If I only had a Brain?

We've been driving across Kansas for a few days now.  It's surprising in many ways, very picturesque, full of museums, rolling hills, grasslands, delicious restaurants.  I don't know how to say this, however, about the people I have talked to.  They don't think in a linear, critical fashion. Their minds jump from one subect to another with no real sense of how it got there.  I know what you are thinking: that sounds like Adina, right?  But no, because despite my eccentricities, I have formal training in analytic philosophy and critical rationalism.  I know I can be a bit emotionally immoderate at times, but often this attitude is based on actual factual situations I have observed and then blown out of proportion.  Kansans, on the other hand, don't seem to take facts into consideration at all.

We started out in Dodge City.  This is, as you may know, the home of "Gunsmoke," the TV show.  Well, not really, actually.  It was mostly filmed in California, but they don't care.  Everyone has to become an honorary citizen of Dodge City, whether they were ever here or not.  Here's a fella we met at breakfast.  He just walked in and started talking to us about Gunsmoke, and how Dennis Hopper was not a nice guy because he wouldn't come back and be made an honorary citizen of Dodge,

and how he himself was delivered by a US Marshal in the back of an ambulance.  I thought he was one of those old timey storytellers, but then he handed us a card that said he was an honorary deputy Marshal of Dodge City.  The below that it said he was a retired Marshal.  Had he really ever been in law enforcement?  Matt says he was a retired Marshal, but I think he was just playing dress up.  All I know is that he talked about Gunsmoke as if it were not a show, but a real series of events that actually happened.  He watches it twice a day.  (I know some of you readers do watch Gunmoke quite regularly, but I don't see you walking around into people's guest houses talking about it night and day).

Consider this painting, which I have now seen displayed in three places in Kansas, including the Eisenhower Museum.

Kansans love this painting.  At first I thought it was like those paintings of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Elvis playing pool.  But then I realized, wait a second, the Bushes are still alive!  If you look at this painting for too long, your mind starts playing tricks on you.  Is Abraham Lincoln telling a joke?  What joke could it be?  Something about the Civil War?  Something about his assassination?  Maybe they are making a crack about Nixon being tricky, or lying about his hand.  You tell me.  It makes me crazy to look at that painting.  But then, Kansans like to jump to non-sequiturs instead of following a train of thought.  For example:

President Eisenhower was really lovely.  Look at that smile.

Kansas landscapes are lovely, too, and haunting.  

Paul Raymond used to live in this house

John Brown used this sword to hack a few folks to death

I was at the state capital, reading the words of John Brown from 1859, where he says the crimes of this guilty land can only be purged with blood.  He was talking about the horrors of slavery.  A man next to me said, "You should tell that to Obama."  What?  WHAT?  

Depite the pride Kansas takes in its schools, they don't really seem to care about facts too much.  They just make weird leaps from one image, impression, or item to another.  I wish I could explain it better, but my brain has started to work (or not work) like a true Kansan. Which I am, having been born in Wichita.  Plus, I have been eating a lot of barbecue ribs.  This may have affected me in some unknown way.  Having studied philosophical logic, I thought I would make up a new formula.

Here are some examples of modus kansas.   

1) Obama has dark skin and I don't like or understand what he says.  Arabs have dark skin and I don't like or understand them.  Therefore, Obama is an Arab.  

2) The Bible says God made the earth in 7 days. The Bible says that only the Bible is true. Therefore, God made the earth in 7 days.

3) I talked to three people from Kansas who were spaced out.  Therefore, just about everyone in Kansas thinks in this way.

It was wonderful to see Paul Raymond's boyhood home, the library where he read all the books twice (It was the old original Carnegie Library, not the newer one that was built in 1969), and the high school he attended.  I can see why he always loved Kansas: the Flint Hills, the iconic old schoolhouses.  But I can also see why he didn't live there.  Tomorrow it's on to Oklahoma.