The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet

In Bossier City, the line wound through a parking lot, a sluggish serpent that moved only in hiccups and burps. Nobody seemed to mind. Two young women in front of me, who had taken off work to travel from Arkansas in bedazzled red-white-and-blue Trump gear, passed the time bragging about their firsthand knowledge of the Clintons. They held my place so I could take a snapshot of a man who wore a T-shirt depicting Bill and Hillary—him with a handgun, her, leather-gloved, flexing a garrote—over the words clintons: they can’t suicide us all. “They say,” confided one of the women, “that the Clintons may have suicided my uncle.” He had been a prominent conservative lawyer in their town, and he had died at a restaurant, choking on steak. Or had he? They called such killings—caused by the Clintons, for reasons upon which one could only speculate—“Arkan-cide.”