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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Stop that man before he washes another dish at sub-minimum wage!

This is the sort of guy Bush is trying to keep satisfied lately:



Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.


I question the wisdom of thinking you can please someone who goes to sleep in Hitler Youth® brand footie pajamas, but Bush is going to try with his asinine plan to send the National Guard to the border. Since there is no emergency situation to speak of, it’s safe to say there’s exactly no real reason to court violence on the border, but since when Bush need a reason to send troops to point guns at people? Hell, that it’s a warm, sunny day is reason enough to deploy troops in the hopes someone gets shot. Nice weather just calls for someone’s brains to be blown out all over the ground.

If I seem a little hostile to the idea of sending troops to the Mexican-American border, well that would be because I’m real hostile to the idea. Troop build-up on the border has led directly to a situation where someone pointed a gun at me many years ago and don’t think I’m going to forget it. It was 1997 and the spring semester had just ended and my college roommate decided to accompany on a trip back to West Texas to visit my family and take a gander at our quaint, retrograde way of life out there. Also, we were going to go hiking in Big Bend National Park. The day before we went to the park, I took her up from Alpine (where I’m actually from) and up to Fort Davis to see a town that resembles 1957 even more than Alpine. We stopped in the drugstore/soda shop for a malt (I’m not kidding) and a friend of mine from high school was working the counter. When we told her that we planned to hike in the park and even cross the border to get lunch in a teeny weeny town in Boquillas Canyon, she said, “Ah, be careful if you go to Mexico. There’s federal police and military all over the place lately.”

In retrospect, I probably should have taken that to mean that I shouldn’t have taken my roommate, who was from Nebraska after all, to Mexico. But hell, we figured this was our best shot at becoming world travelers, so we went ahead and crossed the Rio Grande to go to the town of Boquillas in Mexico. I suspect we were breaking some kind of law with the way we crossed the border, which was paying a guy $2 to take us in a rowboat, and therefore we certainly deserved what happened next when a Jeep full of federal police met us on the other side of the border, armed to the teeth and scared the living shit out of us.

“We’re here for lunch!” I said, trying to remember if I knew a lick of Spanish.

It turns out that tensions on the border were what you might call high because just a few days before the Marines that had been deployed to the border due to escalating drug war violence had shot and killed a teenager who was, depending on who you ask, herding goats or possibly just hanging out. (They weren’t indicted, even though the autopsy shows they shot him in the back.) The Marines defended their actions because there was no doubt the teenage boy, Ezequiel Hernandez, was carrying a gun, which in West Texas is roughly like saying someone looked suspicious because he was walking on two whole feet. The Marines claimed Hernandez was shooting at them; popular sentiment in the area was that the Marines were lying to cover their own asses because it’s hard to really argue someone is shooting at you when he is facing away from you. The government abandoned the idea of having the Marines on the border after that, though they didn’t abandon the War on Drugs, which was and is the only reason that there’s so much gang violence on the Mexican-American border in the first place. And the lesson was learned much too late to save Hernandez that military deployment to “protect” Americans from human beings and contraband that are only coming over because Americans demand it is a stupid idea.

Not of course that Bush ever shied away from an idea merely because it’s stupid. Perhaps from his viewpoint it’s not stupid. After all, he might hope that another horrible injustice like the shooting of Ezequiel Hernandez happens again, and that is sufficient to satiate the blood lust of the people hysterically calling for Bush’s impeachment and get them back on his side.

Posted by Amanda Marcotte on 05/16 at 07:37 AM
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