Virginia - Slim and Narrow

Virginia is a marsh where all of the past and future soldiers congregate in death and bog[god]. One could envisage a scenario out in the sticks, where both the Islamic Jihadists and the Confederate militias practice their skirmishes in between the highway belts and tobacco farms, narrowly missing confrontations until the day when they both have God sitting high and mighty on their shoulders.

The idea doesn’t seem so obsolete. After all, this is God’s country where the twin pillars of the American economy stand side-by-side in the name of God and Dollar: the miliary and American Tobacco. We can pinpoint geographically where the majority of the world’s cancers and smart bombs germinate. These two industries – along with dairy farming – gave the Commonwealth of Virginia (population 7.5 million) a Gross Domestic Product of US$327 billion for the first year of the war. War is big business for Virginia and of course everyone needs to smoke in war. What else will they do? Army rations usually consist of a tin of Spam, a stick of gum, condensed milk and five packs of Winston.

American flags drip onto the asphalt of the ‘Old Dominion’. It perpetrates so much of the landscape that one may confuse it as a natural fauna. Driving under the infinite sky – flat from horizon to horizon – is like driving under God’s open wound. It’s easy to see how one can lose themself here, then later find their soul down in a whiskey den, at the altar of a church or conscripted into the marines.

The long arms of interstate extend out among the open marshes, past fathers and forefathers of the brave and stolen. Is the Underground Railroad still in practice?