The Brits have Bonfires...
...We have 18-Wheelers
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
1/18/01
In the middle of a cold snap in January that sent temperatures plunging below freezing in much of California, and as the state grappled with a major self-inflicted electricity crisis, one fellow decided the only thing for it was to drive a flaming 18-wheeler right up the steps and into the entranceway of the State Capitol.
It was pretty spectacular. Flames raged 60 feet up the side of the building as the truck burned to a roaring metal skeleton. Wide-eyed lawmakers working late to solve the state’s electric crisis by burning lights all night long scurried for the far exits of the building as the place swarmed with cops and investigators, who, understandably enough were worried about it being a part of a larger conspiracy. This being California, it seems likely that hundreds of people a year call up and say they are going to drive a truck filled with flammables into the capitol building, but then they smoke some weed or get a job or something and forget to. Certainly a lot of people with fairly normal and well-adjusted personalities can relate to blowing up the capitol building. There’s just something about the state capitol building that suggests to some people that it ought to be blown up.
Authors Note: At this point in this age of suffocating right-wing PCism masquerading as morality, some perpetually angry sort will start composing a flaming missive, accusing me of encouraging people to blow up the state capitol by joking about it. In the interest of avoiding such mail, and keeping visits from the FBI to a minimum, let me state, without fear or equivocation, that I do not encourage anyone to drive an 18-wheeler up a flight of marble steps and into any historically important state capitol building, even if it’s California’s. If you are thinking about doing that, just knock it off. Right now. If you drive any trucks into any state capitols, there will be no trips to Disneyland for you, young man. I mean it. I can see you’re thinking about it, so just stop. I’m not fooling around. In fact, stop what you’re doing and mail me your driver’s licence, all major credit cards, and any interesting amounts of cash you might have in your wallet. Yes, it’s a pain in the butt for me, but I don’t want you driving into the state capitol. It’s for your own good.
The fellow driving the truck, tentatively identified as one Mike Bowers, was killed in the attack. He was the only casualty. Damage to the capitol building itself was fairly minor, limited to scorching on the outside and some smoke damage inside. According to one witness, he drove around the capitol twice, blasting his horn, before making his fatal plunge up the steps.
A Christian friend of mine, noting this, says that’s where he made his mistake. He only went around the building TWICE, blowing his horn. Had he done it seven times, as prescribed in the Old Testament, those old walls of Jericho would have come tumbling right down, with the state senate meeting late as bonus points.
Hmm. Guy conspires to blow up legislative building, fails, is burned. To someone who spent some formative years in Great Britain, this all sounded awfully familiar.
"Remember, remember, the Fifth of November
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot
There isn’t a reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!"
Let me tell you about Guy Fawkes Day. Fawkes was a conspirator – some think a fall guy – in a plot to blow up England’s parliament building in 1605. He was discovered in the basement of the building with a firebrand and several dozen barrels of gunpowder. This was decidedly suspicious, and English justice, such as it was, moved with a swift surety that would have made George W. Bush groan with envy. Fawkes was burned alive at the stake a couple of days later.
Now, the English, being, as they are, English, could only think of one thing to do with such a gruesome and violent vignette from history. They made a children’s holiday out of it. We kids would go door to door in the fortnight before November 5th, begging "a penny for the old Guy". A "guy" was an effigy. Fawke’s real first name was Guido. But he being dead, nobody thought he would much mind. We would save the pennies (big copper coins the size of silver dollars with Brittanica on the front and George VI or some other monarch on the back) and buy fireworks with them.
On the night of Guy Fawkes day, they light big bonfires ("bone fires") all over the place, and burn the effigies of Fawkes (nobody calls him Guido). There’s potatoes in their jackets in the fire, and fireworks, and it’s all very, very cool. It was my favorite holiday when I was a kid, since it sort of rolls up Halloween and Fourth of July into one deal, and who didn’t like those two holidays when they were kids?
So here we have the makings of a similar holiday here, and with a good, American twist. The guy didn’t use gunpowder. He used an 18-wheeler. I mean, is that the stuff of a good country and western song or what? None of this medieval "Remember, remember" stuff. This is the stuff of Conway Twitty.
It was the entrenched powers of faceless oppression against Everyman and his humble 18-wheeler, Spot. And if Everyman and Spot ended up as bugs on the windshield, at least they had a good cause. Well, maybe they didn’t have a good cause. Maybe the guy was getting instructions from his kitchen toaster. But boy, he sure struck a blow against the powers-that-be, didn’t he? Delayed the Senate by a good two hours, and it might take a couple of weeks to clean up the building. What’s the point of hitting a windshield if you don’t splatter real good?
One guy opined to the press that Bowers had some kind of vendetta going against Governor Gray Davis, one of the blandest and least offensive humans on the planet. The notion that someone has a vendetta against Davis is like hearing that someone has a seething hatred of vanilla ice cream.
Well, ok. The why of what he did it doesn’t really matter. It’s unlikely that anyone asked Guy Fawkes why he wanted to blow up Parliament. He was a Brand X Christian in a Brand Y country, and if the only way an outsider could tell the difference between them was by lifting the tail, it was noble enough to produce doggerel that’s lasted 400 years and a pretty good excuse for squirting off some bottle rockets and getting pissed. If the Brand thing was why Fawkes tried to do it, certainly the notion that he received instructions from his kitchen toaster is no sillier, and it seems pretty clear that standing in a room with a lit torch surrounded by several dozen kegs of gunpowder is no more a reckless disregard for his own safety than piling up marble steps in a semi loaded with incendiaries.
Bowers, whatever his motivations and intents might have been, was certainly no sillier than Fawkes, and celebrating Fawkes hasn’t resulted in any further attempts to blow up parliament, unless you count Hitler, who didn’t celebrate Guy Fawkes. And I’m willing to bet that less than a third of the Brits celebrating Guy Fawkes find the idea of blowing up parliament appealing, compared with California, where, after today’s blackouts, people who still haven’t heard of Mike Bowers would like to blow up the state capitol.
So what the hell? We can’t go around blowing up capitols–it’ll cause talk. So let’s have a party, instead. Let’s have a Michael Bowers day, light off some firecrackers and sing country and western tunes, and remind the politicians that public complacency isn’t absolute and shouldn’t be relied upon. Have some fun, make the leaders vaguely nervous, feel the same sort of vicarious superiority we feel when reading the annual Darwin awards, all without anyone getting hurt.
Works for me.
"Remember, remember, the sixteenth of January..."
Oooh. No, that doesn’t work. I don’t even know if that meter has a name. Iambic decameter, maybe?
Let’s see:
"I opened up my ‘lectric bill, I was really mad,
It cleaned out my savings, every dollar that I had,
I drove I-5 to Sacto, feeling all forlorn,
And drove around that building, leaning on the horn.
I drove around that building twice, no one looked to see
Why any one would circle round as mad as I could be
So I drove right up the marble steps and set off a firestorm
And now I’m dead and so’s my truck...
But at least for now I’m warm!"