On Truthiness, Wiki-Ality, and Driving on a Treadmill

Abstract

THE DRIVE between Lame Deer and Havre is a long one. Montana is a big state. Lame Deer is the largest city on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and home to its government. I'd come to the reservation for a couple of meetings that morning and had to be in Havre, more than 400 miles north, later the same day. What's more, I'd just flown from Kentucky to Montana the day before and was suffering a serious case of jet lag. Pulling away from Chief Dull Knife College, I knew it was going to be a long, hard day. trick would be to keep my mind busy, I thought. At first, that was easy. drive west from Lame Deer toward the Little Big Horn Battlefield and the Crow Reservation is a beautiful one. As I drove through the green rolling hills, I imagined Custer and his men riding foolishly into the history books, Sitting Bull and his men shaking their heads in disbelief at the great military genius, and the Crow scouts begging Custer to rethink his plan of action. Yet onward he went, too few men in an ill-advised action against an underestimated enemy. It felt eerily familiar. After about 45 miles, a sign welcomed me to the Crow Reservation. Soon after, I drove past the entrance to the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Park. Stopping to fill my car with gas before I began the hard drive north, I noted that people were still winding down from Crow Fair, which had ended the day before. This annual event brings more than 80,000 folks to the Crow Agency for five days of celebration, camping in tipis, parades, rodeo, and powwow. With a super-gigantic black coffee and a 16-ounce can of Wired nestled snugly into the cup holder at my side and a fresh bottle of NoDoz on the dashboard, I headed north. Interrupted only briefly by Billings and a left turn in Round Up, the road seldom seems to veer more than a couple of feet to the right or left. While it is beautiful country, you've pretty much seen all there is to see within the first dozen miles north of the Billings city limits. road just goes on and on, with the only break in the monotony in the form of an occasional car speeding past. There is just so much my mind can do to create interesting thoughts about wheat fields and cows, and the coffee, Wired, and NoDoz weren't doing the trick. I decided to give the radio a try. Out there in the middle of nowhere, it picked up only one station, and, just my luck, it couldn't be NPR, an oldies station, rap, country, or even a greatest-hits-of-polka station. No. It was talk radio. And not just any talk radio. It was Rush Limbaugh. Soon Rush began to explain that minimum-wage workers are just uninspired and lazy--or they are high school students trying to earn a little spending money. Hey, even in the throes of boredom, I have standards, I thought, as I turned the radio off. As I drove on, I began to wonder whether the car was really moving. speedometer read 75 mph. I was pretty sure the wheels were turning, and I could see that the gas gauge was slowly moving downward, so I seemed to be using fuel. But in front of me, behind me, and as far as I could see out both side windows, nothing changed--just endless golden fields of wheat. Maybe it was a hallucination from an overdose of caffeine, but I began to wonder if I was driving on a treadmill. Although I was distracted by that thought for a few minutes, I soon decided to relax my high radio-listening standards and tuned back in. Soon Rush turned the microphone over to Sean Hannity, who announced that his special guest for the day would be Ann Coulter. A few days earlier I'd heard Coulter explain that Bill Clinton was gay--a fact he certainly went to great lengths to hide. She had also posited that the Jersey Girls (widows of the 9/11 attack) would probably have ended up divorced if their husbands had lived. She had no facts to support her statements, of course, but in her world, none are needed. Holy yikes, my mind screamed as the theme song from The Twilight Zone played in my head. …