Don't bother looking for this on their website.

Do you live in a foreign country? Have you suddenly found yourself suffering from a need to laugh at how fucked up Americans are? Then this post is for you, sugar tit.

I was released long enough this past Sunday to do some shopping and visit a garage sale or two. Because I live in a tiny little town, and am a bad hippie and don't care about my carbon footprint, I head to the nearest shopping-sized town, which is Lynden. Yeah, it's the town where the Lynden Fryers grocery store chickens come from ( although I have yet to locate the processing plant or the chicken farms. Maybe it's all done by Magic Dutchmen. Like the Keebler elves, only repressed and filled with hate.)

Once my shopping is done I hit the garage sales. And let's not kid ourselves: this is the real reason I'm here.

A lot of people with more money than sense live in Lynden. They throw the best garage sales in history. Something goes out of style or they've worn it in public more than three times, out it goes. New stuff. Kids stuff. Furniture, water heaters, pallets of shingles, cryogenic semen storage cannisters (oh yes); hell, an AIRPLANE-dig it! at a garage sale! They don't care, man! And you better stay the damn fuckedy hell off my hunting grounds, buckwheat, cuz I've pissed on all the posts. MY TERRITORY. I OWN GUNS.

'K. Anyway.

Lynden is known here in Whatcom County for its very vocal, active, megamonstertruck-type Christian conservatives. They range from super separatist homeschoolers living completely off the grid, to mere Real Estate Christians, but besides being hardcore Christians all, they share two things:

1. They are the most thoughtlessly acquisitive people on the planet and,
2. They ARE their brothers keeper, baby. They honestly will come up to your door and point out the unseemly number of liquor bottles in your recycle bin. True story, really happened. Man, we are lucky to have people like this, right? People up there on their higher moral ground who take mercy on us sinners and take the time to show us the error of our ways and such, like so many pink little Imitations of Christ?

Here's their dirty secret, though.
THEY'RE KLAN.
As in 'Ku Klux'.

Back in the bad old days the Klan was big news out this way. In the newspapers and everything. They used to represent HUGE in the Lynden 4h of July parades. Let's ignore the fact that back in the 1920's there may have been two black people in the entirety of Whatcom County, ok?...and I guarantee you there wasn't a damn one in Lynden. Yet there they were, keeping their fellow citizens safe from the tsunami of rape-crazed darkies threeatening all that was good in America or whatever the hell they were high on.
Hell, they even ran a float. Perched atop the float was that years' Miss Klan, a pretty cornfed Dutch girl, waving and smiling, wearing a 'Miss Klan' sash and all. Following that came all the local Klan members...nice old dairy farmers and local businessmen and Lady's Christian Aid Society wives AND THEIR CHILDREN in their dress whites, pointy hoods and all.

This is a stone fact. Anyone who wants to can go to the Photographic Archive of Whatcom County, housed in the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham Washington, and view the stacks of photographs and newspaper articles documenting this fact. I used to volunteer there. I helped catalogue them.

It went on for years. Then suddenly, poof! gone! No more Miss Klan! No more float! No more parade! What Klan? What parade? Never happened! Not here!

Well, what do you expect, I guess. I applaud them for even having a sense of shame about it, however money motivated. But the thing that bothered me for the longest time was, what the hell was a chapter of the Klan doing at all in the Godforsaken, howling, Injun-infested wilderness of Whatcom Fucking County? It doesn't make any sense. Back then the scapegoats 'round these parts wuz the Injuns. You tossed them a bottle of whiskey and problem solved. And as for culture, forget it. Nobody in Lynden was from the South; they were all from Dutchpersonsylvania, which is somewhere in Holland. We are so far north of south that you simply cannot go any further away from the South than here and still be in America. You end up in Canada, and nobody wants that.

Ah, but then I started attending garage sales there in Lynden. And what I found gave me the answer.

I think the churches brought it.
And that it was a conscious, deliberate, church-sanctioned doctrine of hatred.

What evidence do I have to support this wild allegation?

Say Granny pops her clogs and the kids hold an estate sale. Lets say it's on beautiful, tree-lined 17th Street, right in the center of Lynden, although it could just as easily be out on a nearby farm.
You go to any one of these estate sales and you will find boxes, honey, boxes and boxes filled with tracts bearing titles such as 'What the Jews Have in Mind for You' and 'How the Catholics are Buying America' and 'God Wants the Races Separate'! See, and those are just the titles that come immediatly to mind.

I see this shit at EVERY SINGLE ESTATE SALE I GO TO IN LYNDEN!

So judging from the dates on these things, back until not too terribly long ago-like the 70's-you could go to church in Lynden, and after services were over you could stand in the foyer, chatting with your pastor, and put a couple three of these in your purse on the way out the door.
Son of a Bitch.

This Klan bullshit lies deep in the mindset of the Lynden Old Guard. Although their actions reveal as much, let's look at the dates involved just for kicks. This reveals the fact that, more than likely, their parents were marching in these parades. Some of their grandmothers and mothers and sisters and aunts were 'Miss Klan.' Very possibly they were marching too, on their little stubby legs, right alongside the float. Now they belong to the Chamber of Commerce and the Christian Businessmens' Association and City Hall.

Yes...I live 6 miles away from this motherfucker. It ain't far enough. This brand of cultural leprosy taints the entire area. Having grown up with a Born-
again religious fanatic and blue-ribbon hypocrite I can smell this shit stinking by moonlight. But I tolerate it. Why? Because I am just a wonderful awesome human being like that.

And they DO throw a hell of a garage sale.