My walk through the most dangerous city in America
“I’m goin’ to Jackson, I’m gonna mess around, Yeah, I’m goin’ to Jackson, Look out Jackson town”
The top is down on our convertible, it’s 100 degrees (fahrenheit), and the stereo is blasting Johnny Cash’s Jackson as we drive into Jackson, Mississippi.
My mate Pete and I have been driving through the deep South … otherwise known as Trump country – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, (Sweet Home) Alabama, and finally Nashville, Tennessee – for a work conference (well, that’s the excuse we gave our wives anyway).
We hired a Mustang, of course. It may be billed as the quintessential American muscle car, but in reality it has about as much grunt as Joe Biden before his morning nap.
We’ve also been adhering to a strict American roadside-diner diet of approximately 11,000 calories a day. After a week of bacon-on-bacon, my pre-diabetes has made my hands swell up so bad that I can’t remove my wedding ring.
Yee-haw!
We parked the Pony out the front of the Mississippi Capitol building – one of the grandest and most beautiful political buildings I’ve seen in my life – and took a walk downtown to stretch our legs.
Though looking back on it now, that turned out to be a big mistake …
Welcome to the Trump road trip.
Right now it feels like America is in the grips of a binge-worthy Netflix show:
I’m calling it, ‘The final season of the United States’.
This show has it all … an assassination attempt. Pornstars. A coup against a (sleeping) President. And the star of the show is an overweight, 78-year-old white man with a spray-on tan.
Everywhere I went I asked people about the election.
And everywhere I went I got the same response:
A big ole cup of nutt’in.
Asking Americans about the election seemed to generate the same visceral response as that creepy in-law you’ve only met a handful of times, who stretches out their arms and says “where’s my hug”?
No-one wanted to touch it.
They may be the United States, but they are a deeply divided people. Nearly every person I spoke to admitted they’d lost friends based on the tribe they supported.
“It’s just so scary and … exhausting”, sighed Tyrone, my Uber driver.
Now I’ll tell you what’s scary – the streets of Jackson.
We didn’t know it, but it turns out that Jackson is actually a very dangerous city.
In fact, it’s the most dangerous place in America, based on the number of homicides, which seems like a very appropriate yardstick for danger.
“Something about this place doesn’t feel good,” I said to Pete.
Pete pointed to a car that drove by us: “Maybe it’s the bullet holes in the doors?”
“Let’s get outta here now!” we both said in unison.
Snap!
Jackson has been called a ‘failed state’ … a place where the government no longer functions.
Again, that’s not hyperbole.
After decades of mismanagement, and years of warnings about the city’s crumbling infrastructure, it all came to a head in 2022.
The city's water supply was badly contaminated and shut off, leaving its residents without drinking water (or flushing toilets) through the heat of the Summer. Even today, many residents live with brown water that smells of sewage and they refuse to drink it.
There are similarities to what’s going on on the national stage. Throughout this election the Democrats have read passionately from teleprompters at Hollywood-style rallies about the pressing problems the country faces … which they haven’t addressed in the last three-and-a-half years. While Trump has spent a lot of time arguing about the size of his … crowds. Neither has given much time to discussing the actual policies that would benefit the American people.
How does the show end?
Well, no-one knows, of course.
The only thing we do know is that Trump is incapable of losing (even if he loses, again) … and that is the ultimate cliffhanger that keeps us all watching.
Tread Your Own Path!
P.S. The night before we flew out, we went to a bar in Hollywood and met a young rooster who was crowing about the fact that he’d marched on Capitol Hill. He swore that Biden was already dead – “Weekend at Bernie’s style, man”. Though I think he’d had one too many Harvey wallbangers.
Another barfly piped up and said that Kamala has it in the bag. He reckoned that in the next few weeks Joe Biden will have a medical ‘turn’ and announce that he has to stand down as the sitting President, which will officially make Kamala Harris the first black woman President – and she’ll ride that honeymoon period all the way to election day.
To add to the weirdness, TV star Sofia Vergara was standing right behind us, patiently waiting for a drink.
God Bless America!