"Miller Gaffney Threatened By Gunman at Minnesota Fair."

This week's Market Warriors came from an antiques fair in Oronoco, Minnesota.

Mark Walberg, our disembodied omniscient narrator is like "Knowledge" in the Everyman play, who verily says

Everyman, I will go with thee

and be thy guide,

In thy most need to go

by thy side, 

Mark Walberg, who goes with us and is our guide, noted that there had been a "Gold Rush" in Oronoco Minnesota once, but there hadn't been a heck of a truckload of gold. The rush without the gold. 

His comments on that score foreshadowed the way the episode went, because there wasn't much to be got at the Ornoco Antiques Fair either. Things were so dire that Bene won the competition this week with some costume trinkets and more fool's gold. 

Kevin Bruneau was reduced to riding on the back of John Bruno's invalid car scouting for the lowest chintz.

John Bruno spent most of the episode ruminating back and forth about whether to buy a toy frogman from the Sixties. This was less like television and more like a trip through my own interminable internal monologue. 

Should I buy the Norm Show DVD box set at Academy Records on 18th Street.
Should I buy the hardback Larry Hama G.I. Joe volumes when I already have the paperbacks.

Should I sell those Comics Journal Special Editions.
Should I sell at Strand or Popfuzz or Unnameable or PS Bookshop.
Maybe PBS would like to give me my own show.

These Minnesotans were most vicious to Miller Gaffney in particular. 

Maybe she did swan around a bit like Scarlett O'Hara this week, not overly interested in oiling the wheels and greasing the palms and kissing the babies and sugaring her bartering among these hinterland vulgarians. 
Maybe she didn't want to get spittle on her taffeta dress. 

She breezed into one tent with a thirty dollar bangle and said, "Wouldn't yeou, ah say Wouldn't yeou, gimme this for twenny?"

"Don't reckon I would nor," came the peevish grunt from a part-man, part-alligator, mostly squirrel object, hacking on cue into a spittoon.

"Yeou won't give me it for twenny-teau?"

"Naw," came the mean unfriendly response from the catamount, who had plainly refused to go "on camera" and would deliver his lines "without representation or taxation".

"Yeou shure?"

Miller was confused. How shall bartering endure if these backwater graspers won't bite and play ball?

"What part of Naw don't you understand?" growled the off-camera sprig of iceberg lettuce.

("What part of bartering doan't yeou unnerstand?" should have been the comeback.)

Poor Miller not only gave up the attempt at bartering, she actually reached meekly into her purse and drew out the thirty dollars. I never saw the like. The taming of the shrew.

Another participant in the fayre acted even weirder with Miller and, following the recent horrible events of Newtown Connecticut, not to mention Superstorm Sandy, with quite menacing overtones. 

As the show began, we seemed to enter midway through a tart exchange between Miller and a gentleman brandishing a BB gun. 

This only days after PBS's frankly depressing series of shows on "gun control" (laughable turn of phrase!) in these United States in which it was revealed fairly conclusively that the United States is positively alive (pardon the inapt figure) with twenty-two calibre cockblockers who haven't got a lick of gulchur or book-larning but they do know their "Second Amendment Rights" and all they want to do is shoot guns for "entertainment" and they will go to actual Civil War to defend their right to this "entertainment." 

These gun-show knuckle-draggers, these county-fudge mouth breathers, these rocky-road glue-sniffers, these fucking taxidermy enthusiasts. 

Miller was exchanging remarks with such a man in a CHICAGO tracksuit top with his face blurred out. This signified to the audience that he had not signed the "release form" for his "image" to be shown on TV, which usually tells the savvy viewer that this character is going to come across badly as a character. Indeed, this man did.

One cannot judge very generously a man who threatens on television to shoot a lady in the eyes.

He spat back to Miller, "I'll shoot yore eye out!"

He was like the eye-gougers in old South-West almanacks of the Jacksonian day. Except that even Sut Lovingood, even Simon Suggs, wouldn't gouge aout the eyes of a lady. 

He was all snaggle-toothed misogyny and weird misdirected Freudian energies. 

I say candidly that he had misread his Oedipus Rex and should go back to school.

Miller replied with superior and airy gaiety, "Aow, leook aout. Ah knew somebody who got shot in the bottom once." 

While Miller is too sweet to get down to low skirmishing with such back-water country-churn bottom-feeders, the tool got schooled by Mark Walberg in the voiceover. 

"In all seriousness, you should keep the barrel pointed either up in the air or down at the ground," Mark said as the camera showed the CHICAGO moron dully fiddling with the gun, barrel tipped up and veering around, always pointed (though not aimed) at head height. 

A portrait of America in 2013. 

It was redolent of the local news, when they show you some grainy, phrenzied ruckus at a gas station cash booth, and a blurry image leaps over the counter and rifles through the register, or when a neighbourhood rapist is shown lurking in a stairwell on CCTV, and the anchorwoman requests plaintively that if we recognise them would we please telephone the police force? 

We chuckle to see it, we say aloud, "Who could recognise that blur?," but then presumably if you knew somebody well you'd recognise them even in the blurred state. 

It's entirely probable that even this unmemorable fist-hatchet is recognised by family and friends in his CHICAGO tracksuit top. 

Perhaps he even bragged to his hare-lipped kinfolk, "Ah threatened to blind a woman with a gun on television today! Yew–all set the DVR y'hear!"