I am not now, nor have i ever been a terrorist. I am also not a Muslim.
As i type these words terrorists are winning, destroying the land that i love. As i type these words, i am losing my country, my America. And, by the way, the terrorists i am talking about, the ones out to destroy this land i love, are not Muslims either.
Yeah, i am talking about the NYC mosque and i'm talking about the Glenn Beck DC rally and the host of other related religious outrages which have shamed our country these last few weeks. I had hoped the need to write this article would have gone away by now. I had hoped, i had prayed in fact, by the time i sat down to complete this column, America would have restored its own dignity by laughing Beck's whole "phony restoring our fake honor by declaring me your messiah after we listen to this word from our sponsors" snake oil televangelist's side show right off the airwaves.
I mean, clearly when you spend years spewing racist mockery and hate-filled attacks on your perceived enemies, then try to repackage yourself as an icon of racial harmony and the messenger of the god of love, surely even the blindest of Americans would see the unvarnished fraud of it all. By me, any huckster who aims to hide his sinister intentions in a cloak of religion is one of the lowest of sinners, a knowingly false prophet. In some religions you get stoned for it, or in Rush Limbaugh's case, really, really vicodin-ed out.
By now i'd've thought New York City, that city which is itself the symbol of the melting pot that is America, would have listened to their own mayor and accepted the fact that NYC, according to their own website, already has 6500 churches and one more church won't make that much difference, unless, of course, you make a big stink about it. Surely by now the big apple's big cheese could've convinced his city to lay off the religious intolerance and stop annoying their fellow Americans when they try to exercise their first Amendment freedoms.
But neither has happened.
In the long run, you know, i know, and Christian Americans know they are going to have to learn to tolerate other visions of god in much the same way White Americans have to adjust our shrinking prominence in America's multi-colored future. Some say there always was, and always will be, racial and religious intolerance. It's only natural. Like a virus in a dormant stage, America's racial problem has generally been present throughout American history, occasionally flaming up to plague us. Many a time America has championed the cause of bringing in more immigrants while turning a blind eye and deaf ear to their struggles and their oppressions. Take for example the plight of the Braceros in the 20th Century, or the Chinese railroaders in the 19th. But that barely, or is it rarely, repressed instinctual White anger has been recurrently reignited most anytime a political party hopes to make hay out of some citizens' "Nativist" tendencies. And there has always been some phrase to sell the hate: "Know-Nothings," "Yellow Menace," "Red Scare" to name just a few historical buzzwords in chronological order ... or as is happening now, on another front, with the whole issue of "Anchor Babies'" turn at having their Swift Boat flags a-flyin'.
In essence, this resurgence in racism and xenophobia is simply the scared old guard clawing to keep a hold on what they already know they are losing. And no matter how much they rant to the contrary, they are bound to die off and stop being so much of a problem for the rest of us. Unless they kill us first, which is the approach they've usually taken--Indians, Blacks, Chinese, Japanese.
So of course i'm terrified.
Everywhere i look there's more terror. The Fox Network's vertical Terror monopoly works very hard to keep us afraid. And not even of the real stuff: floods washing away Pakistan due to global warming. Gang rapes by the hundreds in the Congo. BP's slippery slide into Exxon-Valdez level environmental clean-up negligence, the billions in corruption and the cover-up its created in both our foreign wars, the mortgage crisis, slipping economy, Mexican drug insanity, Dr. Laura claiming she's the victim, or McCain's potential 5th term. There's plenty that could legitimately scare the holy and unholy bat crap out of us.
But no, what Fox really wants us to be afraid is liberty and progress, liberals and progressives anyway. Why? Because that's not what they're there to sell. They're there to teach us to be afraid of Obama. They're there to teach us the rest of the world is an ugly scary place, which is why we should pay any price to have a lot of big guns. Even more so, over the last 10 years, FOX has been working day and night to sell us a different daily hate--making sure we are afraid of and despising Muslims.
Though the Feb, 2001 Taliban destruction of the giant Buddha statues was a foretaste of the demonizations to come, even pinpoint the roll-out date of the new "Islam is Evil" brand that Fox has sold us for much of the last decade. There were lots of ways to frame the character of the alleged hijackers on 9/11: Al Qaeda, Saudi/Yemeni, bin Laden disciples. But instead we were simply taught they were "Muslim." And so for ten years, all terrorists and insurgents in the countries we've attacked, every foreign enemy we've fought against, and demonized in the process, has been identified as Muslim. After so many years of being told that "All Terrorists are Muslims," it is an easy eyes-closed leap to believing "All Muslims are Terrorists."
Though it is odd Fox should work this hard to sell us this, since Fox itself is in part owned by a Muslim, who happens to have both business and familial ties to Osama bin Laden. And that may be why Fox News ownership is actually, quietly, funding the very same Manhattan mosque they work so hard to demonize. Because they're the terrorists.
That's right, as Jon Stewart and numerous others have laid out for us, after Murdoch himself, the 2nd largest shareholder in News Corp is Bush's old pal, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns billions in shares of Talal's Rotana Group, "the Arab World's largest entertainment company." Prince bin Talal is a member of the royal family of the country that produced most of the 19 9/11 hijackers and which has repeatedly been caught funding terrorists around the world. As dirty an image as that may seem, through his work with Saudi Arabia's Kingdom Foundation, Talal has also helped fund numerous high profile high quality projects, such as the mosque in lower Manhattan. It is just amazing that Fox took such glee in the public burning of the image of all Muslims under the guise of an earnest crusade to follow the money funding the project. When in fact they knew all along.
So to try and keep this straight, Fox is significantly owned by the same Muslims they work so hard to get us to hate. And the principle reason lately is that Fox is giving immense coverage to this particular mosque that their owner is actually funding. As a result, ever more people claim Obama is a secret Muslim, etc.; an Arab looking cab driver has had his throat cut, mosques are harassed in Texas and California, desecrated and urinated on in New York, and a mosque in Tennessee has been not only vandalized, but now firebombed. Just like Black churches once were across the South, when Blacks became too visible and too vocal and demanded to have a reality of equality and not just a dream.
And talk about having one's religion and rights urinated on, at the same time supposedly 71% of Americans are opposed to the proposed "terror mosque at ground zero," noted Florida hatemonger minister Bill Keller has started his own ground zero ministry to preach the word of Islamophobia, homophobia, and Mormonism as Satan worship. As Salon's Justin Elliot noted:
"A bigoted pastor who has assailed gays and Muslims is launching the "9-11 Christian Center at Ground Zero" a mere two blocks from the World Trade Center site this Sunday, but so far the project hasn't drawn a peep of protest from those who are outraged by the "ground zero mosque."Pastor Bill Keller of Florida said today he will begin preaching Sunday at the Marriott at 85 West Street A weekly service is planned at the hotel until the $8 million 9/11 Christian Center finds a permanent space. (Fundraising is going well, Keller told Salon today.) ... Keller is the same pastor who hosted a birther infomercial that encouraged viewers to send him and a partner donations to advance the birther cause. His Internet ministry explicitly calls President Obama the new Hitler. He calls homosexuality a perversion. And in 2008, he targeted presidential contender Mitt Romney for being Mormon with a campaign called "voting for Satan."
Gee thanks Fox. What a horror show! Why Fox what do you want from this? Do you hate us for our freedom? What could these terrorists want bad enough to so destroy America? Gold? God? Glory?
Sad to say there is no possible real solution to this improbable problem since the vast "American Uninterested" ignore the blatant crisis in favor of quibbling over which toilet paper is softest, which fast food tastes the right kind of too salty, which beer gives the best drunk, and which mindless entertainment leaves one the most numbed. They prefer to simply look out for number one and treat everyone else like number two.
Just like Fox News told 'em to.
And when they do rise up to civic wrath, they don three cornered hats to defend a Constitution they aim to rewrite, then, while the kleptocrats rape and pillage their way through our national treasures, they loudly bleat like sheep about such non-issues as an Americans right to marriage, a woman's right to control her body and a people's right to believe, or not believe, in their own vision of god to drown out any serious discussion of America's real issues--racism, economic inequality, and our violent lurking invisible theocracy.
They claim they long for the America of their ancestors, an America bought with the blood and suffering of everyone else's ancestors. They are only interested in aiding human suffering if an insurance company can make a profit in doing so. They debate how hard one has to squint to make it look like "non-citizen" means "non-human;" and the best way to give a zygote reproductive rights over its host. All positions sold to them by Fox.
So, since the American public appear to intend to continue blindly following the misdirection of their so-called leaders, meanwhile leaving the Fox to raid our henhouses blind; let me make a modest proposal, a compromise: First we, the American public, give Fox the equivalent revenue for all television advertising in all markets in all America in all perpetuity. Sure, just give it to them. Yeah, it's another government subsidy for the rich; but it would be a small price to pay if in trade the rest of us never ever have to watch that crap they call news again.
Two, in trade for shipping Glenn Beck, and all those who really want to follow him, off to Guyana along with a lifetime supply of Kool-Aid, the rest of us accept we have to give in the cry baby tea party god-haters and let them have their way in this one case.
I know, that's the hard part. The part where we have to let the terrorists win. That's right, it looks like the only way out of this mess is to go ahead and destroy our own precious First Amendment right of the people having the liberty to go to whatever church they want to. It seems the only way to get the terrorists to stop their attack on our country is to pass a law to forbid any sign of any Muslims anywhere close to hallowed ground called zero. Like everyone says, those Muslims can build their mosque elsewhere, any elsewhere they want, as long as it's not in anyone's backyard.
I know this seems harsh, but this should protect us. We only have to turn against a small portion of our country, at the most it's only seven million people, it's like 2%, it's a weak glass of milk. And it's just the Muslims; and all the terrorists back on 9/11 were Muslims right? So all Muslims are bad right? Isn't that the rationale?
Of course ... the 9/11 terrorists were also all men. So to be safe, we better get rid of them too and why should we say that there is some kind of imaginary shield of "hallow-fication" that begins exactly three blocks for the WTC "footprint"? Isn't that the theory since we're told it's not safe enough to have the proposed Terror Mosque be built two blocks away (though it won't be nearly as close as a couple of hallowed-ground "ground zero" strip-clubs, which also coincidentally attract men--see, i told you there was a plot.) No way are we going to let men so close to our precious "ground zero." They might be terrorists. So shouldn't that shield extend a bit to a less risky distance of, say, New Jersey? That's it--from now on, no Muslims and no men on Manhattan.
Oh wait, They were all also dark skinned, so we have to get rid of dark-skinned women too. So where were we? Oh yeah, no Muslims, no men, and no dark skinned non-Muslim women allowed on Manhattan to properly hallow the hallowed ground at ground zero. Of course, since dark skinned peoples are the vast majority of humans on the planet, and since 37% of US Muslims are White, well, we just can't be too sure, now can we? We would be safer if we got rid of people off of Manhattan entirely, then no human could sully the sacred hallowedness of Ground Zero.
What a monument that would be. To our stupidity perhaps, but it would be a hell of a job of hallowing that hallowed ground. Of course ... the hijackers were also all mammals, backbones, and cells. Why be species-ist about this? If Glenn Beck can claim to be a man of god, who's to say a slug can't be a terrorist? We'll have to all be sure and we can only be sure when that the entire isle of Manhattan is lifeless and white.
Just like that awful morning nine years ago at Ground Zero when it seemed like, the terrorists won. Oh my god, it seems like that again. God, i pray it's not true. God? You don't care which way i pray do you? No?
Oh, that's right. You aren't the terrorist. We are.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Current Comedy, 8/16/10: Birthers Bashing Babies
Every week when I sit down to this computer, I tell myself I am not going to simply write another column that merely belittles and lampoons poor put-upon Republicans. Every week I remind myself that there are numerous Dems who consistently disappoint. It's true. Though, in most cases, it’s because they are acting too much like Republicans, for example, Max Baucus of Montana, Chuck Schumer of New York, or Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and of course, Harry Reid: sell-outs one and all.
I’m no fan of Nancy Pelosi either. Take Impeachment off the table and keep the war going after we got you guys elected precisely to solve those disasters? Oh girl, it's on! Owned by the same people who bought the GOP leadership years back, Pelosi sold herself out as a silent supporter of torture as a member of the "gang of 8," in 2003 when Congress was debriefed on the coming atrocities in our good name. In fact, i oppose Pelosi so much back in ’08 i even did long distance campaigning for Cindy Sheehan when she challenged the queen of the torture enablers for Cali’s District 8. From where I stand, there's little difference between her and Michelle Bachman besides the quality of their facelifts.
All those Blue Dog Democrats ought to have their noses rubbed in the messes they made by crapping all over the American public so they could be corporate curs for Insurance industry donation dollars during the health care debate. And don’t even get me started on the Republican-Appeaser-in Chief, Obama himself. The GOP may not be able to find a birth certificate for him that satisfies them; but these days it seems if they dug deep enough they might find an old RNC membership card of his. So, you see, I’ve got plenty of material on Dems; but on the same week we sent our baby girl off to college and my daughter-in-law brought our baby grandson into this world, I read about birthers bashing babies and it was “game over people”—right wing raging racism trumps left-wing limpness every time.
You’ve heard about the attack of the “terror babies,” right? Oh they are WAY scarier than anchor babies ever thought about being. You may have even seen that, on successive nights in the recent news cycle, Anderson Cooper and staff had to do battle with successive, progressively deranged terror baby obsessed Texas legislators who were making bug-eyed little chicken claims that Terror Babies were the new Red Menace. Despite the fact that GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert argument of crediblity rapidly reduced down to petulantly repeatedly bleating "you can't say that it couldn't happen." And State Representative Debbie Riddle's behavior was so ugly she makes Jan Brewer look good.
Now that's the "good news" part: these people got thoroughly and absolutely debunked for the whole world to see. The bad news is despite having the whole assertion of terror babies quickly reduced to international laughingstock, the Texas legislators and their rapidly growing flock have continued to chant: "Beware of the Terror Babies"!
So what IS a terror baby? Why only the most brilliant right-wing Obama deception yet, that’s what. Supposedly all the rage in the right-wing psycho circles, this one is the über-theory that neatly ties together several strands of tea party delusion into one handy carrying case. The latest brainwash from the right-wing spin cycle goes like this:
Terrorists are smuggling pregnant illegal aliens into the country to have babies who would then be US citizens, which, as infants, would then be spirited back to some terrorism sponsoring host country, to secret Madrasas to be trained in murder, mayhem, and advanced America-hating. Then, as a teen, they would be replanted in the US to quietly wait, expecting to someday serve as a sleeper cell unit which would strike 20-30 years later because … Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I may be guessing on the exact details of that last part; but i'm sure that mantra ties in there at some point. By now hasn't that become the standard GOP signature conclusion for any talking point?
Try it yourself. “Because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.” It’s the answer for everything these days, the reason for any problem if you ask a Republican. You know it, you’ve heard them say it. The GOP will tell you, “it’s wrong to try to curb Wall Street from buying and selling our nation’s very soul” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or, “global warming is a hoax” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. “BP shouldn’t be required to finish paying for the Gulf Coast clean-up” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or the latest disgust brought back for a second ugly aftertaste of corruption: "Pat Tillman was murdered by his own men and the Army not only covered it up and lied it into a sleazy piece of slipshod right-wing religious propaganda, and everyone, all the way up to Rumsfeld at least, knew what was going on but they all kept it secret from the American public and keep keeping it a secret still " … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.
I know you get the picture because it is the one they show on the news, everyday.
These days, It almost even makes the whole idea of terror babies seem ... no, it doesn't, terror babies is still stupid. As if that wasn't ludicrous enough we now have to envision the image of thousands of tiny James Bonds in pull-ups getting their bottles shaken not stirred… because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.
Of course Gohmert et al, insist they heard about terror babies from “credible” retired FBI agents, even as the active incredulous FBI spokespeople are frantically working to discredit the allegation that such a thing as terror babies could even exist and/or that the FBI has ever investigated or currently intends to investigate terror babies of any sort or fashion. And while this sounds like an idea for a sequel George Romero couldn't even get produced, the rapid spread of the myth of the terror baby is an ugly harbinger of crap to come.
Seriously, terror babies, while no more based on facts than most of the GOP prevarications, are the most ingenious explanation of the reasons that “Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on,” yet devised, even if it is the most outlandishly baseless. This is more than just another variation on the crazed illegal immigrant/Willie Horton-style boogeyman, more than just the basic birther conspiracy on steroids ... and meth, PCP, XTC, 10 cups of coffee, and airplane glue. More even than the incestuous spawn of such an unholy mating of the birther myth AND immigrant myth. This explains everything: I mean, after all, who is the original terror baby according to the above description?
Why of course, it’s Obama himself. Whom the GOP have been hating since the day he was born, like they intend to do with terror babies. Speaking of birthers, this recent news cycle also brought us the Bronze Star Birther, Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, a multi-decorated soon-to-retire sawbones who is no less than "the chief of primary care at the Army's DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic at the Pentagon."
Lakin is refusing to take his assigned rotation to the front … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on + an illegal alien with no birth certificate. Never mind the fact that when someone says they won't go to war because it is "morally wrong" and based on falsified claims which exploits our citizenry, savages our international credibility and endangers our citizens around the world, those reasons are the reasons of a coward. Say you won't go to war because you don't like your boss, they call you a hero. This guy Lakin was a lifer and ready to risk the "distasteful choice" of court martial rather than take orders from a foreigner, an immigrant.
No wonder Republicans want to get tough on those demon terror babies. They mean to show us all and especially those babies who is the boss. But as Illinois Dem Congressman Luis Gutierrez recently challenged, targeting pregnant "immigrant looking" women will cause them to shrink away from the medical care they probably need at the time of delivery. Some of those babies will die, either from mothers avoiding the medical la migra, some will die because of it. These are babies, not bombs. And so like Luis, i too have to ask of the "Party of No: "Where is your love of children now?"
Thought it was "a child not a choice. "
Or is it only the unborn life of an American child that matters? Other ones aren't really lives worth caring about? Which is why we can casually bomb the crap out of babies overseas. And these babies, smuggled like balloons of poison hidden inside women, bred to be props of American hating Islamists, they are no different than the duct taped dynamite vests jihadists wear. They must be eradicated.
Right to life? Or only the right to be hated for having one?
So, if the GOP truly says no unborn children of undocumented parents are allowed to be born on US soil, what measures do they intend that can be taken to prevent it? What is it that the GOP suggests when comes to parsing the finer points of targeting children? Are they talking Abortion? As the Virginia drunk-driver case of illegal alien Carlos Martinelly Montano from Bolivia demonstrates, as so many immigrant haters have made clear, it can take up to two years to deport someone. How are you going to stop that baby from being born? You can't just say, "Hey put that back!" once junior crowns. And further, if human life actually begins at the melding of DNA (as the Minnesota GOP state platform recently declared) then the religious right will have to acknowledge the rights of undocumented zygotes the instant they pass onto US soil, even though the fetuses in question would technically be "wet foot" till their water breaks.
Thus they have to have to revoke the 14th Amendment … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I surely do not look forward to finding out where this storyline is leading. But i have a queasy suspicion we're going to find out.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
I’m no fan of Nancy Pelosi either. Take Impeachment off the table and keep the war going after we got you guys elected precisely to solve those disasters? Oh girl, it's on! Owned by the same people who bought the GOP leadership years back, Pelosi sold herself out as a silent supporter of torture as a member of the "gang of 8," in 2003 when Congress was debriefed on the coming atrocities in our good name. In fact, i oppose Pelosi so much back in ’08 i even did long distance campaigning for Cindy Sheehan when she challenged the queen of the torture enablers for Cali’s District 8. From where I stand, there's little difference between her and Michelle Bachman besides the quality of their facelifts.
All those Blue Dog Democrats ought to have their noses rubbed in the messes they made by crapping all over the American public so they could be corporate curs for Insurance industry donation dollars during the health care debate. And don’t even get me started on the Republican-Appeaser-in Chief, Obama himself. The GOP may not be able to find a birth certificate for him that satisfies them; but these days it seems if they dug deep enough they might find an old RNC membership card of his. So, you see, I’ve got plenty of material on Dems; but on the same week we sent our baby girl off to college and my daughter-in-law brought our baby grandson into this world, I read about birthers bashing babies and it was “game over people”—right wing raging racism trumps left-wing limpness every time.
You’ve heard about the attack of the “terror babies,” right? Oh they are WAY scarier than anchor babies ever thought about being. You may have even seen that, on successive nights in the recent news cycle, Anderson Cooper and staff had to do battle with successive, progressively deranged terror baby obsessed Texas legislators who were making bug-eyed little chicken claims that Terror Babies were the new Red Menace. Despite the fact that GOP Congressman Louie Gohmert argument of crediblity rapidly reduced down to petulantly repeatedly bleating "you can't say that it couldn't happen." And State Representative Debbie Riddle's behavior was so ugly she makes Jan Brewer look good.
Now that's the "good news" part: these people got thoroughly and absolutely debunked for the whole world to see. The bad news is despite having the whole assertion of terror babies quickly reduced to international laughingstock, the Texas legislators and their rapidly growing flock have continued to chant: "Beware of the Terror Babies"!
So what IS a terror baby? Why only the most brilliant right-wing Obama deception yet, that’s what. Supposedly all the rage in the right-wing psycho circles, this one is the über-theory that neatly ties together several strands of tea party delusion into one handy carrying case. The latest brainwash from the right-wing spin cycle goes like this:
Terrorists are smuggling pregnant illegal aliens into the country to have babies who would then be US citizens, which, as infants, would then be spirited back to some terrorism sponsoring host country, to secret Madrasas to be trained in murder, mayhem, and advanced America-hating. Then, as a teen, they would be replanted in the US to quietly wait, expecting to someday serve as a sleeper cell unit which would strike 20-30 years later because … Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I may be guessing on the exact details of that last part; but i'm sure that mantra ties in there at some point. By now hasn't that become the standard GOP signature conclusion for any talking point?
Try it yourself. “Because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.” It’s the answer for everything these days, the reason for any problem if you ask a Republican. You know it, you’ve heard them say it. The GOP will tell you, “it’s wrong to try to curb Wall Street from buying and selling our nation’s very soul” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or, “global warming is a hoax” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. “BP shouldn’t be required to finish paying for the Gulf Coast clean-up” … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. Or the latest disgust brought back for a second ugly aftertaste of corruption: "Pat Tillman was murdered by his own men and the Army not only covered it up and lied it into a sleazy piece of slipshod right-wing religious propaganda, and everyone, all the way up to Rumsfeld at least, knew what was going on but they all kept it secret from the American public and keep keeping it a secret still " … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.
I know you get the picture because it is the one they show on the news, everyday.
These days, It almost even makes the whole idea of terror babies seem ... no, it doesn't, terror babies is still stupid. As if that wasn't ludicrous enough we now have to envision the image of thousands of tiny James Bonds in pull-ups getting their bottles shaken not stirred… because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on.
Of course Gohmert et al, insist they heard about terror babies from “credible” retired FBI agents, even as the active incredulous FBI spokespeople are frantically working to discredit the allegation that such a thing as terror babies could even exist and/or that the FBI has ever investigated or currently intends to investigate terror babies of any sort or fashion. And while this sounds like an idea for a sequel George Romero couldn't even get produced, the rapid spread of the myth of the terror baby is an ugly harbinger of crap to come.
Seriously, terror babies, while no more based on facts than most of the GOP prevarications, are the most ingenious explanation of the reasons that “Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on,” yet devised, even if it is the most outlandishly baseless. This is more than just another variation on the crazed illegal immigrant/Willie Horton-style boogeyman, more than just the basic birther conspiracy on steroids ... and meth, PCP, XTC, 10 cups of coffee, and airplane glue. More even than the incestuous spawn of such an unholy mating of the birther myth AND immigrant myth. This explains everything: I mean, after all, who is the original terror baby according to the above description?
Why of course, it’s Obama himself. Whom the GOP have been hating since the day he was born, like they intend to do with terror babies. Speaking of birthers, this recent news cycle also brought us the Bronze Star Birther, Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, a multi-decorated soon-to-retire sawbones who is no less than "the chief of primary care at the Army's DiLorenzo TRICARE Health Clinic at the Pentagon."
Lakin is refusing to take his assigned rotation to the front … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on + an illegal alien with no birth certificate. Never mind the fact that when someone says they won't go to war because it is "morally wrong" and based on falsified claims which exploits our citizenry, savages our international credibility and endangers our citizens around the world, those reasons are the reasons of a coward. Say you won't go to war because you don't like your boss, they call you a hero. This guy Lakin was a lifer and ready to risk the "distasteful choice" of court martial rather than take orders from a foreigner, an immigrant.
No wonder Republicans want to get tough on those demon terror babies. They mean to show us all and especially those babies who is the boss. But as Illinois Dem Congressman Luis Gutierrez recently challenged, targeting pregnant "immigrant looking" women will cause them to shrink away from the medical care they probably need at the time of delivery. Some of those babies will die, either from mothers avoiding the medical la migra, some will die because of it. These are babies, not bombs. And so like Luis, i too have to ask of the "Party of No: "Where is your love of children now?"
Thought it was "a child not a choice. "
Or is it only the unborn life of an American child that matters? Other ones aren't really lives worth caring about? Which is why we can casually bomb the crap out of babies overseas. And these babies, smuggled like balloons of poison hidden inside women, bred to be props of American hating Islamists, they are no different than the duct taped dynamite vests jihadists wear. They must be eradicated.
Right to life? Or only the right to be hated for having one?
So, if the GOP truly says no unborn children of undocumented parents are allowed to be born on US soil, what measures do they intend that can be taken to prevent it? What is it that the GOP suggests when comes to parsing the finer points of targeting children? Are they talking Abortion? As the Virginia drunk-driver case of illegal alien Carlos Martinelly Montano from Bolivia demonstrates, as so many immigrant haters have made clear, it can take up to two years to deport someone. How are you going to stop that baby from being born? You can't just say, "Hey put that back!" once junior crowns. And further, if human life actually begins at the melding of DNA (as the Minnesota GOP state platform recently declared) then the religious right will have to acknowledge the rights of undocumented zygotes the instant they pass onto US soil, even though the fetuses in question would technically be "wet foot" till their water breaks.
Thus they have to have to revoke the 14th Amendment … because Obama is the secret Muslim-Commie socialist and so on. I surely do not look forward to finding out where this storyline is leading. But i have a queasy suspicion we're going to find out.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Current Comedy, 8/8/10: "Morally Wrong"
In their continuing effort to top each other and thus earn the title of author of the "Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the week," this week various high-profile members of the GOP yacked up some pretty jacked up big league BS.
Among the runners-up this week include:
In 3rd place: Russell Pearce's flimsy attempt to flim-flam his way around being caught without a clue, jumping on the broken bandwagon of Republicans trying to label the Constitution as "Unconstitutional." As the sponsor of the incendiary SB-1070, AZ Legislative District 18's State Senator, Russell Pearce, has leapt to national prominence over his outspoken stance on America's immigration issue, and become the latest in the series of poster boys for the thinly veiled racism and xenophobia that passes for Republican policy these days. Like Joe the Plumber without the looks, or Palin without the brains.
Pearce has even posted his studied and misquote studded opinions on the 14th Amendment on his website, and thus professes himself an expert. Weighing in on the latest GOP "Wrong is Right and Ignorance is Strength" fad, on prime-time CNN no less, Friday Aug. 6th, feigning massive moral and mental superiority, "Prof" Pearce's pompous points were precisely punctured by ... first, interviewer Anderson Cooper, then debate opponent Paul Begala, and then, after the break, internationally respected Constitutional historian, Eric Foner was brought in to further poke holes in any attempts at a claim of legitimate Constitutional precedent, or functional scholarship for that matter, by the GOP for their recent anti-14th Amendment rant. The 14th Amendment was written to establish the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, to protect the children of immigrants, in a nation built of immigrants. Imagine that.
Also worthy of consideration in recent news was the GOP push to perpetuate the Bush era rich guy tax cuts. To keep that straight, those tax cuts for the richest 2% of the population that Bush swore we could afford cost us hundreds of billions each year in uncollected revenue and drive up the deficit by as much as a trillion a year for the foreseeable future according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Now, even Alan Greenspan and David Stockman (Reagan era budget director), with all the due vengeance of reformed whores, have copped to the fact that GOP Congressional leaders are apparently parading around with their pants on fire. Rather than the GOP foisted myth that "Secret Socialist Commie Obama" has been single-handedly destroying our economy, bankrupting us all through all sorts of unnecessary spending;" it's actually the Bush tax cuts that are the single most important component of our structural deficit and current GOP efforts to continue them is a disastrous mistake ... and a deliberate deception. Stockman goes so far as to say, " Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy." This from a party which has repeatedly claimed an irreproachable reputation for fiscal austerity as a guise to challenge and even derail many of Obama's efforts.
Yep, those were some great moments in hypocrisy. But there's no point in further following the Eric Holder model of prosecuting governmental abuses (i.e. "Beating around the Bush"), so let's get to the goodies: This week's title, "Morally Wrong," comes to us from the howler of a quote from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an Obama Republican holdover from the previous administration. This quote was regarding Wikileaks' recent public posting of years' worth of US military dirty laundry. While dodging specifics about pursuing charges with the Department of Justice, just yet, Gates appeared to invoke a higher law in condemning Wikileaks and its putative founder, Julian Assange: "There's also a moral accountability. And that's where i think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks." Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen also manned a pulpit to call out the sinner and took up the call of morality to pillory Assange, claiming the US government had a "moral obligation" to the people in the Af-Pak theater of operations and should be the sole authority when it comes to how much the public should know about the wars waged in their name.
To recap: in late July the international whistle blower website, Wikileaks, released their latest bombshell exposing corruption and conspiracy on a massive scale. Already internationally acclaimed for helping concerned citizens document the misdeeds and cover-ups of various corporations and governments, Wikileaks operates on a simple principle: its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations." In Kenya, Iceland, Thailand, Britain and Australia, for example, conspiracies revealed have rocked nations.
This time their sources had revealed a cache of info on a case of mismanaged war on a massive scale--murder and abuse and misuse of funds at an incomprehensible level: a compendium of more than 91,000 on-the-ground reports of misguided violence, greed, and/or stupidity. Unfortunately the culprits this time were us, as in the US military in just the latest revelation of our continuingly misguided misadventures in Afghanistan.
To make matters worse, the documents quite clearly revealed a pattern that our supposed best buddy in the war on terror, Pakistan, was actually in bed all along with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban, and basically with just about every other crank in the neighborhood who hated baseball, apple pie, and/or Chevrolet. Allegations of the Pakistan aiding, abetting, and even being agents of terror against the US have never been honestly addressed every since 9/11 Truthers were marginalized trying to draw attention to the 2004 UK Guardian article documenting that "General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta" and in the wake of the 9/11 investigation, the US government was trying to hush this revelation up.
A war promoted under false pretenses, perpetuated for profit, and inflicting untold misery and death on the civilian population, and for what cause? Because they don't like us enough? Our friend in the war is the world's number one exporter of opium and our other friend works for our sworn enemies. But Wikileaks was not supposed to reveal any of that.
Like Ellsberg before them, Wikileaks' publication of the low-level "low-threat" (according to the New York Times) military logs, was not likely to endanger the lives of the men in the field nearly as much as it will the boys in the back room. Furthermore, according to CNN, "neither Gates nor Mullen, who appeared on both the CBS program "Face the Nation" and the NBC program "Meet the Press," could cite a specific example of any Taliban attacks based on information from the leaked materials."
So, to recap, sell a war with lies, under-man it for years to focus on the other fiasco in Iraq (also sold with lies, etc.), partner up with drug dealers and double agents, bomb a stone-age country back to the pebble-age, enflame the region against our country, invoke religious intolerance, and then tolerate and cover-up widespread corruption and abuse. This is the legacy of former Iran-Contra player, CIA/Council on Foreign Relations figure, Robert Gates and the last four years of his war. No wonder he wants to hide it. Meanwhile the guys who report on it are the bad guys, are "morally wrong"?
Ha-ha, i get it! You, Robert Gates, are a hypocrite AND the winner of this week's title as the author of the "Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the Week."
And the losers? Everyone else.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Among the runners-up this week include:
In 3rd place: Russell Pearce's flimsy attempt to flim-flam his way around being caught without a clue, jumping on the broken bandwagon of Republicans trying to label the Constitution as "Unconstitutional." As the sponsor of the incendiary SB-1070, AZ Legislative District 18's State Senator, Russell Pearce, has leapt to national prominence over his outspoken stance on America's immigration issue, and become the latest in the series of poster boys for the thinly veiled racism and xenophobia that passes for Republican policy these days. Like Joe the Plumber without the looks, or Palin without the brains.
Pearce has even posted his studied and misquote studded opinions on the 14th Amendment on his website, and thus professes himself an expert. Weighing in on the latest GOP "Wrong is Right and Ignorance is Strength" fad, on prime-time CNN no less, Friday Aug. 6th, feigning massive moral and mental superiority, "Prof" Pearce's pompous points were precisely punctured by ... first, interviewer Anderson Cooper, then debate opponent Paul Begala, and then, after the break, internationally respected Constitutional historian, Eric Foner was brought in to further poke holes in any attempts at a claim of legitimate Constitutional precedent, or functional scholarship for that matter, by the GOP for their recent anti-14th Amendment rant. The 14th Amendment was written to establish the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike, to protect the children of immigrants, in a nation built of immigrants. Imagine that.
Also worthy of consideration in recent news was the GOP push to perpetuate the Bush era rich guy tax cuts. To keep that straight, those tax cuts for the richest 2% of the population that Bush swore we could afford cost us hundreds of billions each year in uncollected revenue and drive up the deficit by as much as a trillion a year for the foreseeable future according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Now, even Alan Greenspan and David Stockman (Reagan era budget director), with all the due vengeance of reformed whores, have copped to the fact that GOP Congressional leaders are apparently parading around with their pants on fire. Rather than the GOP foisted myth that "Secret Socialist Commie Obama" has been single-handedly destroying our economy, bankrupting us all through all sorts of unnecessary spending;" it's actually the Bush tax cuts that are the single most important component of our structural deficit and current GOP efforts to continue them is a disastrous mistake ... and a deliberate deception. Stockman goes so far as to say, " Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy." This from a party which has repeatedly claimed an irreproachable reputation for fiscal austerity as a guise to challenge and even derail many of Obama's efforts.
Yep, those were some great moments in hypocrisy. But there's no point in further following the Eric Holder model of prosecuting governmental abuses (i.e. "Beating around the Bush"), so let's get to the goodies: This week's title, "Morally Wrong," comes to us from the howler of a quote from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, an Obama Republican holdover from the previous administration. This quote was regarding Wikileaks' recent public posting of years' worth of US military dirty laundry. While dodging specifics about pursuing charges with the Department of Justice, just yet, Gates appeared to invoke a higher law in condemning Wikileaks and its putative founder, Julian Assange: "There's also a moral accountability. And that's where i think the verdict is guilty on Wikileaks." Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen also manned a pulpit to call out the sinner and took up the call of morality to pillory Assange, claiming the US government had a "moral obligation" to the people in the Af-Pak theater of operations and should be the sole authority when it comes to how much the public should know about the wars waged in their name.
To recap: in late July the international whistle blower website, Wikileaks, released their latest bombshell exposing corruption and conspiracy on a massive scale. Already internationally acclaimed for helping concerned citizens document the misdeeds and cover-ups of various corporations and governments, Wikileaks operates on a simple principle: its "primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations." In Kenya, Iceland, Thailand, Britain and Australia, for example, conspiracies revealed have rocked nations.
This time their sources had revealed a cache of info on a case of mismanaged war on a massive scale--murder and abuse and misuse of funds at an incomprehensible level: a compendium of more than 91,000 on-the-ground reports of misguided violence, greed, and/or stupidity. Unfortunately the culprits this time were us, as in the US military in just the latest revelation of our continuingly misguided misadventures in Afghanistan.
To make matters worse, the documents quite clearly revealed a pattern that our supposed best buddy in the war on terror, Pakistan, was actually in bed all along with Al-Qaeda, with the Taliban, and basically with just about every other crank in the neighborhood who hated baseball, apple pie, and/or Chevrolet. Allegations of the Pakistan aiding, abetting, and even being agents of terror against the US have never been honestly addressed every since 9/11 Truthers were marginalized trying to draw attention to the 2004 UK Guardian article documenting that "General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta" and in the wake of the 9/11 investigation, the US government was trying to hush this revelation up.
A war promoted under false pretenses, perpetuated for profit, and inflicting untold misery and death on the civilian population, and for what cause? Because they don't like us enough? Our friend in the war is the world's number one exporter of opium and our other friend works for our sworn enemies. But Wikileaks was not supposed to reveal any of that.
Like Ellsberg before them, Wikileaks' publication of the low-level "low-threat" (according to the New York Times) military logs, was not likely to endanger the lives of the men in the field nearly as much as it will the boys in the back room. Furthermore, according to CNN, "neither Gates nor Mullen, who appeared on both the CBS program "Face the Nation" and the NBC program "Meet the Press," could cite a specific example of any Taliban attacks based on information from the leaked materials."
So, to recap, sell a war with lies, under-man it for years to focus on the other fiasco in Iraq (also sold with lies, etc.), partner up with drug dealers and double agents, bomb a stone-age country back to the pebble-age, enflame the region against our country, invoke religious intolerance, and then tolerate and cover-up widespread corruption and abuse. This is the legacy of former Iran-Contra player, CIA/Council on Foreign Relations figure, Robert Gates and the last four years of his war. No wonder he wants to hide it. Meanwhile the guys who report on it are the bad guys, are "morally wrong"?
Ha-ha, i get it! You, Robert Gates, are a hypocrite AND the winner of this week's title as the author of the "Most Outrageously Hypocritical Political Statement of the Week."
And the losers? Everyone else.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Current Comedy, 7/31/10: Must Be a Republican
Hey, everybody, how have you been?
Don't know about you, but i've spent the majority of this summer's vacation, as i commonly do, traveling and trying to ignore the nasty national news, which i have now skewered for over twenty years. That's right, my first column was published in February of 1990.
My, oh my, oh gosh, how things have not changed.
In that very first column (published by Anthony Smith in his long defunct 'zine, The Alternative) i found this paragraph where a fictional government spokesman attempts to calm a worried public over an environmental issue:
"While we were standing at the trash pile, a big wind blew by and stirred it all around. I went to pick it up. He said, "No money in that, son. Leave it till it gets so big, no one will ever be able to pick it up, then we'll hire someone to fail at it and invent them all sorts of inadequate but expensive tools to fail at it with and everyone will stay happy."
And i thought: BP. I thought Immigration. Health care, drug wars, foreign wars, culture wars, economy where the rich are forever raping the poor then calling them lazy. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Twenty years ago, our country was being run by a Republican media, promoting a Republican agenda at the expense of the general public. And here in 2010, once again, Republican leadership and Republican press have our country in a continuing disaster.
Now right away i know some readers are already up in arms, whipping out their thesauri and honing barbs to sling about "the liberal press," the Tea Party as the Voice of the People," and what an idiot i am for not knowing that "Obama, the commie/socialist, secret Muslim, Black Power-White Hating Gun grabbing Revolutionary" and his henchmen, er, henchpersons, Nancy "the Shrew" Pelosi and Harry "the Idiot" Reid are responsible for the trainwreck our country's in and it's the Republicans who are trying to save America for the true Americans.
My friends, thanks for the corrections. Save your letters, you must obliviously be Republicans. My condolences. Perhaps there is a cure. If you truly cannot see that the party of "No" is using the same lame techniques to manipulate the ignorant public, then you truly are either a manipulator or ignorant. After twenty years of observation, i would have to say that Republicans fall into three groups: deceitfully greed-driven, vindictively self-righteous, and/or stupid.
Dear angered reader, pray tell which group do you fall in?
Despite my best efforts to ignore their crap, while touring this summer, promoting my new book, Leaving the Empire, I have repeatedly heard tales of Republicans refusing to pay for 9/11 victims and "First Responders," and delaying unemployment for millions, while they champion a law written to satisfy Russell Pearce's Neo-Nazi supporters. What kind of person would do that or support somebody else for it?
Must be a Republican.
Every day it seemed, even while traveling, i received emails from folks like Dudley Brown telling me how the evil Obama admin intends to use his evil Homeland Security to steal their guns. I get people like Rand Paul being called American heroes for wanting to repeal the Civil Rights Act. I get supposed sage national politicians decrying proposed restrictions on Wall Street at the same time we discover Wachovia has been laundering hundreds of billions in drug money, but the real problem in America is peasants sneaking across the border to take the slave labor jobs Americans don't want. What kind of person could spew such vomit? Worse yet, what kind of person would swallow it?
Must be a Republican.
What kind of person would scream bloody murder to try to scandalize a nebbish like Elena Kagan or Shirley Sherrod blindly marching in lock-step behind hate-mongers like Limbaugh, Beck and Gingrich as if they were freedom fighters? What kind of person could listen to Andrew Breitbart and possibly construe him as anything even remotely resembling fair-minded or honest? What kind of person could watch the McCain/Heyward debates and think that either choice was in any way a good one, or for that matter would see Jan Brewer as an attractive candidate?
Must be a Republican (and check that eyesight while you're at it).
What kind of person could claim they were good Christian lovers of Jesus because they would approve of madmen murdering doctors to stop abortions from killing American babies; yet demand unlimited funding for our country to kill foreign babies in wars? See what i mean?
As awful a malady as it must be, "Republicanism" that is, one has to wonder: why would anyone choose to be a Republican in the first place? Well, for the rich and powerful, the obvious answer is since the Republican Party is owned by the rich and powerful, it is simply a matter of investing in the home brand. Who champions wars, exploitive energy companies, the health insurance industry and Wall Street? Republicans. Who works to protect them at the expense of the general public? Republicans. Who makes a butt-load off of the profits buying and selling those miseries? That's right again, Republicans.
Why would some people, actual human Americans, ever support such tripe, when it is clearly out to work against their best interests again and again, year in year out, and has been for as long as i've been beating these same dead horses with these same lame jokes? Well, the greedy, deceitful, and the self-righteously vindictive need all the propaganda they can get. If you can get some schmucks to think marching around with the Tea Party is their personal individual and unique expression of their love of their country when it is merely a fad marketed by GOP leader Dick Armey's Freedom Works for their clients in the health insurance industry, well, it may be greedy and deceitful, but there is no disputing it is damn fine marketing.
Who benefits from getting the people who work to think of themselves as the backbone of our country to envision their Democratic and democratically elected government as an evil enemy that must be thwarted at all costs even when they are doing something good like attempting to pay some 9/11 fireman's hospital bill. Who could possibly benefit from that?
You got it, must be Republicans.
And the ignorant? Why are they supporting this? Well, it is easy to be ignorant these days. With the millions of issues each with their own billions of complexities, it is legitimately hard to know much about anything, much less keep track of everything. Anybody who wanted to distort the news for their own deceitful ends, could fool a lot of fools a lot of the time as long as they made themselves seem fair and balanced loyal Americans. They could be on the wrong side all the time as long as they seemed like the embattled, justly outraged, good guys. What kind of "news" channel would distort the facts to create a false impression of the reality of the world so as to promote the hidden aims and profits of their ownership?
Even the ignorant know i'm talking about Fox News here, right? As was recently reported on Media Matters by Ari Rabin-Havt, "News Corp., Fox News' parent company's shareholders [include] Morgan Stanley owns nearly $300,000,000 in News Corp. stock, Bank of New York more than $175,000,000, Goldman Sachs $115,000,000, and JPMorgan Chase nearly $70,000,000." Who told us Bush was dutifully elected? Enron was unimportant? 9/11 meant Arabs were evil? or that immigrants were ruining our country by making our beds and picking our lettuce?
Who had the unmitigated gall to sell us that Sean Hannity had any interest in anything anyone else had to say, or that Glenn Beck was an intellectual because he uses chalkboards, that Bill O'Reilly was deliberative or that Rush Limbaugh makes sense to anyone this side of a Vicodin induced haze? Who could support crap like that? Why the only people who ever benefit from Fox News' "fair and balanced" reportage:
Must be Republican. Deceitfully greedy, righteously vindictive or stupid. Pray tell dear angered reader, which justification will you wear for your role in helping to feed that elephant that tramples the needs of the many for the frills of the few?
Don't know about you, but i choose "none-of-the-above" and so i probably won't become a Republican. What will you do?
-mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Don't know about you, but i've spent the majority of this summer's vacation, as i commonly do, traveling and trying to ignore the nasty national news, which i have now skewered for over twenty years. That's right, my first column was published in February of 1990.
My, oh my, oh gosh, how things have not changed.
In that very first column (published by Anthony Smith in his long defunct 'zine, The Alternative) i found this paragraph where a fictional government spokesman attempts to calm a worried public over an environmental issue:
"While we were standing at the trash pile, a big wind blew by and stirred it all around. I went to pick it up. He said, "No money in that, son. Leave it till it gets so big, no one will ever be able to pick it up, then we'll hire someone to fail at it and invent them all sorts of inadequate but expensive tools to fail at it with and everyone will stay happy."
And i thought: BP. I thought Immigration. Health care, drug wars, foreign wars, culture wars, economy where the rich are forever raping the poor then calling them lazy. Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Twenty years ago, our country was being run by a Republican media, promoting a Republican agenda at the expense of the general public. And here in 2010, once again, Republican leadership and Republican press have our country in a continuing disaster.
Now right away i know some readers are already up in arms, whipping out their thesauri and honing barbs to sling about "the liberal press," the Tea Party as the Voice of the People," and what an idiot i am for not knowing that "Obama, the commie/socialist, secret Muslim, Black Power-White Hating Gun grabbing Revolutionary" and his henchmen, er, henchpersons, Nancy "the Shrew" Pelosi and Harry "the Idiot" Reid are responsible for the trainwreck our country's in and it's the Republicans who are trying to save America for the true Americans.
My friends, thanks for the corrections. Save your letters, you must obliviously be Republicans. My condolences. Perhaps there is a cure. If you truly cannot see that the party of "No" is using the same lame techniques to manipulate the ignorant public, then you truly are either a manipulator or ignorant. After twenty years of observation, i would have to say that Republicans fall into three groups: deceitfully greed-driven, vindictively self-righteous, and/or stupid.
Dear angered reader, pray tell which group do you fall in?
Despite my best efforts to ignore their crap, while touring this summer, promoting my new book, Leaving the Empire, I have repeatedly heard tales of Republicans refusing to pay for 9/11 victims and "First Responders," and delaying unemployment for millions, while they champion a law written to satisfy Russell Pearce's Neo-Nazi supporters. What kind of person would do that or support somebody else for it?
Must be a Republican.
Every day it seemed, even while traveling, i received emails from folks like Dudley Brown telling me how the evil Obama admin intends to use his evil Homeland Security to steal their guns. I get people like Rand Paul being called American heroes for wanting to repeal the Civil Rights Act. I get supposed sage national politicians decrying proposed restrictions on Wall Street at the same time we discover Wachovia has been laundering hundreds of billions in drug money, but the real problem in America is peasants sneaking across the border to take the slave labor jobs Americans don't want. What kind of person could spew such vomit? Worse yet, what kind of person would swallow it?
Must be a Republican.
What kind of person would scream bloody murder to try to scandalize a nebbish like Elena Kagan or Shirley Sherrod blindly marching in lock-step behind hate-mongers like Limbaugh, Beck and Gingrich as if they were freedom fighters? What kind of person could listen to Andrew Breitbart and possibly construe him as anything even remotely resembling fair-minded or honest? What kind of person could watch the McCain/Heyward debates and think that either choice was in any way a good one, or for that matter would see Jan Brewer as an attractive candidate?
Must be a Republican (and check that eyesight while you're at it).
What kind of person could claim they were good Christian lovers of Jesus because they would approve of madmen murdering doctors to stop abortions from killing American babies; yet demand unlimited funding for our country to kill foreign babies in wars? See what i mean?
As awful a malady as it must be, "Republicanism" that is, one has to wonder: why would anyone choose to be a Republican in the first place? Well, for the rich and powerful, the obvious answer is since the Republican Party is owned by the rich and powerful, it is simply a matter of investing in the home brand. Who champions wars, exploitive energy companies, the health insurance industry and Wall Street? Republicans. Who works to protect them at the expense of the general public? Republicans. Who makes a butt-load off of the profits buying and selling those miseries? That's right again, Republicans.
Why would some people, actual human Americans, ever support such tripe, when it is clearly out to work against their best interests again and again, year in year out, and has been for as long as i've been beating these same dead horses with these same lame jokes? Well, the greedy, deceitful, and the self-righteously vindictive need all the propaganda they can get. If you can get some schmucks to think marching around with the Tea Party is their personal individual and unique expression of their love of their country when it is merely a fad marketed by GOP leader Dick Armey's Freedom Works for their clients in the health insurance industry, well, it may be greedy and deceitful, but there is no disputing it is damn fine marketing.
Who benefits from getting the people who work to think of themselves as the backbone of our country to envision their Democratic and democratically elected government as an evil enemy that must be thwarted at all costs even when they are doing something good like attempting to pay some 9/11 fireman's hospital bill. Who could possibly benefit from that?
You got it, must be Republicans.
And the ignorant? Why are they supporting this? Well, it is easy to be ignorant these days. With the millions of issues each with their own billions of complexities, it is legitimately hard to know much about anything, much less keep track of everything. Anybody who wanted to distort the news for their own deceitful ends, could fool a lot of fools a lot of the time as long as they made themselves seem fair and balanced loyal Americans. They could be on the wrong side all the time as long as they seemed like the embattled, justly outraged, good guys. What kind of "news" channel would distort the facts to create a false impression of the reality of the world so as to promote the hidden aims and profits of their ownership?
Even the ignorant know i'm talking about Fox News here, right? As was recently reported on Media Matters by Ari Rabin-Havt, "News Corp., Fox News' parent company's shareholders [include] Morgan Stanley owns nearly $300,000,000 in News Corp. stock, Bank of New York more than $175,000,000, Goldman Sachs $115,000,000, and JPMorgan Chase nearly $70,000,000." Who told us Bush was dutifully elected? Enron was unimportant? 9/11 meant Arabs were evil? or that immigrants were ruining our country by making our beds and picking our lettuce?
Who had the unmitigated gall to sell us that Sean Hannity had any interest in anything anyone else had to say, or that Glenn Beck was an intellectual because he uses chalkboards, that Bill O'Reilly was deliberative or that Rush Limbaugh makes sense to anyone this side of a Vicodin induced haze? Who could support crap like that? Why the only people who ever benefit from Fox News' "fair and balanced" reportage:
Must be Republican. Deceitfully greedy, righteously vindictive or stupid. Pray tell dear angered reader, which justification will you wear for your role in helping to feed that elephant that tramples the needs of the many for the frills of the few?
Don't know about you, but i choose "none-of-the-above" and so i probably won't become a Republican. What will you do?
-mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Current Comedy, 5/20/10: Tales From the Struggle Over SB1070, Parts Three, Four, & Five
III: "Is this America?" or only Arizona?
You know, Arizona as a state has had quite a few nicknames over the years. Famously once known as the home of inland America's #1 tourist attraction (i mean, prior to SB1070, that is), most highway signs still call us the "Grand Canyon State." Also historically, nickname-wise Arizona, the "Copper State," was considered the least precious among the fabled Southwestern heavy-metal trio, "Golden" California and "Silver" Nevada. And though the maps of Spain once labeled it, "Pimeria Alta," referring to the more readily enslaved Pima Indians, Spaniards in the know called it "Apacheria" for fierce Indians who rendered their "rule" farcical.
Later, after the US conquested the land once ruled by conquistadors, our area, the western end of the New Mexico Territory, was the no-man's land outlaws escaped to from both Mexico and the US. It was a time when Americans like the Glanton Gang scalped both Indians and Mexicans for a hundred dollars for every handful of hair. Back then, fittingly enough, our land was called the "Paradise For Devils."
But in this time of the struggle over SB1070 when duly elected avowed White Supremacists write their own updated version of the "Fugitive Slave Law," punishing those who would harbor, aid or conceal an undocumented immigrant, the nickname that most readily comes to mind derives from a time after the Civil War when the territory flooded with former Confederate soldiers who resented Federal control under Reconstruction in the East and darker skinned people in general. Thus Arizona welcomed such civic leaders as former race warrior/Phoenix founder/drug addict/jailbird Jack Swilling and in 1872, the city of Tempe even made being "Sonoran" a exile-able offense.
For over a hundred years AZ was nationally known as an openly racist society, starting from the Battle of Picacho Peak in 1862 when racial-caste defending Arizonans rebelled against their duly elected national government and took up arms against Union troops (only to quickly get their butts kicked, btw). Our rep as racists was clearly intact 100 years later in the 1960s, when, as Bruce Hartford's recent Huffington Post article notes, " Arizona was (and continues to be) one of those states specifically called out by the Voting Rights Act of 1965" for its widespread disenfranchisement of Hispanic voters. The legend of Arizona as a racist state would later be the centerpiece of rap band Public Enemy's 1991 condemnation of the state for refusing to endorse the national MLK celebration with their hit "By the Time I Get to Arizona."
Between the state superintendent of education firing teachers for having Hispanic accents; and every state official under penalty of lawsuit required to investigate a person's personal heritage for as little "probably cause" as them having a Hispanic accent, one wonders if Arizona will ever outgrow its old Confederate era moniker, the "Mississippi of the West."
*
IV: "Crappy Nappy"? Is This America?
AZ Central would later run articles covering the national protests around the country that May Day including one that documented the arrest of Illinois US Congressman Luis Gutierrez for civil disobedience at a Whitehouse protest. While rummaging around on Arizona's most popular news site [disclosure--this blog is posted on AZ Central, among other places], in short order i had linked to an article discussing the guilty verdict of a recent case where an undocumented immigrant was accused of killing a border agent. For those who scoff that Arizona is now an enlightened state and racist free, in the interest of waking you guys the heck up, here is an actual comment, typos and all, posted just below the article:
This guy is geting.. Jail time for killing a border patrol officer? He should be held as a HERO.. I can see it now. crappy nappy will be here given this guy a medal.. Obama the Savior/Messiah/God will pardon him.. there will be huge rallies for this useless piece of trash from the "MIGRANT" Community.. I'm amazed the "Migrant" Community aren't protestng this...He only cam here for a better life. How dare hte border patrol stop hiim!!!!! The border patrol needs to be investigated for Racial Profiling.....WHERE ARE HTE PROTESTS !!!!!"
Then the very next comment unabashedly said there should be no limit on hunting and killing illegal aliens and none of the subsequent ones called him out over it. Please, check it yourself: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/04/30/20100430BorderAgentShot0430.html#ixzz0muvD3Rx4
And so, i have to ask--are people making this up?
Are those comments really written by a spoof satire site that is parodying the worse of the worse of the redneck mentality that is behind this bill or is this the rank and file of Pearce supporters? This being Arizona one cannot be too sure. Certainly when it comes to the wiles of the AZ GOP, their motives are hard to discern but their actions are generally clear--if it is good for the public, they'll work against it.
Make no mistake, the AZ GOP Lege’ is not actually attempting to solve an immigration issue. They are pandering to the racist ranchers in the southern end of the state and reveling in their power to punish their enemies. It brings to mind last year's outlandish budget cut package for education, which bragged about noble belt tightening but held hidden daggers among the supposed budget cutting shears.
Besides lopping off hundreds of millions of dollars in school funding, handicapping schools across the state, also included provisions to punish the teachers who had protested against said cuts. If the range of punishable offenses in the new immigration law were not enough to convince you that the White power structure of AZ intends to punish those who challenge it, note that at the same time as the immigration bill, the AZ legislature has also passed a law banning Ethnic Studies as not American enough.
Once again the AZ GOP has decided there is not time enough to make life better for its residents, but there is time enough to restrict their freedoms and frighten their children; that there is not money enough for schools and traditional forms of public safety, but there is enough money to marshal all law enforcement throughout the state to investigate a person because his shoes might look foreign. In their public speech and even in the lines of SB 1070 itself, every sentence from those guys is built to be an affront. Jeez. If they are going to argue from that kind of a hostile disrespecting position I say, no kowtowing to that crap. That is the same kind of Bush-league attitude that always gets this country in trouble.
But there is hope. You know in the Tea Party, demographics suggest that about a third of those who participated were newly politically active for the first time in their lives. Which, paradoxically is a good thing for the left; because the more the novices learn about the difference between the reality of America and O'Reilly/Hannity/Beck's twist of it, the sooner they will fall away and scorn the whole bogus enterprise as a boondoggle and then, if the hardcore Tea Partiers haven't already killed us all, the left will gain, when the right finally earn their inevitable backlash.
Like i say, if we live long enough. Certainly hope for that change led many to the capitol that day. Judging from the spontaneous crowds of more than 20,000 who also showed up in Phoenix and joined the million or more around the country who marched that day, it seems i am not alone.
*
V: The First-Timers
That May Day morning, as the crowds began to gather at the state capitol to protest SB1070, the crying woman stood off to one side, some distance from the main rally. Though i had come for the bombast and high theater of speakers and posers who typically standout at such an event, the crying woman caught my attention early on. I had seen her there sobbing for quite a while before going over to check on her.
She laid her head against a capitol courtyard palm tree, hiding herself in its noontime shadow as she sobbed. She asked me not to take her name. She said, “I’m better off over here. I don’t need to be around the others. It gets me too upset. This whole thing is very emotional for me," she waved at the air in her face to try and stop her tears. "All the hatefulness, all those sheep following along," she waved her hand off towards the city of Phoenix somewhere.
"Like they needed another reason to hate us. All those politicians are doing is serving up hate. They’re ruining it and for what? This isn’t trying to make the state any better. It’s all they know to get votes. They will do anything to get votes. They don’t care who gets hurt. They‘re supposed to make things better but they‘re going backward.”
She spoke with one hand across her face and the other hung and/or twitched at her side. At her well-manicured fingertips stood her poster. Though many people circulated the ready-made factory printed posters of Phoenix activists ¡Puente!, or the California-based "Mexica Movement," the May Day March was telling as to the wide assortment of handmade signs created by people who had obviously never protested before. In fact, based on the sheer number of original signs, i would guess more than half of the protesters there that morning were heart-felt novices.
Much like the crying woman and the sign she had made for that day. It was obvious that when she was younger, she was the kind of student who earned extra credit on their class reports because of their sincere and elaborate posters. As meticulous as her polished nails, her heavily decorated foam backed poster board had hand shaded printed text and enlarged color- copies of family photos of generations of clearly Hispanic soldiers --her grandfather, her father, and her brother, she explained, who gave their lives for a country that now attacked her. She was not young and a couple of the pics were older still, men in uniform, frozen forever with their young earnestness. There were also pics of period era military campaign pins, slogans men died by: a red-white-and-blue “Land of the Free,” a cross-stitched sampler, “I Serve My Country,” and a more recent star and stripe bordered, “United We Stand.”
“We fought for this.” She wiped at her face. “They died for this, for this? The way they treat us, pressing for hate just to get vote. They’re going backward.”
*
Sergio the marble-mason had a hard hat to die for. Red, White and Blue to the bone, Sergio's scuffed but bizarrely grime-free shiny white hard plastic hardhat was festooned with US flags, along with his name, "Sergio" in vinyl letters and a couple of judiciously placed Mexican banderas as well. He was dressed in a hyper-neat and ironed near-parody of a construction worker's day labor clothes, so clean it was more like a costume: long sleeve white shirt, loose dark pants, and polished but battered work boots.
Sergio is a marble mason, a skill which brings him top dollar in the suburban homes of Phoenix; but one he learned in his native Mexico. It was his first protest as well. "You can't do nothing, you have to do something. I work hard, hard as anyone. Masonry is heavy, dirty work. I feed my family, I make beautiful things and then they treat me like I am a stealer when I walk in a store. I have to do something." He had come empty handed, but open hearted, and cheerily greeted any who passed by within greeting range. "I am so happy to be here." He paused to wave at the general crowd. Some waved back. "This beautiful day. The people saying what they feel. It makes a difference, yes? It makes a difference?"
It took me a second to realize the question wasn't rhetorical. His eyes quite seriously told me what he hoped he would hear. I said yes, but quickly changed the subject.
*
Paloma Cordova, a beautiful dove-like creature, was perched upon a rock to get a better view and like Sergio wore her message with her clothing, a simple green tee with a neatly hand-lettered logo: "Do I Look Illegal?"
I laughed, "Well, i guess we all do"
"My point exactly," she said and we set to talking.
An primary school teacher in the Tempe school district, Paloma's students already had it hard before SB 1070--gang violence, deteriorating neighborhoods, up at night from shots in the dark. Now the new law had shifted the continuing crisis into panic-mode. "They're afraid of every knock at the door. They're just little kids and they fear for their life. Will mom come back tonight? They are just children. I don't think the legislature thinks about that."
*
Mesa-based private investigator Lupe Daniels thinks about it, the red flags in the new law, its impact on families, the way prejudices can turn peace officers into enforcers. He's seen it firsthand. He says he's even written a book about race relations, police corruption, and secret brutality against Hispanics in Mesa. "Oh, I have seen it all," Daniels shook his head. "You would not believe the things they get away with." He hastily gave me a card.
"No, I have been studying the Mesa police for a long time. This law will give them the idea they can do anything. That is why I am here. You can't let them think it's OK to treat us like this. This is America. We are Americans too."
A decorated veteran, Daniels wore ball cap emblazoned with the words "Bronze Star" and "heroism" and boasting a thickly embroidered image of the medal and its ribbon. His sergeant's bars were pinned there as well along with a lapel flag. Like so many people i talked to that morning, Daniels was hyperbolically clean and neat.
In scanning my photos now for the past three week, i am in fact still impressed the inordinately large percentage of protest attendees who were impeccably dressed. Even the white chicks in anarchist chic were spot- and wrinkle-free. And folks, when the anarchists are neat and presentable, you are talking a movement to be reckoned with.
Her skimpy black tank top and peek-a-boo bra straps went well with her unusually form-fitting cargo Capris and obviously ironed Zapatista-style black bandana/handkerchief/anarchist mask and oversized Jackie O style shades. Even the scrunchie that held her blond ponytail matched. And to top it off, her choice of chrome I-Phone made it clear she was a revolutionary maybe wasn't actually struggling much, but who understood the importance of accessorizing.
Despite the blatant contradiction of her mask's implied anonymity, the whole outfit begged for attention and within time an eager AP reporter was dutifully submitting questions to her. On a college campus she would be the envy of all the hippest trust-fund hippies. That morning, in that place, with all the heart-felt first-timers about, she was little more than a joke.
So i politely laughed and moved on.
Next week the finale.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
You know, Arizona as a state has had quite a few nicknames over the years. Famously once known as the home of inland America's #1 tourist attraction (i mean, prior to SB1070, that is), most highway signs still call us the "Grand Canyon State." Also historically, nickname-wise Arizona, the "Copper State," was considered the least precious among the fabled Southwestern heavy-metal trio, "Golden" California and "Silver" Nevada. And though the maps of Spain once labeled it, "Pimeria Alta," referring to the more readily enslaved Pima Indians, Spaniards in the know called it "Apacheria" for fierce Indians who rendered their "rule" farcical.
Later, after the US conquested the land once ruled by conquistadors, our area, the western end of the New Mexico Territory, was the no-man's land outlaws escaped to from both Mexico and the US. It was a time when Americans like the Glanton Gang scalped both Indians and Mexicans for a hundred dollars for every handful of hair. Back then, fittingly enough, our land was called the "Paradise For Devils."
But in this time of the struggle over SB1070 when duly elected avowed White Supremacists write their own updated version of the "Fugitive Slave Law," punishing those who would harbor, aid or conceal an undocumented immigrant, the nickname that most readily comes to mind derives from a time after the Civil War when the territory flooded with former Confederate soldiers who resented Federal control under Reconstruction in the East and darker skinned people in general. Thus Arizona welcomed such civic leaders as former race warrior/Phoenix founder/drug addict/jailbird Jack Swilling and in 1872, the city of Tempe even made being "Sonoran" a exile-able offense.
For over a hundred years AZ was nationally known as an openly racist society, starting from the Battle of Picacho Peak in 1862 when racial-caste defending Arizonans rebelled against their duly elected national government and took up arms against Union troops (only to quickly get their butts kicked, btw). Our rep as racists was clearly intact 100 years later in the 1960s, when, as Bruce Hartford's recent Huffington Post article notes, " Arizona was (and continues to be) one of those states specifically called out by the Voting Rights Act of 1965" for its widespread disenfranchisement of Hispanic voters. The legend of Arizona as a racist state would later be the centerpiece of rap band Public Enemy's 1991 condemnation of the state for refusing to endorse the national MLK celebration with their hit "By the Time I Get to Arizona."
Between the state superintendent of education firing teachers for having Hispanic accents; and every state official under penalty of lawsuit required to investigate a person's personal heritage for as little "probably cause" as them having a Hispanic accent, one wonders if Arizona will ever outgrow its old Confederate era moniker, the "Mississippi of the West."
*
IV: "Crappy Nappy"? Is This America?
AZ Central would later run articles covering the national protests around the country that May Day including one that documented the arrest of Illinois US Congressman Luis Gutierrez for civil disobedience at a Whitehouse protest. While rummaging around on Arizona's most popular news site [disclosure--this blog is posted on AZ Central, among other places], in short order i had linked to an article discussing the guilty verdict of a recent case where an undocumented immigrant was accused of killing a border agent. For those who scoff that Arizona is now an enlightened state and racist free, in the interest of waking you guys the heck up, here is an actual comment, typos and all, posted just below the article:
This guy is geting.. Jail time for killing a border patrol officer? He should be held as a HERO.. I can see it now. crappy nappy will be here given this guy a medal.. Obama the Savior/Messiah/God will pardon him.. there will be huge rallies for this useless piece of trash from the "MIGRANT" Community.. I'm amazed the "Migrant" Community aren't protestng this...He only cam here for a better life. How dare hte border patrol stop hiim!!!!! The border patrol needs to be investigated for Racial Profiling.....WHERE ARE HTE PROTESTS !!!!!"
Then the very next comment unabashedly said there should be no limit on hunting and killing illegal aliens and none of the subsequent ones called him out over it. Please, check it yourself: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/04/30/20100430BorderAgentShot0430.html#ixzz0muvD3Rx4
And so, i have to ask--are people making this up?
Are those comments really written by a spoof satire site that is parodying the worse of the worse of the redneck mentality that is behind this bill or is this the rank and file of Pearce supporters? This being Arizona one cannot be too sure. Certainly when it comes to the wiles of the AZ GOP, their motives are hard to discern but their actions are generally clear--if it is good for the public, they'll work against it.
Make no mistake, the AZ GOP Lege’ is not actually attempting to solve an immigration issue. They are pandering to the racist ranchers in the southern end of the state and reveling in their power to punish their enemies. It brings to mind last year's outlandish budget cut package for education, which bragged about noble belt tightening but held hidden daggers among the supposed budget cutting shears.
Besides lopping off hundreds of millions of dollars in school funding, handicapping schools across the state, also included provisions to punish the teachers who had protested against said cuts. If the range of punishable offenses in the new immigration law were not enough to convince you that the White power structure of AZ intends to punish those who challenge it, note that at the same time as the immigration bill, the AZ legislature has also passed a law banning Ethnic Studies as not American enough.
Once again the AZ GOP has decided there is not time enough to make life better for its residents, but there is time enough to restrict their freedoms and frighten their children; that there is not money enough for schools and traditional forms of public safety, but there is enough money to marshal all law enforcement throughout the state to investigate a person because his shoes might look foreign. In their public speech and even in the lines of SB 1070 itself, every sentence from those guys is built to be an affront. Jeez. If they are going to argue from that kind of a hostile disrespecting position I say, no kowtowing to that crap. That is the same kind of Bush-league attitude that always gets this country in trouble.
But there is hope. You know in the Tea Party, demographics suggest that about a third of those who participated were newly politically active for the first time in their lives. Which, paradoxically is a good thing for the left; because the more the novices learn about the difference between the reality of America and O'Reilly/Hannity/Beck's twist of it, the sooner they will fall away and scorn the whole bogus enterprise as a boondoggle and then, if the hardcore Tea Partiers haven't already killed us all, the left will gain, when the right finally earn their inevitable backlash.
Like i say, if we live long enough. Certainly hope for that change led many to the capitol that day. Judging from the spontaneous crowds of more than 20,000 who also showed up in Phoenix and joined the million or more around the country who marched that day, it seems i am not alone.
*
V: The First-Timers
That May Day morning, as the crowds began to gather at the state capitol to protest SB1070, the crying woman stood off to one side, some distance from the main rally. Though i had come for the bombast and high theater of speakers and posers who typically standout at such an event, the crying woman caught my attention early on. I had seen her there sobbing for quite a while before going over to check on her.
She laid her head against a capitol courtyard palm tree, hiding herself in its noontime shadow as she sobbed. She asked me not to take her name. She said, “I’m better off over here. I don’t need to be around the others. It gets me too upset. This whole thing is very emotional for me," she waved at the air in her face to try and stop her tears. "All the hatefulness, all those sheep following along," she waved her hand off towards the city of Phoenix somewhere.
"Like they needed another reason to hate us. All those politicians are doing is serving up hate. They’re ruining it and for what? This isn’t trying to make the state any better. It’s all they know to get votes. They will do anything to get votes. They don’t care who gets hurt. They‘re supposed to make things better but they‘re going backward.”
She spoke with one hand across her face and the other hung and/or twitched at her side. At her well-manicured fingertips stood her poster. Though many people circulated the ready-made factory printed posters of Phoenix activists ¡Puente!, or the California-based "Mexica Movement," the May Day March was telling as to the wide assortment of handmade signs created by people who had obviously never protested before. In fact, based on the sheer number of original signs, i would guess more than half of the protesters there that morning were heart-felt novices.
Much like the crying woman and the sign she had made for that day. It was obvious that when she was younger, she was the kind of student who earned extra credit on their class reports because of their sincere and elaborate posters. As meticulous as her polished nails, her heavily decorated foam backed poster board had hand shaded printed text and enlarged color- copies of family photos of generations of clearly Hispanic soldiers --her grandfather, her father, and her brother, she explained, who gave their lives for a country that now attacked her. She was not young and a couple of the pics were older still, men in uniform, frozen forever with their young earnestness. There were also pics of period era military campaign pins, slogans men died by: a red-white-and-blue “Land of the Free,” a cross-stitched sampler, “I Serve My Country,” and a more recent star and stripe bordered, “United We Stand.”
“We fought for this.” She wiped at her face. “They died for this, for this? The way they treat us, pressing for hate just to get vote. They’re going backward.”
*
Sergio the marble-mason had a hard hat to die for. Red, White and Blue to the bone, Sergio's scuffed but bizarrely grime-free shiny white hard plastic hardhat was festooned with US flags, along with his name, "Sergio" in vinyl letters and a couple of judiciously placed Mexican banderas as well. He was dressed in a hyper-neat and ironed near-parody of a construction worker's day labor clothes, so clean it was more like a costume: long sleeve white shirt, loose dark pants, and polished but battered work boots.
Sergio is a marble mason, a skill which brings him top dollar in the suburban homes of Phoenix; but one he learned in his native Mexico. It was his first protest as well. "You can't do nothing, you have to do something. I work hard, hard as anyone. Masonry is heavy, dirty work. I feed my family, I make beautiful things and then they treat me like I am a stealer when I walk in a store. I have to do something." He had come empty handed, but open hearted, and cheerily greeted any who passed by within greeting range. "I am so happy to be here." He paused to wave at the general crowd. Some waved back. "This beautiful day. The people saying what they feel. It makes a difference, yes? It makes a difference?"
It took me a second to realize the question wasn't rhetorical. His eyes quite seriously told me what he hoped he would hear. I said yes, but quickly changed the subject.
*
Paloma Cordova, a beautiful dove-like creature, was perched upon a rock to get a better view and like Sergio wore her message with her clothing, a simple green tee with a neatly hand-lettered logo: "Do I Look Illegal?"
I laughed, "Well, i guess we all do"
"My point exactly," she said and we set to talking.
An primary school teacher in the Tempe school district, Paloma's students already had it hard before SB 1070--gang violence, deteriorating neighborhoods, up at night from shots in the dark. Now the new law had shifted the continuing crisis into panic-mode. "They're afraid of every knock at the door. They're just little kids and they fear for their life. Will mom come back tonight? They are just children. I don't think the legislature thinks about that."
*
Mesa-based private investigator Lupe Daniels thinks about it, the red flags in the new law, its impact on families, the way prejudices can turn peace officers into enforcers. He's seen it firsthand. He says he's even written a book about race relations, police corruption, and secret brutality against Hispanics in Mesa. "Oh, I have seen it all," Daniels shook his head. "You would not believe the things they get away with." He hastily gave me a card.
"No, I have been studying the Mesa police for a long time. This law will give them the idea they can do anything. That is why I am here. You can't let them think it's OK to treat us like this. This is America. We are Americans too."
A decorated veteran, Daniels wore ball cap emblazoned with the words "Bronze Star" and "heroism" and boasting a thickly embroidered image of the medal and its ribbon. His sergeant's bars were pinned there as well along with a lapel flag. Like so many people i talked to that morning, Daniels was hyperbolically clean and neat.
In scanning my photos now for the past three week, i am in fact still impressed the inordinately large percentage of protest attendees who were impeccably dressed. Even the white chicks in anarchist chic were spot- and wrinkle-free. And folks, when the anarchists are neat and presentable, you are talking a movement to be reckoned with.
Her skimpy black tank top and peek-a-boo bra straps went well with her unusually form-fitting cargo Capris and obviously ironed Zapatista-style black bandana/handkerchief/anarchist mask and oversized Jackie O style shades. Even the scrunchie that held her blond ponytail matched. And to top it off, her choice of chrome I-Phone made it clear she was a revolutionary maybe wasn't actually struggling much, but who understood the importance of accessorizing.
Despite the blatant contradiction of her mask's implied anonymity, the whole outfit begged for attention and within time an eager AP reporter was dutifully submitting questions to her. On a college campus she would be the envy of all the hippest trust-fund hippies. That morning, in that place, with all the heart-felt first-timers about, she was little more than a joke.
So i politely laughed and moved on.
Next week the finale.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Current Comedy, 5/10/10: "Tales From the Struggle Over SB 1070" Continued
II: In Search for a Beverage of Their Own
In case you don’t know it, the Left has been brewing up their very own Tea Party, though I don’t believe it is immediately associated with any specific beverage as of yet; I mean aside from the typical patriots’ rousing mug of righteous indignation over governmental abuse. That's right, liberals apparently can still get riled up enough about governmental abuse to take to the streets too just like the big bad Tea Party, except when liberals protest, such as the recent nationwide Mad Day marches, it's really big and not really bad.
One might have forgotten that liberals are traditionally the go-to "protest about injustice" kind of crowd, with a pedigree that goes all the way back to the old "taxation without representation" days of protest history. To watch the way the media's covered since the 08 election and considering the limp push back liberals gave to Obama during his few months in the Whitehouse, one might've thought there was no "left" left. Well, those days are over, 1070 was a much-needed wake-up for the left of the massing anger and insolence on the right. In the basic dynamic of a democracy, the liberals will have to fight back to keep the social balance. Just like the populist movements of the 1880s, or the anti-establishment/anti-war movement of the 1960s, this anti-1070 movement has all the standard features of a nascent grassroots groundswell.
You can tell by going to a rally. There were all types of liberals protesting SB 1070 that morning, just like a tea party crowd ...well, at least a little like anyway, but in an absolutely opposite non-bizarro world sort of way. They have people who are screaming mad about legitimate injustices; they have people who are just shouting because they like to shout anyway. They have folks brimming with passion and articulate explications of their movement's talking point version of a world view; and they've got folks who thought up their most snide 10 word retort, scrawled it on a sign, and now have nothing else left to say. They've got elders trying to save their vision of their America and children just learning to believe; they've got folks in funny costumes and the newly politicized first-timer activists, and even a few sign makers who are still practicing their spelling.
See, just like a regular tea party except without all the aggressive racism, sexism, militarism, downright smug anti-environmentalism, and out and out self-serving greed that are the hallmarks of the stagnated conservative movement that, last month, thought it held the copyright on the idea of patriots walking together out in the street to profess one's love and image of country. Which bring to mind that when it comes to draping one's self in the flag the Tea Party has met its match.
At Tea Party events, the fashion disasters usually take flag motifs and/or colors and re-pattern them into new functional, thought wretchedly gaudy, item of clothing usually involving a hot glue gun and/or fabric paint. At the May Day Anti-SB 1070 parade, it was the flags themselves that were worn or carried. By the dozens, the US flag, the Arizona flag, wrapped like blankets around smiling faces. It sometimes looked like citizens being born before our very eyes.
But before we get lost in the esoteric of the meaning of flags as a fashion accessory, first let's address a more immediate and simpler question: What about that beverage thing? They can't call themselves the coffee party. Somebody already took that and it sounds to copy-cat to be cool anyway. So the left will have to self-identify with some other beverage if they hope to brand themselves into the public consciousness. In this modern age a movement that can't generate product placement won't amount to much more than a wiggle. So, if the nationwide liberal/ethnic hybrid movement that rose up in response to AZ's immigration follies were to actually come up with a beverage worthy of self-identification, its beverage of choice would probably have to be "water."
Water for all the bottles of water spontaneously bought and freely distributed at the rallies and along march routes, water for the gallon jugs you see copiously set out along highways, supposedly a criminal offense of mercy in the southeast corner of our state. As you probably know, the same ranchers who erroneously blamed immigrants for the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz so they could have a straw man to propagandize with, would insist that offering humanitarian aid to lost immigrants is to be treated like a crime and a gallon jug of water is just littered trash in the desert, especially if it might help a dying person to live.
It's those kind of people who briefly considered drafting Arpaio for governor, before Joe backed out of the deal. Which might have been a wise move for Sheriff Joe to stick to his day job, what with the Tea Party people looking a little less hearty these days in the face of the impressive superiority in marching numbers that the ethnic/liberal hybrid amassed this past May Day. Tea Partiers met with paltry crowds at their vaunted Tax Day protests, then at their paranoia-inducing armed protests in and around DC, April 19th--AKA "The fizzle snickered about around the world." Even with Dick Armey's Freedom Works and theirs deep pockets of war-bucks, when the hoopla settled both events fired duds, mere tempests in a ... well, you know.
Now, AZ’s hot new immigration law, and Arpaio as its poster boy, are facing the backlash as the “civil liberties patriots” clash with the “defend the empire patriots.” In this case, just as submerged resentment at Obama’s blackness merged with right-wing fears of losing control of the country caused the Tea Party to coalesce, the overt racism and hatefulness of SB 1070 has given a wide range of liberals an outrage they can react to.
Remember back in pre-election 2008 when we wondered if America was grown up enough to deal with the "whole race deal." Well, now we know. We aren't worthy.
Case in point, if the AZ Senate’s SB1070 wasn’t enough to make you wonder about the racist intent in the legislation, or the mentality of the men who claim to run this state for the public good, then you had to be scratching your heads when the AZ House followed suit the following week with a separate bill, HB 2281, which bans ethnic studies courses, and clubs and sacks any teachers with thick accents. According to Jennifer Allen of the Border Action Network, there wasn’t any real doubt as to the intentions of the AZ Lege’. "There's no real good public good intended."
Counting the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets on May Day, you can bet many of the protests around the country involved first-timers embracing the bracing empowerment of activism, much like the way the Tea Party’s equally flamboyant events brought older white voters out into the streets for the first time, at first. As with the rampant naïveté and weak grammatical skills of novice Tea Partiers, those who massed in courtyard of the capitol building in Phoenix had their own share of English language limitations. You may recall all the postings of pics of inept Tea Party Sloganeering which led to the invention of a new term, “tea-bonics,” to describe the plethora of misspelled and garbled political messages on the signs at Tea Party rallies. My favorite teabonically misspelled sign from the May Day rally read, “Define Reasonable Doubt: 1. Is it the Vechile I Drive? 2. Attire I Wear 3. My Brown Skin.”
Of course it might be noted: first, that there were very few signs with such spelling errors; and, second, that unlike Tea Partiers, at least many of the thousands attending the Phoenix May Day spontaneous demonstration have an excuse for their problems with the English language--it is for many of them it is a second language; unlike so many Tea Partiers who have only ever attempted English and still gained no mastery of it.
By and large, however, spelling was not an issue for the thousands who gathered in Phoenix; and their spontaneous enthusiasm took many on the Left by surprise. “There wasn’t any actual event, march or whatever organized for the afternoon. It was spontaneous in Phoenix. It went amazingly well since there was not central organization,” Allen noted. “None of the major organizing groups were there or had been campaigning for a march. There was a small gathering expected that morning, but the rest of it was the people. They just kept showing up and showing up. It was just regular citizens who felt they needed to do something and went to the capitol to let their voices be heard.”
Veteran Canadian activist Azami Ishihara who was in town to catch the Phoenix stop of L.A. Legend S.A. Griffin's "Poetry Bomb Tour" and also attended the rally noticed the same thing when she show up midday. "I had been to several events and protests in Canada and at first, I was really surprised. I thought it really lacked structure. Usually there is a speaker, people guiding the event along, and none of that was visible. Which makes the size and success of the event fairly impressive then if there were no leaders, realizing now that it was unorganized. More and more people just kept showing up. For a long time there were just folks milling around, then the march just started to form up. It's like the people were teaching themselves how to protest."
Understand, elsewhere throughout the country this past May Day various marches had been planned, just not in Phoenix. At least not planned, even thought May First, May Day, has traditionally been a day of some kind of celebration, or protest pretty much world-wide going back at least till the middle ages. This year over the over 80 immigration rallies that stepped off on, were already scheduled for the date, well before that disaster widely known as SB1070, hit the national fan.
Across the country there were major protests in L.A., New York, Dallas, & DC-- 100,000s (Get that, Tea Party? Hundreds of Thousands) of sympathetic marchers joined the 20,000 spontaneous Phoenix area patriots who flash-mobbed the Legislature. At the Whitehouse protest, Illinois Congressmen Luis Gutierrez was arrested for civil disobedience along with 30+ others.
Here in Phoenix the epicenter of the action, May Day turned out to be a long protest day in the capitol city. Too bad it was a Saturday and everyone was gone. Russell Pearce, John Huppenthal and Ron Gould could have attempted to reenact the Alamo with real Mexicans.
In fact, comically on May 2nd more than one news source around the nation noted that the AZ protests were smaller than in comparable cities around the country. One politician quipped in Phoenix folks are afraid to protest lest they get detained.
Next Week, Part Three
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
In case you don’t know it, the Left has been brewing up their very own Tea Party, though I don’t believe it is immediately associated with any specific beverage as of yet; I mean aside from the typical patriots’ rousing mug of righteous indignation over governmental abuse. That's right, liberals apparently can still get riled up enough about governmental abuse to take to the streets too just like the big bad Tea Party, except when liberals protest, such as the recent nationwide Mad Day marches, it's really big and not really bad.
One might have forgotten that liberals are traditionally the go-to "protest about injustice" kind of crowd, with a pedigree that goes all the way back to the old "taxation without representation" days of protest history. To watch the way the media's covered since the 08 election and considering the limp push back liberals gave to Obama during his few months in the Whitehouse, one might've thought there was no "left" left. Well, those days are over, 1070 was a much-needed wake-up for the left of the massing anger and insolence on the right. In the basic dynamic of a democracy, the liberals will have to fight back to keep the social balance. Just like the populist movements of the 1880s, or the anti-establishment/anti-war movement of the 1960s, this anti-1070 movement has all the standard features of a nascent grassroots groundswell.
You can tell by going to a rally. There were all types of liberals protesting SB 1070 that morning, just like a tea party crowd ...well, at least a little like anyway, but in an absolutely opposite non-bizarro world sort of way. They have people who are screaming mad about legitimate injustices; they have people who are just shouting because they like to shout anyway. They have folks brimming with passion and articulate explications of their movement's talking point version of a world view; and they've got folks who thought up their most snide 10 word retort, scrawled it on a sign, and now have nothing else left to say. They've got elders trying to save their vision of their America and children just learning to believe; they've got folks in funny costumes and the newly politicized first-timer activists, and even a few sign makers who are still practicing their spelling.
See, just like a regular tea party except without all the aggressive racism, sexism, militarism, downright smug anti-environmentalism, and out and out self-serving greed that are the hallmarks of the stagnated conservative movement that, last month, thought it held the copyright on the idea of patriots walking together out in the street to profess one's love and image of country. Which bring to mind that when it comes to draping one's self in the flag the Tea Party has met its match.
At Tea Party events, the fashion disasters usually take flag motifs and/or colors and re-pattern them into new functional, thought wretchedly gaudy, item of clothing usually involving a hot glue gun and/or fabric paint. At the May Day Anti-SB 1070 parade, it was the flags themselves that were worn or carried. By the dozens, the US flag, the Arizona flag, wrapped like blankets around smiling faces. It sometimes looked like citizens being born before our very eyes.
But before we get lost in the esoteric of the meaning of flags as a fashion accessory, first let's address a more immediate and simpler question: What about that beverage thing? They can't call themselves the coffee party. Somebody already took that and it sounds to copy-cat to be cool anyway. So the left will have to self-identify with some other beverage if they hope to brand themselves into the public consciousness. In this modern age a movement that can't generate product placement won't amount to much more than a wiggle. So, if the nationwide liberal/ethnic hybrid movement that rose up in response to AZ's immigration follies were to actually come up with a beverage worthy of self-identification, its beverage of choice would probably have to be "water."
Water for all the bottles of water spontaneously bought and freely distributed at the rallies and along march routes, water for the gallon jugs you see copiously set out along highways, supposedly a criminal offense of mercy in the southeast corner of our state. As you probably know, the same ranchers who erroneously blamed immigrants for the murder of Cochise County rancher Robert Krentz so they could have a straw man to propagandize with, would insist that offering humanitarian aid to lost immigrants is to be treated like a crime and a gallon jug of water is just littered trash in the desert, especially if it might help a dying person to live.
It's those kind of people who briefly considered drafting Arpaio for governor, before Joe backed out of the deal. Which might have been a wise move for Sheriff Joe to stick to his day job, what with the Tea Party people looking a little less hearty these days in the face of the impressive superiority in marching numbers that the ethnic/liberal hybrid amassed this past May Day. Tea Partiers met with paltry crowds at their vaunted Tax Day protests, then at their paranoia-inducing armed protests in and around DC, April 19th--AKA "The fizzle snickered about around the world." Even with Dick Armey's Freedom Works and theirs deep pockets of war-bucks, when the hoopla settled both events fired duds, mere tempests in a ... well, you know.
Now, AZ’s hot new immigration law, and Arpaio as its poster boy, are facing the backlash as the “civil liberties patriots” clash with the “defend the empire patriots.” In this case, just as submerged resentment at Obama’s blackness merged with right-wing fears of losing control of the country caused the Tea Party to coalesce, the overt racism and hatefulness of SB 1070 has given a wide range of liberals an outrage they can react to.
Remember back in pre-election 2008 when we wondered if America was grown up enough to deal with the "whole race deal." Well, now we know. We aren't worthy.
Case in point, if the AZ Senate’s SB1070 wasn’t enough to make you wonder about the racist intent in the legislation, or the mentality of the men who claim to run this state for the public good, then you had to be scratching your heads when the AZ House followed suit the following week with a separate bill, HB 2281, which bans ethnic studies courses, and clubs and sacks any teachers with thick accents. According to Jennifer Allen of the Border Action Network, there wasn’t any real doubt as to the intentions of the AZ Lege’. "There's no real good public good intended."
Counting the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets on May Day, you can bet many of the protests around the country involved first-timers embracing the bracing empowerment of activism, much like the way the Tea Party’s equally flamboyant events brought older white voters out into the streets for the first time, at first. As with the rampant naïveté and weak grammatical skills of novice Tea Partiers, those who massed in courtyard of the capitol building in Phoenix had their own share of English language limitations. You may recall all the postings of pics of inept Tea Party Sloganeering which led to the invention of a new term, “tea-bonics,” to describe the plethora of misspelled and garbled political messages on the signs at Tea Party rallies. My favorite teabonically misspelled sign from the May Day rally read, “Define Reasonable Doubt: 1. Is it the Vechile I Drive? 2. Attire I Wear 3. My Brown Skin.”
Of course it might be noted: first, that there were very few signs with such spelling errors; and, second, that unlike Tea Partiers, at least many of the thousands attending the Phoenix May Day spontaneous demonstration have an excuse for their problems with the English language--it is for many of them it is a second language; unlike so many Tea Partiers who have only ever attempted English and still gained no mastery of it.
By and large, however, spelling was not an issue for the thousands who gathered in Phoenix; and their spontaneous enthusiasm took many on the Left by surprise. “There wasn’t any actual event, march or whatever organized for the afternoon. It was spontaneous in Phoenix. It went amazingly well since there was not central organization,” Allen noted. “None of the major organizing groups were there or had been campaigning for a march. There was a small gathering expected that morning, but the rest of it was the people. They just kept showing up and showing up. It was just regular citizens who felt they needed to do something and went to the capitol to let their voices be heard.”
Veteran Canadian activist Azami Ishihara who was in town to catch the Phoenix stop of L.A. Legend S.A. Griffin's "Poetry Bomb Tour" and also attended the rally noticed the same thing when she show up midday. "I had been to several events and protests in Canada and at first, I was really surprised. I thought it really lacked structure. Usually there is a speaker, people guiding the event along, and none of that was visible. Which makes the size and success of the event fairly impressive then if there were no leaders, realizing now that it was unorganized. More and more people just kept showing up. For a long time there were just folks milling around, then the march just started to form up. It's like the people were teaching themselves how to protest."
Understand, elsewhere throughout the country this past May Day various marches had been planned, just not in Phoenix. At least not planned, even thought May First, May Day, has traditionally been a day of some kind of celebration, or protest pretty much world-wide going back at least till the middle ages. This year over the over 80 immigration rallies that stepped off on, were already scheduled for the date, well before that disaster widely known as SB1070, hit the national fan.
Across the country there were major protests in L.A., New York, Dallas, & DC-- 100,000s (Get that, Tea Party? Hundreds of Thousands) of sympathetic marchers joined the 20,000 spontaneous Phoenix area patriots who flash-mobbed the Legislature. At the Whitehouse protest, Illinois Congressmen Luis Gutierrez was arrested for civil disobedience along with 30+ others.
Here in Phoenix the epicenter of the action, May Day turned out to be a long protest day in the capitol city. Too bad it was a Saturday and everyone was gone. Russell Pearce, John Huppenthal and Ron Gould could have attempted to reenact the Alamo with real Mexicans.
In fact, comically on May 2nd more than one news source around the nation noted that the AZ protests were smaller than in comparable cities around the country. One politician quipped in Phoenix folks are afraid to protest lest they get detained.
Next Week, Part Three
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Current Comedy 5/5/10:“Immigrants Go Home … Back To Europe!” and Other Tales From the Struggle Over SB 1070
Part I: With My Irony Meter Set to Stun
May Day morning I arrived at the State Capitol grounds as an undocumented migrant to protest AZ SB 1070. No, I am not, nor was I, at the time, pretending to be stupid, noble or even clever. It didn’t even have any intended symbolic value to it, just ineptness. Notice, it merely says “migrant” not “immigrant.” I had simply migrated from my home at the So-Hi Peacesign Themepark, west of Kingman, to the state capitol in Phoenix, leaving my driver’s license on the counter at a gas station in Wickenburg on my way down the previous afternoon.
Though my non-documentation had been unplanned; I can’t say that while I was at the rally, or more so afterwards, that the symbolism of the circumstance did not strike me. There I was risking detention for being undocumented when I was protesting against arresting people for being undocumented.
Though there is no doubt that I could have proven the fact I was born a US citizen of US citizen parents, I was still at risk for getting detained. Notice, I did not say “arrested,” merely detained. Merely detained. Unless you've been through it, it is easy to act like it is nothing at all.
In fact as far as some are concerned, it is a wonder why all the silly little babies on the Left have whined so much over the years over such a trivial inconvenience. Perhaps taken downtown and held in a cell while they “ran your prints and made sure everything checked out.” Probably only take a few hours, not too much for an innocent man to sacrifice if it keeps the borders safe, “no harm, no foul,” some say. I say, I don’t think so—full body cavity searches having generally been seen by me and my various cavities/orifices as a bit more than “a mere inconvenience.”
Still, lost license or no, potential probing or not, May Day morning I found myself, like thousands of others drawn to downtown Phoenix to join my voice in the struggle. Unfortunate schedule i was traveling under i arrived five hours before the rally and couldn't stay long. Which was fine because it didn't take long to start finding the comedy in the ongoing disaster 2010 American race relations. As comically rich as it was, my inadvertent anonymity isn’t what pegged the old irony meter that morning. That would be Saturday morning at ten AM, five hours before the main part of the event, when the clean-up crews were still out when I arrived.
First thing I noticed was the veteran press lounging around the satellite trucks of the local affiliates of the major news channels, at the back edge of the parking lot. Their dreary faces and morning coffees showed they thought it was going to be another long and unpleasant day spent standing around talking about what an unpleasant job it is to have to stand around talking about what an unpleasant job you have.
Then, there past the satellite trucks, standing out in the crisp cool of that May Day morning were the shockingly orange jumpsuits of the prisoner slave-labor workforce being used by the police to police the state capitol grounds and parking areas in preparation for the day's rally. Personally, I could possibly be OK in some very specific ways regarding the use of prison labor, but most of what I’ve seen of prison labor is slave labor (having grown up in the county seat of the only county in the US to indict Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales for being part of the prison-industrial complex).
So yeah, let’s not pretend prisons in the US are about justice. They are sold for money and bought for revenge. Prisoner medical neglect and gang violence run rampant. That is the world we throw our immigrant into. In the US, thanks to SB 1070, especially for imprisoned immigrants Arizona, justice also comes at a price. Besides the part about being incarcerated with folks that are often rightly separated from society, once the bill takes effect, immigration prisoners will be charged for their room and board over the course of their time served. At the mandatory minimum built into the bill of six months, that'll run a person about ten grand. Actually the bill says “jail costs,” so who knows what that could mean. Perhaps they will charge the prisoners for the privilege of getting to wear their orange jumpsuits. Perhaps they will have to pay it back by working picking up trash.
Get a lot more prisoners, we could pick up a lot more trash and somebody could make a lot of money manning these houses of pain and others could sell or sew orange jumpsuits, to each according to their immigration status. If no one else SB1070 is guaranteed to be a money maker for fine folks who own prisons.
Everybody knows America likes to punish its prisoners. We don't caudle them like they do in some countries. We make sure they pay. And so Americans tell each other it's OK if someone suffers injustices while in prison. In Arizona, we make a point of electing guys with ideas like that, even when we know they don't need to be so mean about doing their job. As Arpaio himself admitted, the Feds launched an investigation into his operation for prisoner and civil rights abuses shortly after Obama took office. Nowadays, Arpaio and his deputies often trail a pack of watchdog groups aiming to document that next instance of police brutality, which will surely come.
These were the people I was there to protest against. What if I made them mad?
What if, like me, someone had simply been inept, and then inadvertently rubbed the cop the wrong way? Detention. If, as Arpaio insists, the new law is not aimed to target Hispanic or other darker skinned people, then anyone anywhere could be accused of being “an undocumented/an illegal” by just about any government official and a person would have to be detained, you know, only “until your fingerprints clear and everything checks out.” So i could be detained, possibly for days while they work out my citizenship. Just like that. 1070 says any jurisdiction has to pursue the issue of immigration status in all cases and to the general citizenry’s satisfaction, or your local PD can be sued by Joe Schmoe local racist crank, depending on how nasty he's feeling that day. According to Border Action Network's Jennifer Allen, "These provisions in the bill are Pearce’s way to address sanctuary cities because some cities were leaving quite a bit to the officers discretion," Allen, the executive director of Border Action Network, who had not attended discussed the march in a follow-up phone interview while she was in Washington with a delegation of civic leaders from AZ aiming to persuade the Justice Dept. to challenge the law. That night she was preparing for their meeting with asst. Attorney General Tom Perez along with other AZ leaders to talk about what DOJ can do to overthrow or pre-empt it.
In the southeastern corner of the state where the Arpaio's most vocal supporters punch cows, "officer discretion" is a dirty word and illegal immigrants are anything but safe. The area ranchers and the Minutemen militia and all their wannabes are up in arms over border violence, the "rampant border violence," as they say. And the people in southeastern AZ, particularly the older white rancher type people and their militia friends type people say all sorts of things about border violence some of which might be true, few of which are kind hearted as to our neighbors to the south.
But the "rampant border violence isn't one of those things that are true. As AZ Central's number crunchers recently revealed border crime stats have remained flat over the decade. "Nogales Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.
"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."
Not that truth matters to redneck red-staters on a mission. Getting their way on this bill emboldened the AZ GOP to trot out the equally ethnic bashing HB2281, which, as mentioned earlier, professes to protect students from hatred, but basically bans ethnic studies and literally requires schools to replace teachers based on their accents.
Knowing this, i stared at the orange and blue of the morning police detail--big bright blue baggies, as bright as their orange suits--and i thought how strange it would be if some of those very prisoners, there to prepare the area so we could trash it all over again, what if any of them were falsely jailed on immigration issues, stuck, still waiting for everything to check out. It's not like "jailed," it's merely "detention." But it still looks like picking up trash in orange jumpsuits to me.
Here they were, picking through the grass like birds for breakfast, working as prisoners of the state that imprisoned them and required that they fight the Sisyphean task of cleaning up from one immigration protest to get ready for the next immigration protest to protest the fact that there are people falsely imprisoned and having to pick up trash from protests, etc. That’s when the irony pegged the meter.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ and this is my 100 political column since resuming political humor in 2007 following my mother-in-law and wife's deaths in 2005. That number is a victory for me.
May Day morning I arrived at the State Capitol grounds as an undocumented migrant to protest AZ SB 1070. No, I am not, nor was I, at the time, pretending to be stupid, noble or even clever. It didn’t even have any intended symbolic value to it, just ineptness. Notice, it merely says “migrant” not “immigrant.” I had simply migrated from my home at the So-Hi Peacesign Themepark, west of Kingman, to the state capitol in Phoenix, leaving my driver’s license on the counter at a gas station in Wickenburg on my way down the previous afternoon.
Though my non-documentation had been unplanned; I can’t say that while I was at the rally, or more so afterwards, that the symbolism of the circumstance did not strike me. There I was risking detention for being undocumented when I was protesting against arresting people for being undocumented.
Though there is no doubt that I could have proven the fact I was born a US citizen of US citizen parents, I was still at risk for getting detained. Notice, I did not say “arrested,” merely detained. Merely detained. Unless you've been through it, it is easy to act like it is nothing at all.
In fact as far as some are concerned, it is a wonder why all the silly little babies on the Left have whined so much over the years over such a trivial inconvenience. Perhaps taken downtown and held in a cell while they “ran your prints and made sure everything checked out.” Probably only take a few hours, not too much for an innocent man to sacrifice if it keeps the borders safe, “no harm, no foul,” some say. I say, I don’t think so—full body cavity searches having generally been seen by me and my various cavities/orifices as a bit more than “a mere inconvenience.”
Still, lost license or no, potential probing or not, May Day morning I found myself, like thousands of others drawn to downtown Phoenix to join my voice in the struggle. Unfortunate schedule i was traveling under i arrived five hours before the rally and couldn't stay long. Which was fine because it didn't take long to start finding the comedy in the ongoing disaster 2010 American race relations. As comically rich as it was, my inadvertent anonymity isn’t what pegged the old irony meter that morning. That would be Saturday morning at ten AM, five hours before the main part of the event, when the clean-up crews were still out when I arrived.
First thing I noticed was the veteran press lounging around the satellite trucks of the local affiliates of the major news channels, at the back edge of the parking lot. Their dreary faces and morning coffees showed they thought it was going to be another long and unpleasant day spent standing around talking about what an unpleasant job it is to have to stand around talking about what an unpleasant job you have.
Then, there past the satellite trucks, standing out in the crisp cool of that May Day morning were the shockingly orange jumpsuits of the prisoner slave-labor workforce being used by the police to police the state capitol grounds and parking areas in preparation for the day's rally. Personally, I could possibly be OK in some very specific ways regarding the use of prison labor, but most of what I’ve seen of prison labor is slave labor (having grown up in the county seat of the only county in the US to indict Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales for being part of the prison-industrial complex).
So yeah, let’s not pretend prisons in the US are about justice. They are sold for money and bought for revenge. Prisoner medical neglect and gang violence run rampant. That is the world we throw our immigrant into. In the US, thanks to SB 1070, especially for imprisoned immigrants Arizona, justice also comes at a price. Besides the part about being incarcerated with folks that are often rightly separated from society, once the bill takes effect, immigration prisoners will be charged for their room and board over the course of their time served. At the mandatory minimum built into the bill of six months, that'll run a person about ten grand. Actually the bill says “jail costs,” so who knows what that could mean. Perhaps they will charge the prisoners for the privilege of getting to wear their orange jumpsuits. Perhaps they will have to pay it back by working picking up trash.
Get a lot more prisoners, we could pick up a lot more trash and somebody could make a lot of money manning these houses of pain and others could sell or sew orange jumpsuits, to each according to their immigration status. If no one else SB1070 is guaranteed to be a money maker for fine folks who own prisons.
Everybody knows America likes to punish its prisoners. We don't caudle them like they do in some countries. We make sure they pay. And so Americans tell each other it's OK if someone suffers injustices while in prison. In Arizona, we make a point of electing guys with ideas like that, even when we know they don't need to be so mean about doing their job. As Arpaio himself admitted, the Feds launched an investigation into his operation for prisoner and civil rights abuses shortly after Obama took office. Nowadays, Arpaio and his deputies often trail a pack of watchdog groups aiming to document that next instance of police brutality, which will surely come.
These were the people I was there to protest against. What if I made them mad?
What if, like me, someone had simply been inept, and then inadvertently rubbed the cop the wrong way? Detention. If, as Arpaio insists, the new law is not aimed to target Hispanic or other darker skinned people, then anyone anywhere could be accused of being “an undocumented/an illegal” by just about any government official and a person would have to be detained, you know, only “until your fingerprints clear and everything checks out.” So i could be detained, possibly for days while they work out my citizenship. Just like that. 1070 says any jurisdiction has to pursue the issue of immigration status in all cases and to the general citizenry’s satisfaction, or your local PD can be sued by Joe Schmoe local racist crank, depending on how nasty he's feeling that day. According to Border Action Network's Jennifer Allen, "These provisions in the bill are Pearce’s way to address sanctuary cities because some cities were leaving quite a bit to the officers discretion," Allen, the executive director of Border Action Network, who had not attended discussed the march in a follow-up phone interview while she was in Washington with a delegation of civic leaders from AZ aiming to persuade the Justice Dept. to challenge the law. That night she was preparing for their meeting with asst. Attorney General Tom Perez along with other AZ leaders to talk about what DOJ can do to overthrow or pre-empt it.
In the southeastern corner of the state where the Arpaio's most vocal supporters punch cows, "officer discretion" is a dirty word and illegal immigrants are anything but safe. The area ranchers and the Minutemen militia and all their wannabes are up in arms over border violence, the "rampant border violence," as they say. And the people in southeastern AZ, particularly the older white rancher type people and their militia friends type people say all sorts of things about border violence some of which might be true, few of which are kind hearted as to our neighbors to the south.
But the "rampant border violence isn't one of those things that are true. As AZ Central's number crunchers recently revealed border crime stats have remained flat over the decade. "Nogales Assistant Police Chief Roy Bermudez shakes his head and smiles when he hears politicians and pundits declaring that Mexican cartel violence is overrunning his Arizona border town.
"We have not, thank God, witnessed any spillover violence from Mexico," Bermudez says emphatically. "You can look at the crime stats. I think Nogales, Arizona, is one of the safest places to live in all of America."
Not that truth matters to redneck red-staters on a mission. Getting their way on this bill emboldened the AZ GOP to trot out the equally ethnic bashing HB2281, which, as mentioned earlier, professes to protect students from hatred, but basically bans ethnic studies and literally requires schools to replace teachers based on their accents.
Knowing this, i stared at the orange and blue of the morning police detail--big bright blue baggies, as bright as their orange suits--and i thought how strange it would be if some of those very prisoners, there to prepare the area so we could trash it all over again, what if any of them were falsely jailed on immigration issues, stuck, still waiting for everything to check out. It's not like "jailed," it's merely "detention." But it still looks like picking up trash in orange jumpsuits to me.
Here they were, picking through the grass like birds for breakfast, working as prisoners of the state that imprisoned them and required that they fight the Sisyphean task of cleaning up from one immigration protest to get ready for the next immigration protest to protest the fact that there are people falsely imprisoned and having to pick up trash from protests, etc. That’s when the irony pegged the meter.
--mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ and this is my 100 political column since resuming political humor in 2007 following my mother-in-law and wife's deaths in 2005. That number is a victory for me.
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