Welcome to Boomland

Will 2024 be the year America explodes?

In the bootheel of Missouri a bald eagle gazes out at a packed parking lot from a storefront painted like a giant American flag. The eagle is faded and frozen, forever free from flight or fight. “God Bless America”, it says, but this phrase is an afterthought. The real invitation is bold-face and blood-red.

“WELCOME TO BOOMLAND.”

We walk through the doors to our sanctuary.

Boomland is an experience, not a destination. Technically, it is a fireworks emporium, but it is so much more. I like to go to Boomland before the Fourth of July and watch my countrymen load up on Patriot Sticks and explosives with names like “America’s Elite”.

As someone who routinely suppresses an urge to blow up America’s Elite, I have always understood the appeal of Boomland.

Boomland is a popular stop for anyone driving between St. Louis and New Orleans with an excess of cash and a deficit of discernment. Lately it has branched out beyond fireworks to challenge its Missouri road trip rivals, Ozarkland and the Uranus Fudge Factory, with acres of Americana.

There is nothing one cannot buy, or should buy, at Boomland. As a result, I own many items dedicated primarily to the greatness of Boomland.

I have a Boomland hat and a Boomland magnet and a Boomland keychain and a Boomland mug decorated with a firework-filled sky and an American flag bracketed by IN GOD WE TRUST and UNITED WE STAND. The bottom of the mug has another familiar phrase: MADE IN CHINA.

If I had to pick the most American place in America, it would probably be the 30,000-square foot McDonald’s straddling all four lanes of I-44 in Vinita, Oklahoma (I explain why in my upcoming book, The Last American Road Trip). But the runner-up would probably be Boomland.

Boomland lies where the worst American earthquake east of the Rockies hit in the winter of 1811-1812. This is the New Madrid Seismic Zone, named for the small town of New Madrid (that’s New MAD-rid to you, hombre, in the region where Versailles is pronounced “Ver-SAILS”).

The 8.2 magnitude quake transformed the topography of the sparsely populated, newly purchased Louisiana Territory. It was so violent that it caused the Mississippi River to run backwards. It was so massive it made church bells ring on the eastern shore. It terrified southern Missouri’s few residents, a smattering of settlers and indigenous tribes, who saw in it a dark omen of the American future.

They appear to have been right.

There is an inherent violence to the Missouri bootheel, the result of two centuries spent dwelling in dread. The question of whether a quake of that magnitude will hit this region again is not “if”, but “when”.

When the sequel arrives, large parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, Illinois, and other states will be destroyed. Memphis and St. Louis will collapse. Bridges will fall, water will be undrinkable, and tens of thousands of Americans – hundreds of thousands? millions? – will die.

In 2008, the US government announced that they had no plan to help Americans when the earthquake comes, and they were not going to bother to create one.

This admission seemed shocking at the time. But I am used to government declarations of casual murderous apathy now.

*          *          *

In Boomland, they sell masks for the ongoing pandemic. They carry emergency equipment for climate disasters. They acknowledge that these problems exist. Boomland is ostensibly doing more to protect Americans than the government is. It sells bumper stickers that attest to this fact.

“I Love My Country,” one says. “It’s My Government I’m Afraid Of!”

There was a time when I would dismiss this sentiment as reactionary, the kind of thing Reaganites manufacture to get citizens to reject the premise that government is necessary.

That time passed at some point between the millionth covid death and the first unpunished attempted coup. I don’t embrace the sentiment but accept it as an unpleasant truth. Loving one’s country but fearing one’s government is not reactionary, but a reasonable reaction.

There are no officials whom Americans can trust in times of trouble, and a whole lot of them who act like they want us dead.

In the era of continual catastrophe overseen by oligarchs, The American People are seen as a scourge. We are too broke to provide a lucrative tax base to fund the latest overseas genocide. We are too poor to buy our way into industries of influence. We wouldn’t want to, anyway, working alongside all those suits swallowed into a soft-focus death cult. Watch good folks join an operation like that and you’ll see a little piece of the human soul die on live TV.

We are the Aftermath People, stubbornly surviving one cataclysm after another. We use precious resources and inhabit valuable land that hedge funds keep trying to buy. Life expectancy plunged enough that the government can boast about low unemployment: of course there are ample jobs when so many workers are abruptly dead or disabled. But it did not fall with the finality they crave. Our existence is an obstacle for the hoarder plutocrats who are also primary donors to both parties.

The Aftermath People serve no purpose -- except to each other, except to our fellow countrymen. Our country is the United States of America. It is a country that does not seem to matter much to the people running it. But it means the world to me.

There is a homespun ingenuity I see everywhere that is often mistaken for stupidity, but it’s the inchoate stumble of American survival.

I may be an American Useless Eater, but Boomland has a sale on beef jerky and walnut fudge and apple butter. I can stock up on sundries and frills. I can buy a wooden plaque on a rope that says “Blessed” and then blow up a piece of the sky with an explosive called One Bad Mother.

I didn’t do any of those things this time round, but I like knowing that I can. I pledge allegiance to Boomland, and the republic for which it stands, down by the banks of the Mississippi, where no one harbors the illusion that things will be okay.

*          *          *

At midnight on January 1, 2024, I wake to the sound of gunfire. I am home in St. Louis, and this is how the city celebrates the new year. I live in the most violent city in America, and I am a master at the St. Louis guessing game of “guns or fireworks”.

I am glad to have developed this skill, because I fear I will need it in 2024. People keep asking me what’s coming, and I do not have an answer. But I know that violence is likely.

For a decade, we have been groomed for this moment – not only through cruel policies, but through a kind of psychic torpor that begs you to abandon your morality. And with your morality, to abandon your fellow man.

And, in the end, to destroy him, and in doing so, destroy what is left of yourself.

The Trump and Biden administrations acclimatized Americans to mass death through the spread of covid, about which each administration lied and hid public health data. They are still hiding essential data about the long-term effects, the pervasiveness of long covid, and the means we could take to protect ourselves. Officials have mocked calls for empathy. Their followers have mocked the dead.

This is not a partisan phenomenon. I have seen atrocious behavior across the political spectrum. No one deserves to be its recipient.

The next step after acclimatizing a population to mass death is acclimatizing them to mass murder. Americans are used to this here at home, but our violence pales in comparison to the bloodshed we fund abroad. In Gaza, Israel has murdered over 10,000 Palestinian children and displaced 1.8 million out of two million people in a genocide funded by the United States government.

Extremists in the Israeli government have declared their genocidal intent overtly. Their retaliatory attacks do nothing to stop Hamas’s terrorism or save Israeli hostages. It is mass child murder, accompanied by the slaughter of over ten thousand other Palestinian civilians and a cultural genocide of monuments, mosques, and museums. It took a mere three months for Israel to accomplish this.

If Americans will accept these acts of mass death and mass murder as normal, there is no limit to what they will accept in 2024. Especially when they are frightened, as they have reason to be. Especially when they are enraged, and deceived, and carrying pain they are afraid to admit exists for fear it will be greeted with scorn and disbelief.

I live in the region where the most destructive earthquake in American history may take place – in my lifetime, or in the far future. The threat has always been there, always waiting. The scariest fault line lies in Middle America and most people don’t know it exists. It is here, where the rivers of history collide, that the Big One waits to push us through the cracks.

It feels like all of America lives on this fault line, like we are all waiting for the pent-up energy of the past decade to explode. But the government flips the fault line into a line about our faults. They recite it endlessly. If something bad happens, it is never due to institutional failure. It’s because we didn’t work hard enough, vote hard enough, prepare hard enough.

They are looking for scapegoats as we struggle to stay alive, dreading the inevitable crash. They are looking for scapegoats, and they are finding you. They are finding potential friends that they will tell you are natural enemies. If you hear rhetoric like this in the media, or from the government, reject it. This is the rhetoric of operatives seeking to gain power through your violence. It will increase as we near the election.

People keep asking me what to do. On New Year’s Day, I did an interview with Jared Yates Sexton in which we discussed what lies ahead in 2024, and how to handle it. We agreed that Election Day is a neon-lit stop on a very long road, one whose shadowed passages are shunned for flashier terrain.

But it is those dark winding roads that require the most attention. This is a struggle for the soul. It always was.

You must refuse to accept atrocities as normal or adjust your morality downward, despite the new limitations of old ways to fight back. We live now under the digital surveillance of Cop Cities and AI. We live in the time of streamlined treason, of sovereignty for sale.

Welcome to Boomland.

There is no precedent, so it is incumbent upon you to create one. It is a moral precedent: an itinerary of what you will and will never accept, of what kind of person you want to be, of what kind of country you want to create.

Of what you want to build from the rubble if everything comes tumbling down.

*          *          *

On the highway home from Boomland, fields of cotton flicker past like piano keys. The bootheel is where Missouri most feels like the Deep South. Its population is impoverished and diverse: a region of Black small towns lying south of the Trail of Tears. This is still the road of the Delta Blues, a place where people expect pain, and sing it loud.

We pass a billboard saying, “Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.” I do not know who put it up. It could have been anyone. Bible-thumpers, end-times preppers, fascists who think they are anti-fascists, anti-fascists fighting for freedom.

Dreamers and doomers, it’s hard to tell these days.

But you cannot argue with the message. Its logic is so impeccable and universal it gives me hope that we will do more than survive.

In a time when empathy is treated as an affront, there is something comforting about a simple roadside proclamation that evil is evil -- and that it is good to do good.

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Outside the New Madrid Historical Museum, which I highly recommend for a visit

You know you want one