We Found The Liberal In South Dakota

Protect Wayne, everybody, Wayne is precious cargo!

As the completist Wonkette reader knows, my husband and I (everybody wish Shy a happy FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY today, oh my lord) have picked up sticks from Suddenly Lunatic Montana and beat feet with our family for the Golden Dream by the Sea, wait no that is California, we have beat feet for Detroit Vs. Everybody.

Fuk yeh.

We stopped, as people in Wonkesbago do, at a thousand-acre bison ranch in the prettiest spot in South Dakota (they exist), where the "Harvest Host" (vineyards and farms where you can stay free with the assumption that you'll buy something. I love buying somethings from local people! It is perfect! This is not a paid endorsement but I would absolutely accept one!) put us in the prettiest meadow known to man, and the girls were happy and the dogs were happy and we were happy and the next day I found some off-brand Frontline and now all the ticks are dead.

And what was I doing moving to Detroit? Same thing I do everywhere, Brain, run a liberal political news website! "Well you're the first one of those [he meant liberals] who's ever come through here!" he said. Nah, we're just the first one's who've ever said so, I said and I winked like a jolly old elf and then bought two bison ribeyes, two kinds of jerky, and barbecue sauce with honey from his bees. We didn't need the straight honey from his bees though, we have honey from our own. And had he lived here all his life? I asked the bison ranch fellow. Since 1909, when his great granddad got the land, he told me. Was South Dakota a state then? I queried. It was a state, but that's when the county got opened up. Ohhhhh I told my husband later, his great granddad stole the land from the Indians on the Rosebud reservation, and lo, it was true. 

I told the fellow where we would be stopping (for free!) the next day, at a sculpture park in Montrose. And oh, how that fellow tried not to sneer, as it wouldn't be entirely polite and I hadn't even accused his great granddad of genocide. (That he knew of.)

"It's ... it's like a junkyard sculpture place," he told me. "My wife actually knows the guy!" And if that weren't the most ignorant thing I've heard since I left Montana and stopped talking to my erstwhile neighbor, Sen. Greg Hertz, I don't know what is.

Because for one thing, it had me looking forward to a junkyard sculpture place, with presumably at the LEAST a pyramid of old tires, and there was only pristine acreage, where Wayne (the sculptor) and his blind dog Bambino (the poet) hand-watered flowers they planted, hauling around plastic jugs. (Not Bambino, he has no thumbs.) And there was massive sculpture and small sculpture and bohemian women dancing and poems, each poem stark and mournful and deep and fucked up and "creepy" my daughter said. One was your typical Easter Island head with lips sewn shut and eyes sewn shut and the shortest poem, about the wise man not seeing evil or hearing evil, like the monkeys. "To become wise," it read, "you must first be mangled."

Yes, daughter, it is creepy and it is perfect and it is the last thing you expect at a tourist trap. And the bison ranch fellow would never understand it.

And of course I talked to Wayne, and we talked about being liberal and getting the fuck out, and for all his poems about loss and isolation and how each choice you make precludes another choice, he has planted himself like a flower hand-watered from a plastic jug in South Dafuckingkota, and he sits there in the heat and the wind and the sun and talks to the tourists and sells them a T-shirt, and he's got some online friends of likeminded SD weirdos (HE CLAIMS EXIST) and I invited him to Wonkette, where y'all are weirdos, I believe that was a direct quote just kidding of course it was.

Ballerina 

Dancing women and pre-women 

Please keep Wonkette going forever, if you are able!