What rushes through our veins

I read this a little too quickly last year, but some of its scenes keep cropping up in my head...

In Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein, the search is on for the Secret Constitution of the United States, dragging private detective Michael McGill through all the dark secret places crawling beneath America's red white and blue crust. But despite the prevalence of perversions and addictions there's a bump in the road that sticks with me in this election season:

McGill and his guide Trix travel through the sexual and pharmaceutical byways of the nation and eventually the clues take them to Las Vegas, to the newly-opened Freedom Hotel. The Freedom is shaped like Rio De Janeiro's giant Jesus, but in the Vegas version Jesus is dressed in an Uncle Sam suit. And all the flag-waving grows tackier from there. It's the kind of a place where they'd have red, white, and blue toilet paper.

Trix gets upset with the receptionist and McGill drags her to the elevator:

"These people just work here. They didn't build it." explains McGill... "you want to kill people for being dumb?"

Trix answers in the affirmative, so McGill continues:

"Look," I said. "You don't get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you've got America. You didn't vote for the president, right?"

"Fuck no."

"No, I bet she did. Half the people in America did. More than half the people in America believe in God. You don't get to just ignore that. I know you like telling me about new stuff and showing me that there's a whole other society in America and all that shit. So now I'm showing you: this is what the rest of the people have, okay?"

And this is not the point of the book, it's just one of the points along the way. Read it for yourself.

We're one side of things from others, but if all we see is our own truth, then how are we better than those "narrow-minded idiots" we see skulking around on the "Other Side"?

Flipping through channels: Bill O'Reilly had on some woman who was a born-again Conservative of some kind, shaking her head that she found she was lying to herself all the time she was "Liberal" and she couldn't live with the lies anymore, so she became saved by Conservatism. I don't know who she was and I don't really care: she could have been someone interviewed by Keith Olbermann about how they couldn't live with the lies of being a Conservative. The sincerity was the same.

This isn't mathematics where only one answer is possible, this is people-stuff where answers are neither neat nor permanent.