Know what the American way is? Finding someone to blame. It’s true. You out working a construction job and you drop a hammer on your foot? Hell, sue the company. That’s a ten-thousand-dollar foot. You’re white and you can’t get a job? Blame affirmative action. Can’t get one and you’re black? Blame the white man. Or the Koreans. Hell, blame the Japanese, everyone else does. Fucking whole country’s filled with nasty, unhappy, confused, pissed off people, and not one of them with the brain power to honestly deal with their situation. They talk about simpler times – before there was AIDS and crack and gangs and mass communication and satellites and airplanes and global warming – like it’s something they could possibly get back to. And they can’t figure out why they’re so fucked up, so they find someone to blame. (…) I mean, hell, why bother looking in the mirror at your own damn self when there’s so many other people out there who you ‘know’ you’re better than.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it’s simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beach-front properties and listen to the surf so they won’t have to hear the screams of the drowning. They tell us it’s about race, and we believe them. And they call it a “democracy,” and we nod our heads, so pleased with ourselves. We blame the Socias, we occasionally sneer at the Paulsons, but we always vote for the Sterling Mulkerns. And in occasional moments of quasi-lucidity, we wonder why the Mulkerns of this world don’t respect us. They don’t respect us because we are their molested children. They fuck us morning, noon, and night, but as long as they tuck us in with a kiss, as long as they whisper into our ears, “Daddy loves you, Daddy will take care of you,” we close our eyes and go to sleep, trading our bodies, our souls, for the comforting veneers of “civilization” and “security”, the false idols of our twentieth-century wet dream.