In the Land of Wrong Names

Comedy and Colonialism and Fighting Through Cynicism

The more I learn about the United States the more I feel like a legal alien. Steinbeck said something about barbarism to decadence with no culture in between. Driving our cars on pavement laid over native trails, past billboard manipulated memories, feels less like home than it once did. When you wrap your head around how recent this destructive theft of territories happened, it’s difficult to unsee. But everyone who witnesses the contours of these gorgeous lands, from sea to shining sea, falls in love. Through the airport windows in Bozeman, Montana I view snow dusted mountains and think to myself, God it’s beautiful country. It’s God’s Country, but whose Gods?

I’ve been travelling for comedy the latter half of this year. Being in the airports feels absurdly like a hostage situation, kidnapped by consumer exhaustion. The need to travel to coerce enough personal capital out of the territories to survive. Plastic wrapped sandwiches, microwaved scrambled eggs, overworked toilets. You pay for a flight then get sold credit cards 30,000 feet in the sky.

On the connecting plane ride home from Denver, I watched 40 minutes of the “Lakota Nation vs United States” documentary. Sometimes real messages slip through the arrogance of corporate programming. I’ve been reading Indigenous history all year and this doc was a visual companion that added layers. Made me remember filmmaking as extra resonance rather than throwaway propaganda. I finished the rest on my couch today.

My wife came home from work shortly after and told me I seemed depressed. The other night we laid awake in the middle of when we should’ve both been asleep and she asked “Do you think we’re gonna be ok…globally?” I laughed and she laughed at how not ok it seems. We’ve been watching a genocide the past year in Palestine while living in the resulting patriotism of one a few generations advanced. We behave in this society to continue, to contemplate, imagine change, make little actions toward the world we’d prefer. In our downtime we suffer for what we are willing to know.

Can you really be sober if you spend 8 hours a day on your phone? Do you ever hide from humanity in your home only to stare at the worst of it on your phone? Can you really be sane if you operate in an insane world? A corporation is a psychopathic entity and our daily lives bend to the collection of their ice cold wills. Monsters thrive in monstrous systems. But they are not special, the monsters, new ones are always there to become further engorged host bodies. The rest of us remain threatened by their alternatives.

My family has been here a few generations and it’s no wonder they’ve all been suffering. You don’t find happiness oblivious to a curse. In the documentary I was reminded of how the invaders overcompensate. A 4th of July fireworks show at Mt. Rushmore in the sacred Black Hills. Mount Rushmore itself. The documentary highlighting the perversion of settler propaganda and the dignity of the Oceti Sakowin people who have fought to maintain their sane conversations with the land.

In Bozeman last weekend to perform, snow remained in slushy patches off sidewalks and I thought of the cold towns my mom left Southern California for in her middle age. How, now, I’m thinking of doing the same. The wandering dissatisfaction of settler DNA, with little to show materially for the trauma. I tried not to slip on the ice with no thread on the bottoms of my leather shoes. Don’t crack your head before the comedy show I warned myself.

A traveling joke salesman, hocking my wares and awares and unawares.

Steak, Sprite, brussel sprouts with bacon, fries, a brownie, dark chocolate squares at the Ted Turner owned restaurant when I first arrived. I didn’t know it had been his, or I wouldn’t have gone. The Hearst fortune, I learned in the documentary, was built on stolen gold from the Black Hills. All billionares earn their titles through theft.

In Montana, the land was so close to its previous state it was easy to see how its been tarnished by its current nation state. I made a joke at both shows about how the settler violence still vibrates a little louder here. Those mountains, open plains, that gas station shouldn’t be there. Herds of buffalo replaced by the quiet stampedes of Tesla Cybertrucks. I saw one on the walk from my motel to the shows and made a wish. I wished to never see one again.

The nice lady working at the hotel chocolate stand where I bought the brownie asked what my comedy was like. Cynical right now I guess, the world is dark. She said don’t I know it. Both shows were fun, the crowds were honest and laughing and willing to go down lanes of uncertainty. The venue was in a basement, the feelings were good, dream-like, vibrant. I felt a bite to what I wanted to say. I made fun of Dick Cheney. Some young dude in the crowd said something I called the most abstract heckle I’ve ever heard. That second show we fed off each other, the crowd and I. Everyone in that town was so nice.

After it was over, when relief entered my bloodstream to soothe adrenaline, I hung out awhile with the club owner and some local comics, I walked the mile back to the throwback motel in the dark. The only person I saw walking was me.

Bozeman trail is where treaties were violated for yellow metal. Learning colonial history, helps frame context for why everything feels so fucked, it helps us imagine a better world by learning from those who already had one and have resisted for another one. Even while we weave through what’s left of this one with how much of ourselves we can find sacred. No one is perfect, humans are full of beauty no matter where they find themselves, we can paint new pictures together, we are capable of more kindness than the people who landed us in this predicament would ever let on.

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