Totem and Taboo

On nostalgia for the future and invaders of the present.

The oldest store on Route 66 in Missouri closed last month. I don’t remember the last time I visited. But I will always remember that it was the last time.

The Totem Pole Trading Post opened in 1933 and moved down the Mother Road until landing in the small city of Rolla. I was in Rolla to see a geology museum rumored to have minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast — bacon and biscuits — but it was closed. I went to the Trading Post because it had always been there, and would always be there, and found that it was there no more.

The door was unlocked but the lights were off.

“Are you open?” I asked, confused, looking at a sign with a buxom redhead cooing “Y’ALL COME IN NOW” and the cavernous empty space behind her.

An old man sat on a bench, packing items in a box. The Trading Post is a junk store, or in local parlance, an “antique mall.” I am always buying crap — excuse me, treasures — at antique malls. The Trading Post was king of the road.

“We’re closed.”

“Today?”

“Forever,” the owner said. He sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’d come earlier, you could have gone to the retirement sale. Now we’re done. Two generations. My father’s store.”

“I used to come here,” I said. “Not looking for anything in particular, just looking for a place to look around.”

The man looked bored. Unlike his wares, I was interchangeable.

“Not much to look at now,” he said, and motioned to the door, where I exited.

I stood behind rusted gas pumps and gazed skyward at billboards advertising moonshine and moccasins. Like other Route 66 landmarks, The Totem Pole Trading Post borrowed Native American iconography as the road tore apart indigenous lands. *

It might have felt like poetic justice that I’d found it shuttered on Indigenous People’s Day. But it didn’t. It felt like wandering into a wound.

The Americana icon had collapsed so gradually, no one noticed. Maybe no one was left to spread the word. Maybe I’d have known if one local newspaper, The Riverfront Times, hadn’t replaced its staff with AI robots and the other, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hadn’t downsized into a shadow of its former self.

Antique malls sell serendipity and safeguard memory. There’s no organization, no order, no internet — just life after death. Bound books and free spirits: a return to the past, where possibility lives now that the future has been stolen.

I wander halls of history, radio waves tuned to a dead station. Sometimes a ghost plants an object before me, so I know what to do next. These secondhand store specters have been far more useful than my PhD in providing guidance.

I’m not joking. In 2021, I was in Prairie Archives, a sprawling used bookstore in Springfield, Illinois, browsing in a low-key panic. I had a book to write and no clue what to say. I was sick to death of Trump, sick to death of death, and needed a change.

“I’m going to cover my eyes,” I told my kids. “You two walk me through the store and put me in front of a shelf. Whatever page of the book I open, that’s what my next book is about.”

They did as they were told, guiding me through the maze of aisles and spinning me around for good measure. Eyes closed, I grabbed a book, opened it, and exclaimed “Oh, fuck!”

It was a Hunter S. Thompson essay collection from the 1980s. The page I landed on was about Donald Trump and Iran-Contra villain Adnan Khashoggi.

I bought it and spent the rest of 2021 writing They Knew, a book about real conspiracies from the 1980s and how they are marketed as “conspiracy theories” so facts are never found and justice is never served.

Missouri has no shortage of junk stores. But I wonder what I would have found at the Trading Post if I’d gotten there in time. Maybe something to tell me what to do, because I sure as hell don’t know when my country is dying the same way. No fanfare, no pinpoint. Slow and steady surrender, bit by bit — murder disguised as death.

Murdering the United States until it is so unrecognizable, even the mementos are gone.

*          *          *

“Where were you when JFK was shot?” ask the Boomers.

“Where were you on 9/11?” asks Gen X.

“Where were you when covid hit?” ask the Millennials.

Where were you when America ended, asks Gen Z, whispers freezing in the air, words scrawled in the frost of a window, words too cold to bear.

Words not set in stone — yet.

The USA is on a crime spree against foreign civilians and against its own people. Self-inflicted wounds are nothing new. The US government long ago justified them by deeming the targets — Black Americans, indigenous peoples, different ethnic groups at different times — as not truly American.

But the scope of the current attack is unprecedented. It targets nearly everyone, regardless of party or race or location. It is a controlled demolition led by kleptocrats and billionaires. It is a going-out-of-business sale that Americans are not told is happening — because we are not the buyers, we are the product.

Or, worse, we are in the way.

An election in which one candidate is a seditionist allowed by the other party to run again is not a real election. It is confirmation of sovereignty lost. It is the final act of a play we’ve been forced to watch for years as grifters swindled Americans by assuring them of justice that never came.

Who is writing this play? Liberal pundits say Trump, but he is only the star, which is why they let him do anything, like launch coups. They bring up the Kremlin, but they’re one player in an ensemble. This is foremost a tale of networks. As I said on TV in 2019, “It’s a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.”

I got kicked off TV after that — because transnational organized crime is a taboo topic. Fascism is now acceptable to discuss because fascism implies that the nation-state survives. Ruled by murderous madmen, but still standing.

But the mafia state remains untouchable.

The real plan is to strip the United States down and sell it for parts while trying to convince Americans that it’s their own idea. The easiest way to do this is to feign a partisan war while the two parties work with each other to destroy the very country they swore to protect.

They want you to fight your countrymen to the death so they can steal the little that remains of your life.

The Republicans are the elephant in the room, but the elephant has a parasite. So does the donkey — so does the whole zoo. A parasite burrowed so deep for so long, it knows how to make murder look like suicide.

High-level officials welcome the infection. The wealthy think it gives them powers — in particular, the superpower of impunity. Ordinary Americans die from it, but ordinary Americans are deemed incidental.

The people in charge are not looking to the future but plotting how to destroy it.

The parasite is transnational organized crime. It has many locales — Russia, Saudi Arabia, Silicon Valley, the United Kingdom, Wall Street, Epstein Island; and many accomplices — the FBI, the CIA, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and Big Crime, otherwise known as the American Government.

Our planned demise is supersized. We are still America, after all, for now.

Then there is the country we are not supposed to name: Israel, even though it is the most egregious offender. Israel, which has long served as a point of entry and passageway for transnational organized crime, including the Russian mafia to whom Trump is linked as well as the warmongers backing Harris.

Israel, whose parliament once banned the far-right Kahanists as terrorists, but now lets them determine their country’s course.

In 2022, Joe Biden removed the Kahanists from the US terrorism blacklist. Their extremism didn’t bother him then or now.

Israel has annihilated Gaza. The Israeli military has murdered at least 20,000 Palestinian kids, breaking a universal taboo against deliberately killing children. The Israeli military has no limit to its immorality, illegality, or, in their view, territory.

They invaded Lebanon and proclaimed it part of “Greater Israel.” Israeli Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel will also conquer Jordan and parts of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, in echoes of Israel’s controversial 1982 Yinon Plan, once dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

As they plan annexation and annihilation, Israel funds US seditionists. AIPAC supports the members of Congress who want the United States of America to collapse.

They also fund members of Congress who could curtail collapse but have chosen to let seditionists serve by their side. Very few members of Congress refuse AIPAC money. When they do, AIPAC spends millions to fund an opponent and remove that representative from office.

This is not democracy. This is a hostile takeover: one where bribery, blackmail, nukes, espionage, and religious fanaticism intersect. Israel’s far-right leaders regard the US with open contempt and US officials abet them anyway.

US politicians take Israeli money and the US government gives money to Israel, funding a regional killing spree that will eventually hit home. This is true regardless of who wins the election, since fealty to Israel is the one thing the two parties share.

When Russia threatened the US — funding Republicans through proxies, using bribes and blackmail — and invaded Ukraine, one party, the Democrats, denounced it. They refuse to do the same with Israel, even though the Israeli threat is greater.

We have seen what that threat looks like in Gaza and Lebanon.

Unexplained acquiescence to a genocidal state is why I wake every day fearing America will end.

*          *          *

Every four years we are told that this election may be our last.

We were told that in 2016. Back then, I was a teller, and few believed me. By 2020, people understood the danger and voted to protect democracy. But the assumption was that once in power, Biden would remedy the conditions that allowed a career criminal and his cohort to take power, instead of acting as a de facto accomplice.

Now it’s 2024 and officials are not even pretending to care.

Eight years take a toll. Americans trust each other less, love each other less, blame each other more. People should blame the institutions that betrayed us instead. They do not work for us and they are not sentimental about our survival.

I’m a junk store girl. If I have to live in a secondhand country — one that retains authentic America in faded form — I will, because that America got worn out through love. I will take a sovereign shabby America over whatever shiny pseudo-America the technocrats are devising. I will never back their wars or repeat their lies or surrender my home.

“Nothing lasts forever,” the old man at the Trading Post said. I still don’t know if that’s a threat or a promise.

*          *          *

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* I discuss Route 66, and in particular Native American territories, in depth in my upcoming book THE LAST AMERICAN ROAD TRIP.

Inside the closed Totem Pole Trading Post.

The remains of Route 66.

A nearby spring I visited after my Trading Post and breakfast-shaped geology plan fell through.