FEAR AND LOATHING OFF HIGHWAY 24

SATIRE

I was in a diner off Highway 24, somewhere between Murfreesboro and the edge of reason. The kind of place where the coffee’s burnt, the waitresses call you “hon,” and the napkin dispensers have NRA stickers. Fox News was on mute but no one needed the sound; they could all lip-read the gospel according to grievance. A half-dozen regulars in red hats were working through the post-church buffet, humming with the confidence of people who believe the world ended in 2015 and forgot to tell them.

Then the wall exploded.

I thought it was a gas leak or divine retribution. Plaster snowed down over the lunch counter, a portrait of Reagan toppled into the cobbler tray, and through the smoke stepped the Kool-Aid Man himself — cracked, sweating syrup, eyes glowing like brake lights in hell.

“OH YEAHHHH!” he bellowed, but it sounded more like a threat than a slogan. The chatter died. Forks froze halfway to mouths. The woman in the corner who’d been quoting Facebook statistics about gas prices made the sign of the cross.

The Kool-Aid Man stomped forward, sloshing rage. “You’ve been drinking me wrong!” he shouted. “I was supposed to cool down kids, not baptize adults in delusion!”

A man in a camo cap whispered, “Deep state hologram,” and tried to film it. The Kool-Aid Man glared — and the phone cracked down the middle. That’s when the muttering started: half the room saying it was CGI, the other half saying Biden sent him. One guy insisted it was the Antichrist because no patriotic beverage would “use metric liters.”

The Kool-Aid Man pointed his glass fist toward the TV, where the rally crowd chanted on a loop. “That’s not patriotism,” he thundered, “that’s fermentation! You’ve turned grievance into a sports drink and fascism into a flavor!”

Nobody moved. A woman clutching a cross necklace whispered, “He sounds like NPR.” The fry cook ducked behind the counter, holding a spatula like a weapon. Two men in matching Trump 2024 shirts tried to start a “U-S-A!” chant, but it died in their throats when the mascot turned and said, “You spelled it wrong — you forgot the A for Accountability.”

He started listing the flavors like curses. “Authoritarian Cherry. Coup-Aid Punch. Blueberry Book-Ban. Freedom Fizz. You’ve been chugging them all, and now you can’t taste truth if it bit your tongue!”

The big man at the counter, the one with the AR-15 decal on his mug, shook his head. “Fake news,” he muttered, even as the red liquid pooled around his boots. The Kool-Aid Man slammed his fist on the Formica, rattling the ketchup bottles. “You people called tyranny ‘law and order’ and cruelty ‘clarity!’ You didn’t lose your country — you dissolved it!”

Somebody shouted, “You’re just jealous of Trump!” Another yelled, “Where’s your permit?” The Kool-Aid Man leaned in, condensation dripping from his rim, and hissed, “I am the permit. You’re living in the violation.”

He turned to me then, eyes like blinking sirens. “You write things down, don’t you?” I nodded. “Then write this,” he said. “You can’t fix stupid, but you can stop refilling its glass.”

And with that, he trudged back through the hole he’d made. The MAGA crowd sat motionless, staring at the wreckage. One woman dabbed Kool-Aid from her blouse and muttered that it looked like communism. Another swore she’d seen his face on a missing-child milk carton from the seventies. The man in the camo hat raised his broken phone and said, “He didn’t even tip.”

I finished my coffee, scribbled the quote, and watched the puddle of red slowly dry into a map of America — cracked, sticky, and still arguing with itself.

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