Aztlan or Bust
Looking Like Arizona
Yesterday, as i walked home from work, I overheard a comment made by one student to another. The comment needs context. At Cornell, today is the last day of classes and the students traditionally hold a large party known as Slope Day. Once Upon a Time, Slope Day was an unorganized event. There was always a lot of mud and vomit. Also a certain amount of vandalism. Over the years, as the contagion of control has spread throughout our dreary and depressing republic of fear, Cornell has seen fit to organize the event. Public toilets, food and drink are provided, as well as ambulance care for drunk students. (I don’t want to seem like a geezer but in my day you never went to the hospital because you were drunk, and I doubt anyone has figured out a way to get drunker than we were…). They also put up chain link fences everywhere for crowd control. The whole area of campus where this event is taking place is fenced off with security guards posted at the entrances. The fences have been going up for days and yesterday, as I walked home, the fencing was complete. Said one student to the other:
“This place is beginning to look like Arizona.â€
Until a few weeks ago Texas was shorthand for racist, xenophobic stupidity. Now it’s Arizona. Texas and Arizona, like Virginia, are for Fuckers.
But really, Texas and Arizona are a state of mind.
I’m for open borders. I think people should be able to live and work where they like and speak what language they like. It doesn’t make me alienated or nervous walking into a store where they don’t speak english. This is the difference between a cosmopolitan state and a tribal state. It’s not even necessary to drag history into it, but I could.
Like eliminating drug laws, opening the borders would create new problems, but I doubt that they be as severe as the problems it would solve.
If people don’t want Mexicans here, they could try making american corporations pay living wages when they open factories in Mexico. We could pay more for the goods we import. Hell, we might want to consider having a living wage law here for all workers. But then it wouldn’t be a nation of fuckers, and that’s what we are.
In general semantics they say the map is not the territory. Like when we were kids crossing state lines, we expected a big black line to be painted on the border, the sky to change color, etc.
Strangely, people still act like the map is the territory. Like these lines mean something. Like all that territory out west wasn’t once Spanish-speaking and part of Meico, stoeln in an imperialist war.
Maybe I’m touchy coz I’m an immigrant and my mother was an immigrant, because my children speak better Spanish than English, because I’m a non-national kind of guy.
I dunno. Building fences, gettin’ ornery about “illegals.”
Fuck that. We’re all illegals in some way or another, merely by existing.
And the nannification of slope day is distressing. Vey much so.
We are a natina of fuckers, united under one fucker god and one fucker predatory mentality.
Bomb, the commons, Olin, the cafeteria the slope, set it all on fire and cook weenies. Shit.
Also, I can’t spell, apparently.
Also, I didn’t want to be antagonistic, just make the point that the cultural and latin identity of this land is far older than the US, that the pre-US identification of this as a Latin American geography lasted longer than the US has been in existence. As an historian, I take a longer view of these things, and can’t stand the jingo hubbub of people ignorant of the fact that people spoke Spanish in this place long before it was Mexico and that it was Mexico before it was the US, so why the knotted knockers? Live Free or Die (if yer white?)
Anyone claiming this isn’t a racist thing is either a liar or a fool….
Daurade, you sound like a bomb throwing anarchist!
You’ve lived in that part of the country, so no doubt you hear all the nuances. I argue with people in my family, whom I love and respect, about this. They don’t see their own hipocricy.
Hoho! I was a bit buzzed when I wrote that, hence the inability to type correctly.
Have you seen the film Lone Star? I think it captures the American Southwest perfectly.
Weird how borders that only exist on maps and in the minds of men can be taken so seriously.
McCain should take another look at Gangs of New York and reflect upon where he’d be if the nativists had succeeded in gettin rid o’ the Irish….
i don’t know how mccain managed to get his head so far up his ass.
All economic roads lead back to the Federal Reserve. The government raises wages, then the Fed prints more money to bring wages back down via inflation. The government spends too much money, then the Fed prints more money to accommodate them. There’s a world of trouble over the horizon.
If there were no social security, minimum wage, health care, or public schools, you wouldn’t need to have a closed border.
It weird how passionate conservatives are about protecting liberal policies.
“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” G.K. Chesterton
Read anything by Murray Rothbard, but starting with _the Mystery of Banking_ is probably best.
Hi Shadow of Iris. I’ll leave banking to the bankers, since I’m a poet, and the last poet who got mixed up in banking policies was Ezra Pound. I won’t read henry paulson’s poems either….but I do believe that promoting the social good, not private profit, is the role of government, and i am a liberal with strong anarchist instincts. what does that mean? I want to be left alone, but I want taxes to redistribute wealth to correct inequalities in a capitalist system. i care about justice for the poor. i think social cost should be borne by all people. we have interests that are shared. the government in a representative democracy represents the people. we are not just individuals, but a community too. in art i’m an arch individualist but i don’t believe i exist apart or in isolation from my community, which includes people and interests that differ from me and mine.