Huskers

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Greetings from Falls City, Nebraska. It’s a beautiful day here. The high will be slightly above freezing, but it’s a wet cold, which is the opposite of a dry heat.

Falls City feels like it’s frozen in time. Maybe not frozen, but stored in Jello, so stuff really moves slow here. I sat down at a bar called the Would Eye on the day after I arrived, and the gentleman to my right was the same guy I sat next to the last time I was in town. I’d guess he’s about 40, hard to say.

“Are you an attorney?”

“Yeah, you’re that journalist.”

We immediately launched into the political discussions. He calls himself a libertarian, but he’s not like any kind of Libertarian I’m familiar with. He’s a Trump/Cruz man, preferring those guys over Gary Johnson, the actual Libertarian Party candidate for president.

We managed to get pretty far into the keg before he started making a pretty creative argument against abortion as a crime against a person, which he says is actually a crime against property, since we own our bodies. I don’t want to mischaracterize his argument, but it goes back to the “personhood” concept.

A couple of nights later, I was visiting Lem’s Northvue Bar & Grill, when a long-haired guy, very drunk—I believe he works at the Cooper Nuclear Plant—came in and sat next to me, demanding to know my business. As soon as I said I’m a journalist, he decided I was a member of the vast liberal conspiracy to misinform the American public about—everything. Another Trump man—I can only say that I’m proud that Americans like him are in charge of nuclear reactors.

Back at the Would Eye, I ran into an undertaker, another younger man, again probably 40ish. A staunch left-winger—he was a Bernie Sanders man.