I grew up in Jamestown, North Dakota.

One of the town’s main industries is, and has for 130 years been, the North Dakota State Hospital, a place that’s seen a century’s worth of psychiatric fads – from restraint to sterilization to electroshock to drugs – come and go.

In the seventies, the fad – driven by the ACLU and the social “sciences” academy – was deinstitutionalization.  Mandates passed in the late seventies saw a good chunk of the State Hospital’s population converted from inpatients to outpatients.  Some of these outpatients had noplace else to go, so they gravitated down the hill into Jamestown itself.  To this day, some of them wander the city’s “loop” – First Avenue, Tenth Street – day in, day out, drinking coffee and doing whatever their various combinations of disorders and medications tell them to do.

One of those former inpatients was “Kenny” (name changed, partly for his privacy, partly because after 20-odd years I don’t actually remember it).   Of all the characters that came down the hill, Kenny was pretty distinctive.  He wore a red, military-style beret with some sort of badge worn on front, commando-style, and a brown vest adorned with all sorts of military patches – all home-made – and embroidered with “Satan’s Angels” on the back.  He and his girlfriend, “Sue”, would wander the loop together.  They were also regulars at the bar at the Holiday Inn where I worked after my junior year of college.  Kenny would park all evening in a stool and tell stories of his time in a “Marine Special Forces” unit in Vietnam; of battles fought in jungles we’d never heard of…

…because they didn’t exist.  He told stories of units that didn’t exist, and places that didn’t either.  He told stories that real Vietnam vets heard and scoffed at – but nobody really pushed it with the guy, not that I saw – because he looked and sounded mentally ill.

And so for years, Kenny and Sue wandered the streets of Jamestown.  Time rolled on.  I moved to the Cities.  And one day, four or five years later, someone from Jamestown told me Kenny had strangled Sue to death, and been shot by the police in a standoff.

Question:  On whose vitriolic political rhetoric should we have blamed the murder?

With the brush of what fringe political thinker could we tar Kenny’s demented act?