A Victory for the Dunces

I read about this in the Kansas City Scar and I had to see first hand.



Ever since I was a wee tot, every time we drove by this site my Dad would complain that someone ought to shut this guy down. He thought of it as an eyesore and had some notion that some condition of the Interstate Highway laws forbade junk yards visible from the Interstate. Or maybe it was something in the Highway Beautification Act, I don't know.

But I never shared his view. I was fascinated by the cool old trucks, the oddball machines.



And as I grew older, I also objected to my Dad's line of reasoning on the basis that it's that guy's land. That guy, by the way, is Joe Lambeth. His 20 acres, and he's using it as he sees fit. If you think it's ugly, buy him out or look the other way. He's not trying to get an injunction against endless rows of identical 'custom' homes or get some judge to order a moratorium on homeowners' associations. He's out in the unincorporated wilderness, free of the ceaseless stupidity of zoning boards.



Plus, I hate when the state throws its weight around. If you value freedom, really and truly, you have to allow for some people to choose things you find repulsive. That's why my all time favorite novel, probably, is A Confederacy of Dunces.



Ignatius Reilly has nothing to recommend him as a human being. He's an obnoxious freeloader and ne'er do well, he's verbally abusive toward strangers, defiant of authority, an asshole who shouts objections in the movie theater, a longwinded boor. He is unhygienic, obese, bigoted, dishonest, lazy and insane to top it all off.

But he's benign. Well, except for the movie theater part, I'd kill him with my bare hands if he started that shit after I paid theater prices for a show.

And the ultimate conflict in the book is his mother, who is rightly sick of him, decides to have him committed. This is back in the 1960s when the ACLU hadn't won the right of obnoxious lunatics to refuse hospitalization. And that's the question the book poses: is it okay to essentially imprison someone for being a jerk? I'm all for his Mom kicking him out, telling him to fend for himself.



But he's not a menace to himself or others, at least not in the life and death sense, so you have to let him be. Same thing with a junk yard like this. He's not even hurting anyone's supposed property values: the only things around him are farms and a paper recycling mill. Nobody, far as I know, has ever wrecked their car or needed years of therapy to get over seeing this little operation from I-35. Blink at 70 mph and you might not even realize it was there.



But the owner fought the law and now all his beautiful trucks are being reduced to scrap and sent off to a recycler. And having seen a few of those operations, I can tell you it's no less an eyesore, maybe worse. See also whatever environmental impact you want to accuse this guy of: a scrap metal yard is as bad or worse.

My hat's off to Joe Lambeth for keeping up the good fight for 34 years. If I ever meet you, Joe, I'll buy you a hot dog. Unless you talk over movies, too.