Who's the sexy Air Force dude on the beach cruiser? Oh and who's that cute little blond boy? This photograph of "the America we lost" shows Doctor Ron Paul and his son, board-uncertified ophthalmologist Rand Paul. If you're wondering how these two become so nutty in the 21st Century, all the clues are in this seemingly innocent photograph.

  • That child isn't wearing a helmet. What is this, Somalia? No, it's (probably) Texas in the 1960s. (It might also be a suburb of Pittsburgh, where the Pauls lived before moving to Texas. All of these places looked exactly alike, just as today's stucco hell-box exurbs look exactly alike.)
  • That's right, the 1960s. Rand Paul was born in 1963. This photograph was taken in the middle of the Sixties, our most heavily documented and mythologized decade of American craziness. Where's Malcolm X and John Lennon and Jane Fonda in a French space-monster bikini? Nowhere around suburban Pennsylvania or Texas, that's where. Texas is where the "Dreams of the 1960s" got shot in the head.
  • Look at the charming old brick house, etc. But it's not really old at all—only the photograph is old. This is a newish suburb, circa 1965. This is how America killed the cities, with "white flight."
  • Even in this idyllic suburb, the libertarian is angry. Why do I have to mow my lawn all the time and fix these brown spots on the grass? Ron Paul, also not wearing a bike helmet, has already had it with the soft tyranny of suburban lawn maintenance pressure from the community. He's tuning them out. And that's why you see a wire dangling from Ron Paul's ear: He's listening to Alex Jones, probably! We need a new American Revolution in this country before Johnson passes civil rights legislation or something. LBJ is a traitor!
  • (It's technically "true" that Alex Jones wasn't even born when this photo was taken. Even though Jones looks like a furious old man about to blow a heart gasket, he's only 39!)

[Cute photo via Rand Paul's Twitter.]