KENTUCKY THINGS: A SENATOR GETS TACKLED

Rand Paul is the junior Senator from Kentucky. He is the son of Ron Paul, a giant of the libertarian movement and a former House representative from the state of Texas. Rand Paul grew up reading the usual menu of Austrian economists and Ayn Rand. He can therefore be forgiven a little for not understanding team sports, playing well with others, or ever proving it on the field.

Note: Rand Paul attended school at Baylor and Duke. If he saw a single football game at either institution during the 1980s when he was there, he would have witnessed hundreds of examples of how to survive a painful blindside tackle.

Upon completing his studies and getting his MD degree, Paul started a ophthalmology practice in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Later, Paul ran for the United States Senate as a Republican on a compelling platform of doing whatever you want, not paying your taxes, and guaranteeing the right to carry assault weapons into Panera. Kentucky voters found this very persuasive. In January, 2011 Rand Paul was sworn into office.

Rand stands about 5’8” and probably weighs about 160 pounds, based on average body weights and a charitable read of his build from recent photographs. If he were a football player, he would be a kicker. Based on recent news, he’d be the kind of kicker you tell not to run down the field too much during kickoffs, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Rand Paul is 54 years old, and has a very nice house in a very nice gated subdivision in Bowling Green, Kentucky. That house sits next to the house of Rene Boucher, a 59-year-old anesthesiologist and the inventor of the Therm-A-Vest, a back pain relief vest warmed up in the microwave. Boucher is retired, as of 2015, and is a registered Democrat. His son plays professional ultimate frisbee, but that was already assumed.

This is all background to Boucher tackling Paul in his driveway on November 3rd so damn hard Paul broke five ribs and may miss time in the Senate.

[deeeeeeeep inhale]

OH HOW DO WE GET ALL THESE JOKES OFF. Let’s just start and see where it ends.

If we had to guess which state was going to have a Senator get speared in his own driveway, Kentucky is absolutely the first guess. Kentucky is the only state to have a standing governor assassinated; it is the only state with a town built inside a meteor crater; it is the only state we know of where people burned each other’s shit down over who got to take people into caves.

Another example: A Kentucky man in 2013 siphoned gas from a police car. That could be anywhere; the Kentucky part came when he took an unobscured photo of himself actually stealing the gas and shooting the middle finger at the police car. He then posted the picture on Facebook, and was subsequently arrested and charge with theft.

This is one of his Facebook responses, which is also the real Kentucky part.

yea lol i went too jail over facebook

A vigorous disregard for law enforcement and authority, ample space for disputin’, and a tradition of letting these hands settle the score? Kentucky is number one, and that’s before we even namedrop the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Justified, or that the most famous person from the state ever LITERALLY MADE HIS MONEY BEATING THE HELL OUT OF PEOPLE.

There’s also this extremely funny part of this story:

WE WERE RIIIIIIIIGHT. We’re never right about anything, but a story about two middle-aged dudes fighting in a driveway? This is the song of our people. We know the words by heart because our heart wrote the words, and our bones sang the melody before the words even existed.

From birth we have watched the men of exurbia have inept shoving matches in driveways over seas of nothing: A poorly officiated Little League Game, a perceived slight against a neighbor’s child, and on more than one occasion, a college football game. These fights are baseball fights. They are loud, terrible, and badly executed. Contact is rare, punches are thrown in long, lazy loops, and a crowd almost always rushes to the scene to break up the. Bad conditioning and a low VO2 max are the winners; a torn polo shirt and embarrassed wives and children are the losers.

Others less versed in the ways of our people guessed wildly and badly. Our favorite terrible guess was undoubtedly the idea that this was a political argument gone wrong. The antifa osteopath! So much for the tolerant left!1!1!!!! The two men here had been neighbors for almost 17 years, were both wealthy, and had worked in and around each other when they were both practicing doctors. They knew each other’s brand of stupidity, and their kids were friends.

Like 90% of all men, they probably talked about sports to get by and avoid a genuine and uncomfortable personal interaction.

That all said: Why do you decide to have a very personal interaction, and walk over and beat someone’s ass after 17 years of living next to someone? You do it on principle. You do it because someone, after years of being one percent shitty at all times, failed to realize they had hit 99% on the shit meter and was living blind, not even understanding how close they were to 100% shittiness and the certain beatdown to follow.

And you know what Rene Boucher, and millions of other homeowners believe in? Yardwork. He is a man who believes in clean, well-executed yardwork.

This is nothing new. Lawncare disputes have been getting people lit up for years. Medieval England, after all, had a murder rate ten times that of modern England. Most of those murders involved fighting over property lines or tools; most of them were committed with those same garden tools. Add in 17 years of both neighbors probably thinking the other was a jibbering dickbag, a low-boiling conviction of each other’s stupidity, and some free-range Objectivist landscaping, and suddenly this all makes so much sense.

It would also make sense if anyone reading this was ever a child who let the sprinklers run too long in their grandmother’s garden and ruined an entire year’s worth of carefully cultivated horticulture. She wanted to kill you, and a jury of her peers would have acquitted her.

More. MORE.

Rand Paul, the libertarian Senator, had to call the local police. It had to be hard to yell AM I BEING DETAINED with five broken ribs, but a brand is a brand. That’s why you don’t hire Ayn Rand-reading bodyguards. Their prerogative, it turns out, was to let the free market decide if you were going to get blasted off your feet Terry Tate, Office Linebacker-style by a rampaging osteopath you’d been on mission trips with. They just laissez’d the doctor faire what his highest happiness demanded, man.

Next time hire some proper looters, Rand. They went to public school, and can fight.

The real capitalist in the situation, though was the doctor who made money selling vests to alleviate back pain. He was out here literally making business two ways by creating a client and a patient at the same time. That is insane hustle, and we respect that.

The sympathy for this in Kentucky will probably ultimately fall to the tackler, not the tacklee, because we’re guessing that abstract political principles will always lose to the basic appeal of “that sumbitch messed up my yard for the last time.” The law is the law, but cussedness dictates that your brush pile on my lawn is an act of aggression that will not stand. Ask someone if they’d do a year in jail—which the guy could do if convicted—over someone messing with, say, their prize hydrangeas. The answers wouldn’t all be yes—but we’d guarantee it wouldn’t all be no, either.

This wasn’t ever about politics, because Y’ALL DIDN’T REALIZE THAT LANDSCAPING AND PROPER LAWN CARE IS NOT A GAME. Mess with someone’s fescue and the gloves come off. Landscaping gloves, probably. The nine dollar ones you buy at Lowe’s.

Finally, the Duke graduate in the situation took a tackle for loss. That last point isn’t unusual, it just needs to be said out loud.