Ann Coulter and the Quest for the Larry Craig Memorial Bathroom Stall

by Pa Rock
Tourist

It has been a long, hard day on the road. I woke up at my apartment in Goodyear fifteen hours ago, drove to Phoenix, caught a flight to Minneapolis,and flew from there to Kansas City. Carla met me at the airport in Kansas City and gave me a tour of the places here that are important in her life. As we talked and got reacquainted, forty years of our divergent lives slipped quietly away. We capped off the evening at a restaurant called the Peachtree that specializes in soul food and soulful jazz. Carla's good friend, Millie Edwards, was singing there along with a very talented keyboard player and bassist. I could have listened to that sweet music all night long!

Today was my first visit to the great state of Minnesota, brief though it was. There was a blanket of snow on the ground that was truly beautiful from the air, especially to my old Ozark eyes that have been deprived of the sight of snow for a couple of years now. I saw lots of barren, white countryside as we were descending. It reminded me of flying over the tundra on a flight out of Sweden a few years back.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport does not appear to be too large, though I did hear a couple of overhead pages about boarding for the Tokyo flight. One of my main objectives while there was to try and locate the Larry Craig Memorial Bathroom Stall. But try as I might, I couldn't find any signs pointing to the most famous tourist attraction at the MSP Airport - or probably in the entire state of Minnesota for that matter! I'm sure there must at least be a brass marker somewhere, but I missed it. Oh well, maybe I'll break down and ask for directions during my return flight next Sunday.

I did cruise through a couple of bookstores at the airport - a weakness of mine. One of the things that I enjoy doing in small bookstores is finding books by Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly and turning them around or around and over. When I am in larger bookstores, my thing is to take Coulter and O'Reilly books and hide them. I get a kick out of hearing befuddled sales clerks telling people, "That's odd. We had two-hundred-and-fifty copies of that book just before lunch."

Ann Coulter, a bitter, right-wing opinionator who is to journalism what Nancy Grace is to law enforcement (completely useless), has a new piece of trash out entitled Guilty, which she has been shamelessly hawking on any media outlet that will put up with her. (You undoubtedly heard about her flap with the Today Show where she finally bullied her way onto the program.) One of the Minnesota bookstores today had just a few copies of Guilty, and I quickly turned them all around so that Annie's face wouldn't unduly distress the harried travellers who wandered in for a candy bar or newspaper. There was another bookstore, however, that had at least a hundred copies of her latest bound doggerel forming a ceiling-to-floor wall of fear. I debated what action to take and finally left it alone. That is another challenge that will have to wait until the return flight next Sunday!

Prairie Awful

by Pa Rock

Earlier this week a quiet young man was stabbed to death and beheaded as he was traveling across the Canadian prairie on a Greyhound bus. The victim was 22-year-old Tim McLean, a carny who was en route home to visit his parents, sisters, and little brother in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He had boarded the bus in Edmonton, Alberta, the site of his most recent carnival employment.

Also boarding in Edmonton was Vince Weiguang Li, a forty-year-old newspaper carrier who worked for, among other papers, The Edmonton Sun. Li was the attacker in this bizarre crime. According to witnesses he initially sat in the front of the bus. After a stop in Manitoba where he stepped outside and had a cigarette and some polite conversation with a lady passenger, he re-boarded the bus and moved to the back where he sat down next to McLean - who was dozing with his head resting on the window.

Twelve miles outside of Portage La Prairie, Manitoba, while passengers were napping or watching "The Legend of Zorro" on their seat monitors, the air was cut with a "bloodcurdling scream" coming from behind them. Turning in horror, they saw the attacker standing next to his victim and repeatedly stabbing him in the chest with a "Rambo" hunting knife. The rear section of the bus was quickly turning bright red from the grisly arterial spray. The driver managed to get the bus stopped, and the passengers fled in panic.

The driver, a passenger, and a passing truck driver went back on the bus to see if anything could be done for the victim, and to attempt to subdue the attacker. As they entered they saw Li on the floor trying to cut off McLean's head. The driver managed to disable the bus before the knife-wielding attacker left his business on the floor and rushed at them, forcing the three would-be rescuers off of the bus. The three were able to barricade Li on the bus until the police arrived. During that standoff, the killer brought McLean's head up to the front of the bus to show the terrified on-lookers.

Those were the facts as gleaned from The Edmonton Sun and Yahoo News. Those who are desirous of more gory details should park themselves in front of any cable news show. I'm sure that somewhere tonight Nancy Grace and Geraldo are embroiled in a bidding war for the severed head, so there will be more "news."

This was the story of a nexus in the lives of two people. One was obviously psychotic, probably hearing voices - Jesus, the Queen, Bob Marley - who knows. His background may have included extensive drug use, childhood trauma, and lapsed mental health care. (Oddly, he had no criminal history.) Chances are good that he had been prescribed anti-psychotic drugs but wasn't taking them. Thousands of men and women just like him are sleeping on America's sidewalks tonight, and more than a few are zoned out, going nowhere on a Greyhound bus.

The person whose life path crossed that of Vince Li at the worst possible moment was a slight young man, roughly seventy pounds lighter than his assailant. Friends say Tim McLean had never had a fight in his life, and he usually tried to avoid contact with others. When he did socialize, it was over a card game or an all-night game of Risk. He worked the carnival circuit because he liked to travel and see different places. All that he wanted that last afternoon of his life was to catch some shut-eye before he got back to his family in Winnipeg.

Tim McLean and Vince Weiguang Li had no history between them and they exchanged no words, but they will forever be linked in an indelible bloodstain on the Canadian prairie. McLean didn't expect to die that day, and Vince Li probably didn't expect to kill, but something happened in the mind of one that ended the life of the other, and the peaceful prairie will forever be mocked with that awfulness of that happenstance encounter.