Arkancide (pronounced ahr-kuhn-side)
A neologism coined to describe the remarkably high death-toll (by causes such as "suicide", "misadventure" and "accident") among those associated with Bill (b 1946; US President 1993-2001) and Hillary Clinton (b 1947).
2005-2006: A compound word, the portmanteau being Arkan(sas) + -cide. The name of Arkansas, the US state, was applied first to the Arkansas River and derives from the Modern French Arcansas, the plural form of the transliteration of akansa, an Algonquian term for the Quapaw people (a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking people who settled in the area in the thirteenth century); Akansa is thought also the likely root of Kansas, another US state. Aspects of the word Arkansas have long been debated. Pronunciation had varied from the start and it wasn’t until 1881 the state legislature defined the official pronunciation being with the final "s" silent, following the French practice and in 2007, the politicians passed a resolution declaring the possessive form to be Arkansas's. The suffix –cide is a word-forming element meaning "killer", from the French -cide, from the Latin -cida (cutter, killer, slayer), from -cidere, a combining form of caedere (to strike down, chop, beat, hew, fell, slay), from the Proto-Italic kaid-o-, from the root kae-id- (to strike). The element also can represent "killing," from the French -cide, from the Latin -cidium (a cutting, a killing). Arkancide is a noun; the noun plural is Arkancide and the use of an initial capital seems universal.
Bill Clinton built his political base in Arkansas, first as attorney-general, later as governor and in Arkansas, as subsequently in the White House, with each election of Bill, voters received a free copy of crooked Hillary. Arkancide was coined to describe the phenomenon of the surprisingly high number of deaths (especially the many recorded officially as “accident” or ruled “suicide” even if the method “chosen” appeared, prima facie, to make self-inflicted injuries actually impossible) among those associated with Bill and crooked Hillary Clinton. Depending on which conspiracy theorist does the body count, the numbers bounce around a bit and the more rigorous researchers do exclude from their lists those souls for whom the cause of death was, at least on the balance of probabilities, not suspicious, but every tally is in the dozens. What all agree is the catalogue begins with Kevin Ives (1970-1987) & Don Henry (1971-1987) in 1987 and ends (thus far) with Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) in 2019 and it’s difficult to guess at the veracity of the connection between the Clintons and all these deaths. Like any data set, much work will have to be done to determine the relationship between cause and effect and, as is drummed into every student during their first lecture in Statistics 101, correlation does not of necessity equate with causation and a mere list of apparent coincidences (even if in the dozens) does not prove Jeffrey Epstein was murdered on the orders of crooked Hillary any more than it proves the assassin was a Freemason. Officially, the establishment's consensus was (and remains) it's all mere coincidence, many of the dead just really unlucky and statisticians who have run the numbers say the conspiracy theory is debunked, one notable factor the predictable large number of people still alive who could in some way be linked with any US president. Beginning in the 1990s, the slang terms for the phenomenon were "Clintonization" & "Clinton Body Count" but neither never caught on to the extent of Arkancide, probably because the latter, being a little more removed, functions better as a euphemism. Also, pre-dating even the arrival of the Clintons in Arkansas politics, was the sardonic phrase Arkansas Sudden Death Syndrome (ASDS), used to describe those whose death was said to be at the hands of the state's employees, this means of demise apparently unusually frequent in Arkansas.
Randall Made Knives of Orlando, Florida: The Arkansas toothpick
To gain a sense of the way the folk in the state of Arkansas have long been perceived, consider the Arkansas toothpick, an impressive dagger produced usually in lengths between 12-20 inches (300-500 mm) and claimed to be ideal for “thrusting & slashing”. The weapon is said to be the creation of US knifemaker James Black (1800–1872) and is described by many historians as an “improved version” of the famous Bowie knife, the design of which was credited to James Bowie (1796–1836) who enjoyed the sort of varied career once often enjoyed south of the Mason-Dixon Line, his activities including land speculation (lawful and not), slave trading (mostly lawful) and military adventures (officially sanctioned and not). In truth, Mr Black’s original dagger seems to have been a slight variant of the Bowie knife because there’s little in documents from the nineteenth century to suggest the two were regarded as sufficiently different to be used for different purposes. The term “Arkansas Toothpick” seems first to have appeared in the late 1820s or early 1830s in tales by European travellers who told of the rugged characters they encountered in the backwoods of Arkansas, their habits including using the long-bladed daggers to “pick their teeth”. Some have speculated the term might have pre-dated the debut of the Bowie knife in (circa 1830) and that the notion of two different knives evolved in the nineteenth century only because of this casual journalistic slang. However it happened, the Arkansas Toothpick and Bowie knife are now established items in the knifemakers’ catalogues.
The idea of a biopic documenting the allegedly murderous trail of death in the wake of Bill & crooked Hillary was so obviously and attractively filmic it must be only the fear of litigation that has prevented a project being brought to fruition. The satirical site Weekly World News did suggest Hill & Bill might be in the works, the casting for crooked crooked Hillary an obvious choice but left unexplored was who to play her husband. To depict Bill Clinton would demand a wider range than most actors possess so it would be tempting to look outside the profession and cast former film producer Harvey Weinstein (b 1952) but his commitments make that now impossible, though presumably he could play Jeffrey Epstein, on-location as it were. Still, so irresistible is the lure of a tale like this that screenplays presumably lie in drawers, awaiting the circumstances (God forbid) which will permit the pitch.
The Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport
What is now the Bill & Hillary Clinton National Airport was Little Rock’s first aerodrome, opened in 1917 as a military facility called the Little Rock Intermediate Air Depot, operated by the US Army Signal Corps; in 1925, the federal government acquired some adjoining land additional property to support the activities of an observation squadron of the Arkansas National Guard. By 1928, reflecting the way in earlier centuries commerce and support services had usually “sprung up” around ports, by 1928 the first of many aircraft manufacturing and maintenance businesses had been established in close proximity to the facility which, in 1930, passed to local civilian ownership, commercial air services launched the following year (by American Airlines, then known as American Airways).
During the
inter-war years, the airport was renamed Little Rock Municipal Airport and expanded
from a single grass field (known in the industry as a “sod runway”) to three
paved runways; despite the effects of the Great Depression, civil aviation in
the era continued to expand and the building of runways was an attractive form
of job creation by government because they were classic “shovel ready” projects
which then could absorb for months at a time many of the unskilled and
semi-skilled unemployed to lay the asphalt-concrete mix; despite “tarmac”
enduring as a popular colloquialism to describe the paved parts of an airport,
the traditional tarmacadam (which uses tar as a binder) had by then ceased to
be used because it lacked the strength and durability required to handle the weight,
speed, and fuel spills associated what were by then heavy airframes.
As upgraded, the airport became established as a hub for commercial and military aviation. In 1942, with the entry of the US into World War II (1939-1945), the War Department (not renamed “Department of Defense” until 1946 and since 2025 it appears to be using both names) assumed control and daily commercial air services did not resume until the facility was returned to the City of Little Rock after the war, at which point, daily commercial air services re-commenced. The “Adams Field” element in the name is a tribute to Captain George Adams (1899-1937) of the Arkansas National Guard, killed on the tarmac in a “freak accident” when struck by the blade of a propeller which had become separated from its housing. Although in March 2012, the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission voted to rename the facility the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in honor of "the Clintons' public service and their ties to Arkansas", the designation "Adams Field" remains in use for references to the runways and air movements. In its October 2013 edition, Travel + Leisure magazine released the results of a survey which found travelers ranked the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport as the worst of the 67 surveyed, prompting the airport administration to retaliate by commissioning their own survey. This contradicted the magazine's numbers and claimed some 90% of passengers were satisfied with their experience. It's not known if the dissenting 10% committed "suicide".
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