Hate flows. It festers. It can freeze, burn or both. At times it behaves as energy - either widespread and searing, or tight-focused and lethal. Others it is a miasma, a stain spreading across the surface of the world and its inhabitants to paint their skin with lacquered fire. What is there to hate? So, so much. People are the most distinct targets; having and misusing choice, they suffer for their inability to just make themselves not complete wastes of protoplasm. The United States prides itself on the variety of people that inhabit it - at least, some portions of the United States do. The corollary, because they're human, is that every additional distinguishable group you add you increase the number of hatred
dyads exponentially.
How to slim it down.
Let's use regions. The U.S., big on making all manner of group identification simply verboten as the targeting of hate, is fine with the use of its own regional Balkanization. Why not take its inhabitants at their word?
The Northeast
The Northeast (which likes to call itself 'The East Coast' as if the fucking seaboard dropped off into the infinite beyond somewhere around Delaware) is the oldest bit of the U.S. Thus it's understandable that it's also intimately connected with most of the really good recognizable hatreds. If you're from there, everyone everywhere else in the country is just fucking wrong about everything, and if they'd just become smarter like the fucking Northeasterners, or optionally more rational and liberated, everything would be peaches and cum. If you ever find an American abroad (or in the South) trying hard not to look like they're disgusted at the lower-class nature of the environment they find themselves in (i.e. British) then the odds are good you've run across someone from the Northeast.
Second key identifying trait - that American will immediately identify themselves as being from America and wax on about the benefits of said place. Bring up another region of the country, though? They'll scoff at it and declaim loudly about how the country is being ruined by <insert pejorative adjective here>. Fucking gits.
And whatever you do, don't ask them about the goddamn Founders.
The South
The South is interesting because it's more of an attitude than a place, although the place is actually well-defined. There's almost no need to go on about how fucked up the South is, because of two powerful forces in the world: non-U.S. media, and Hollywood. Both maintain deep disdain for this region, and aren't afraid to tell you all about it long after you've fucking wished they'd just pull their cunts back in and start lowing about how hard it is to maintain their fucking useless monopolies without legislative capture and shitty technology.
That's not to say there aren't all manner of excellent reasons to hate the South. No, not at all. You see, there's this terrible problem with defending the South from most of the really nasty portrayals of it in media: they're completely fucking accurate. We are, after all, discussing a region and/or worldview which (a hundred and fifty fucking years later) insists on a self-expiating revisionist name for the Civil War. We speak of a region that happily continues to elect complete scumbags for national service and return them to office when they are caught stealing, race-baiting, or just generally failing to pass a single fucking test of decency. In fact, the really successful Southern electees aren't even from the fucking south, but from the Northeast instead - but are too afraid to admit it after moving to the inbred, ill-educated, poorly-run corrupt cesspits from which they draw political legitimacy.
The South is, of course, composed of regions itself. I speak not of regions in the geographical sense, but regions in the religious sense. These religions are familiar to all of us: NASCAR, barbecue, wrestling, latent homosexuality and gap-toothedness.
The Southwest
The Southwest is 'the South, Lite and New version.' Once a fairly quiet place as far as national hatred pastimes go, it has shot up in recent years with the help of some all-star players. There's much to choose from here; almost a fucking hatred buffet. Everything from the 'Energy Field' crystal-hugging hippie anachronistic losers of Arizona and New Mexico to the pervasive anti-Mexican racism that ebbs and flows across the area.
It's difficult to get a precise handle on hatred in and out of the Southwest, though, because so much of it is reserved for intra-squad play. States just north and west of Texas hate Texas for reasons running the gamut from water use to 'regional image' to sheer fucking cussed disgust with 'em, and many would probably secretly enjoy dropping napalm on the goddamn Alamo if the Texans would just shut up about it already.
Nevada isn't even a goddamn state, it's gambling, prostitution, and nuclear weapons residue. Coupled with a thriving industry pulling money from UFO dreamers who need a Mecca, as if one wasn't enough fucking trouble. The gangs that built Vegas have gone corporate and now sway hand in hand with the Government and Hollywood - which alone is enough reason to want to burn the fuckers down. Disney music piped into hotel elevators should be punishable by a forced Prinz Albert.
The Midwest
Where, precisely, is the fucking Midwest anyway? Nobody knows, except when they take a crap on a jetliner and secretly wish the pilot would hit that magic DUMP button. Flyover state isn't even an epithet anymore, it's hard to work up any serious vituperative daggers for a place that can't even convince major airlines not to stop there midflight to empty their fucking toilet tanks. They have a city or two, maybe a couple more than that, but they seem to think they're in the modern fucking world when, in actuality, the only modern services (like, say, cellphones that work) exist along Interstate highways to make sure that the truckers who drive through there can hire a whore for the night's stop. Once famous for wheat and corn, the Midwest is becoming famous for meth labs and boredom and places to not be from.
What can we add to this, except to point out that Dorothy for some unknown reason wanted to go back there, and as a result, we had to keep hearing about it every time some fool remade the movie. That alone should make it worthy of irradiation. Fortunately for us, there's another good reason to hate it if you're a liberal/environmentalist/russian: most of the U.S.'s land-based nuclear arsenal (which, handily enough, has the word 'arse' in it) is there. So luckily if things go bad, it's going to fry, if not first, at least assuredly.
The West Coast
For one thing, this entire region is fucking schizophrenic. There's 'SoCal' and 'NoCal'. How about no fucking Cal at all? This state, which was so proud of its status as some single-digit ranking in 'world economy sizes' in the 1980s, should be given what it seems so eager to get - its walking papers. A good 20-kt device on the San Andreas should do it, if we're to believe Gene Hackman.
In the south, there is Hollywood and Los Angeles in general. Self-absorbed to the point of supersaturation, this region should receive federal tax breaks for freezing cold caffeine and liquid-heat enemas every morning just to be clued in as to how the rest of the country feels about it. This is a region which thinks that the manufacturing of soulless suburbs so deadly fucking boring that the famously fatuous Bill and Ted can't wait to escape is progress. No, seriously, have you ever been to San Diego? Try it. If you're not looking to eat a shotgun from sheer boredom within a week, even if you're from fucking Omaha, I'll be amazed.
Then there's L.A. itself, a region so terminally fucked that there's not much we can even say about it. The Onion had an amazing quote once, attributed to Madeleine Albright as she visited "the beyond-fucked city of Mogadishu." It could be used to describe L.A. and the socioeconomic ruin of its own (gleeful) making. "I've never seen a place so profoundly under the shithammer." Added Albright, "Christ, this place is fucked."
Race relations set in ferroconcrete overpasses; economic capital anchored by mudslides, natural disasters requiring federal aid which is squawked for immediately and loud - by people like the fucking residents of Malibu, for fuck's sake. I can't even posit a more self-absorbed scenario, and believe me, I've fucking tried.
San Francisco? Imagine everything wrong with the Northeast. Now give it an extra layer of superiority brought on by too much dot-com and tech money, and ensure that most of its actual identity is definable as being 'other than SoCal'. Sprinkle on top an economy devoted to the meandering masturbatory grazing and displays of cock length by and between stratas registering from 'yuppie' to 'obnoxiously wealthy' and you have some idea.
There are other regions of the U.S. I could go into great detail about, but this is getting long enough. A short, brief gazetteer of internecine U.S. hatred; a taste test for the bold tourist. Bring your curled upper lip, a command of invective and most of all, if you're going to engage in any form of conversation with anyone from any of these regions, a willingness to lower your I.Q. by a noticeable percentage. You'll either need to do this to understand what they're saying, or to give those who have brains enough of a perceived superiority that they'll fucking condescend to talk to you.
On second thought, why bother?
I'm Spider Jerusalem, and I hate it here.
HQ2k7