CSI: American Carnage (Wednesday, January 9, 2019)
The Times guy and the Post guy stand on the desert plain, wind whipping their jackets. A cameragal stands firmly with them, leaning into the gusts. The sun beats down. The Times guy says, I don’t see anything, do you? The Post guy looks over the tumbleweed and rocks, he looks along the dry ditch of the Rio Grande, he looks up at the sky. Nothing, he says, nothing but sand and rock and pokeweed. Is that pokeweed? The Times guy says, Hey, what’s that? He points. A cloud of dust rises in the distance. It continues toward them. The Post guy says, A bus! The bus stops on the road about 30 yards away where a man in a fedora has been quietly standing. He gets on and the bus drives away. The Times guy says, Did you see that? Where did he come from? The cameragal says, I think he just walked over the rise there and caught the bus. The Times guy says, Oh. You don’t see fedoras too often these days. Some crisis out here. Back in El Paso they’ve got a lot of families with sick kids they’re refusing to let on US soil. The Post guy says, If there’s a crisis right now, it’s in our asylum system. The Times guy says, Yeah, because we’ve made these policy choices to militarize the border, we don’t have the capacity to respond to the reality of the situation, which is these families. The group of journalists continues to stand in the windy desert. A plane is flying back and forth in the distance. The Times guy looks to the west. The Post guy looks to the east. Nothing. A gila monster skitters from under a rock. The Post guy turns the rock over. Hey, he says, look at this. The Times guy comes over and looks. He says, Oh, just a bunch of gila monsters sitting on some bags. Somebody left some flour or something, but it’s turned bad – it’s got a browny gold tint to it. Hey, you see that plane? The Post guy looks up. He says, Yeah, a crop duster. The Times guy says, What’s it doing? The cameragal says, Dusting. The Times guy says, Strange. There’s no crops over there. The plane veers from its back and forth and heads toward them. It is spewing something. The Times guy says, Hey, that’s poison and it’s heading right toward us! Let’s get out of here. The plane swoops low and aims right at them. The three journalists turn and run. The plane begins begins depositing a great cloud of poison dust along the desert floor! It is bearing down. It is deliberately aiming for the Times guy, the Post guy, and their documentarian. The journalists run, reaching their car in the nick of time. The plane passes over and disappears beyond the rise. The Post guy says, Wow! You okay? Whew! What the hell was that? The Times guy dusts himself off and looks out the window in the direction of the vanished plane. He says, That, my friend, is what a crisis looks like. Let’s get back to town; I need a Brewdog and some decent wi-fi. They turn around and head off down the bumpy road with emptiness spreading everywhere and nothing to hear but the gusty wind.
— Wednesday, Jan. 9, 2019