-air fare ingested daily in these parts. To that I must promptly add not only a word of clarity, but of caution.
My guess, you just now thought: Everyone has heard the right's foul offerings; there could be nothing rottener, so nothing really new. You might think again. It was with care that I chose the words perfectly rancid; only they describe what I heard suppurating from the beast's soft underbelly last Sunday evening as I approached.
As poisonous rancidity goes, this discharge was otherwise indescribably perfect and, to my knowledge, incomparable. Once within its radio range of Stone county, I heard perhaps 15 minutes of two separately hosted airings. The first were clips from the unctuous Charlie Kirk's AmericaFest 2024 in Phoenix. Interviewed was Steve Bannon.
He spoke for maybe six or seven of the quarter-hour I was able to hear, and his spiel contained perhaps a dozen talking points, some of them fresh. I'll frame them historically. In 1941, Joseph Goebbels confided to his diary: "There are so many lies that truth and swindle can scarcely be distinguished. That is best for us at the moment."
Yet the framing is only partially correct. As do all propagandists, Bannon mixes bits of truth into his articulated swindles. I've no doubt he's read Goebbels and entered many a marginalia while consuming the master's bilious insights and guidelines for future provocateurs. But on this occasion he broke ranks, banishing from his talk all truth, any truth.
Bannon's remarks perforce reminded me of the critic Mary McCarthy's 1979 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Asked her opinion of Lillian Hellman, McCarthy — repeating a line she had used on the playwright a year earlier — said "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In other words? Last Sunday, Steve Bannon outlied Joseph Goebbels. Now that's new.
As my listening minutes soon demonstrated, Bannon's originality was exceptional indeed, though the language itself was a rather tame warm-up for the depravity next intoned. I missed the speaker's name, as well as that of his program. Unmissed was the perfectly incomparable bile that followed, a rapid-fire rhapsody in poisonous hate like I had never heard.
You had to be there — an old quip, never truer. The prattler's venom loses its potency in the retelling, nevertheless try imaging the phrase Democrats are pro-murder hissed in sudden strikes to the brain every few seconds within a minute or two.
(This in relation to the healthcare executive's murder, which further converted, somehow, into Democrats' goal of denying healthcare to all citizens. That gibberish was left unexplained.)
The Dems-as-pro-murder trope preceded at least two more minutes of the Army-Navy game remembered. In attendance there was not one pro-America Democrat, seethed the host. Any game-attending person outside the sacred confines of Trumpist America was by default anti-American of unprecedented depth.
This the radio host spit with a sincerity so intense, easily conceived — and conspicuously encouraged — were small armies of gun-happy Trumpers keen on subtracting from the U.S. population any number of random persons of the Democratic persuasion. You had to be there. Had you, you would have found the performance bone-chilling.
The time I spent enduring this vastly escalated deceit and malice was negligible. The station from which both aired serves endorsing, not enduring, listeners 24 hours a day, and their hatreds are endlessly reinforced as righteous. That much we know.
Unknown is how such stratospheric hate will someday manifest. But climax it will, hammered, as it is, into the weakest minds among us. Release is rendered inevitable. And in some counties, these minds are made feebler yet even more dangerous when they sense false power in an 80% majority.
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