The Border Ya Un' Otra Vez

It grows almost impossible to write sometimes. I seem to scrawl the same things… and nobody reads, or he who does refuses to understand. Words, after all, are for debate, and I am forced to believe that most people have made up their minds—have petulantly resigned their faculty of reason, more precisely, to indulge themselves in fantasy, come what may. No question of our time is more given to posturing Philippics and sanctimonious Jeremiads than our southern border’s enforcement… and no discussion so needful tires me more in prospect.

I was born and raised in Texas. I have spent most of my life here, despite several efforts to escape. I am pretty close to Ground Zero regarding the border crisis. I have listened to stuffed suits who inhabit walled-and-gated communities in Arlington or New Jersey call people like me racist for years now. I taught myself Spanish, and my copies of Azorin and Unamuno are penciled up and down the margins around favorite passages; I have fond memories of visiting my grandfather in El Paso, and of foraying into Juarez with him; after that distant childhood, in my scarcely less distant youth, I sought the courage for weeks (unsuccessfully) to ask out Janet Vargas, and later to speak to the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen waiting tables at El Toro’s in Austin…. All the typical m.o. of a racist, don’t you know? They always do what I’m doing now: “Why, some of my best friends are…”

The truth is that one can only NOT be a racist by embracing the strictly non-racist policies announced by our dogmatically non-racist rulers who, like George Bush, wax nostalgic over a refugee nanny or a cheerful “yard man”. Their experience is genuine, their sentiments pure: the testimony of my life, and of lives like mine, is a vomit of bile, hypocrisy, and suppression.

So why bother with words? I know what I see… but it is as unwelcome in the elite-monitored public forum as Cassandra’s prophecies of doom were during Troy’s orgies. I see that legal Hispanic Americans like the Rodriguez boy in San Bernadino are the most frequent victims of the kidnappings and murders which have washed over our unprotected border, and I see that the lives of these innocents don’t matter, since they stand in the way of “progress”. I see the legacy of persecution begun with the jailing of Agents Ramos and Campeon continued: the redoubtable Sheriff Arpaio himself is now a “racist”, hounded by the Obama “Justice” Department, despite his ethnic identity. I see that much of the execrable “stimulus package” was designed specifically to create construction jobs, and that the Democrat-controlled Congress, having stripped E-Verify from the original provisions, fully intends to invite about ten million illegal workers back into the country. I see these would-be populists salivating over the prospect of registering millions and millions of voters who speak only broken English and have no experience of demanding their legal rights in a free republic; I see them already so intoxicated on the mere odor of such power that the past winter’s rash of Senate- and Cabinet-level tax fraud, bribery, blackmail, and graft is a mere zephyr anticipating the hurricane.

On the Republican side, I see that FOX News never missed an occasion to deride the proposed closing of the border to protect American lives from swine flu. (Shepherd Smith’s homespun “logic” was fully analogous to the fool’s who resists patching a leaky hull because the ship has already taken in water.) I see this cable channel, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard all in bed with a neo-conservative economic globalism which will force the masses back to sweatshop servitude while the cosmopolitan elite fattens its Swiss and Caiman Island bank accounts.

Among the foolish masses increasingly fit only for the childish handling with which their overlords humiliate them, I see more and more immigrants who flaunt Spanish in my face—not Castellano, but a code-like dialect that even Cubans and Puerto Ricans can’t understand. I see the look in their eyes: “Move over… or clear out.” Among my neighbors of African descent, I see all too many who sense that Race is the wedge which will soon rive our society into shivers—and who intend to occupy the best position for snatching up stray coins. Money, money, money… I remember the Dixie League organizers two years back who spent more time pocketing change from the concession stand than teaching my son’s friends how to play baseball; and the words of black students and one friend whom I helped to write a dissertation breed perversely with Obamania: “How can you be rich and not be happy?” Among poor, uneducated whites, resentment of race-based politics waxes ever stronger—as it does in me, for that matter; but this group is all too willing to identify the removal of certain races with the removal of basic problems. Naturally, the ruling elite has long been eliciting this very response: if resistance to the oligarchic subversion of our republic can credibly be portrayed as racist, then suppressing it with ruthless severity will be rendered palatable. I can see all that, too. Can’t you?

I have but two further observations, both of which I have also made before. One is that, if ALL expenses of state and local government were to be raised ONLY by a sales tax on every purchase except staple food items, then most of us discontents would be much placated. We’re sick of providing free health care, education, transportation, and security for uninvited guests, and of underwriting new police hires and new prisons to handle thugs who ought to be deported. If law-abiding illegals were paying into the system the same as the rest of us, we could take the hostility at the grocery store in stride. There is no inalienable right to be liked by your neighbor—only to be protected from his predation of your wallet.

Second observation: if and when some segment of Mexico and/or Canada wants to form a union with certain central states interested in upholding constitutional law, that union will have my blessing. I can speak French as well as Spanish. I’m far more attached to living my life beyond the reach of the tyrant’s whimsy than I am to the Texas drawl or to Fourth of July cookouts. The Northeast Coast can go marry itself to the West Coast, for all I care, and apply its collective genius to developing new kinds of sodomy. The real future—the only future—for a culture both progressive and independent must lie in some variety of high-tech agrarianism which will allow ordinary people to mine their immediate neighborhoods for necessities and for leisure. A Mexican probably understands this much better than a Bostonian. How’s that for racism?