Free Ride

I must say that the latest stunt out of MAGA-dom is inspired, though not in a good way.  Busing and flying immigrants from Florida and Texas to blue states has the optics of a raised middle finger liberals.  Fox and other right-wing news outlets are portraying it that way. Less unhinged sources highlighted the outpouring of kindness toward the new arrivals in communities like Martha’s Vineyard. 

No story is that simple, notwithstanding one’s ideological lens.  We know that the migrants were promised jobs, housing, and gifts at their destination.  Some were misled about these destinations; the Cape Cod contingent thought they were going to Boston.  Others seemed to have known their itinerary in advance and saw an opportunity to travel someplace they wanted to be; one man got off his bus in Chicago and was met by family.

I’m sure each family or individual concerned had their motives for going along.  It does appear that many were deceived.  Outside the MAGA-verse, there have been comparisons to the “reverse Freedom Rides” of the early 1960s.  I thought I knew my Civil Rights Movement history, but I was unaware of them until now.  This bit of near-forgotten right-wing ratfuckery was orchestrated by the New Orleans White Citizens Council as retaliation for the SNCC- and CORE-organized Freedom Rides against racial segregation in the South.  Black families were bused to northern states with the promise of housing and jobs only to discover upon arrival that they had been had.  The campaign subsequently spread to other southern states. 

The idea was to overload social welfare systems up north, point out the imputed hypocrisy of civil rights advocates, and demonstrate to the displaced Black people that they were better off in the segregated South.  Similarly, the ongoing drive to offload Latino migrants onto blue states and sanctuary cities is intended to punish those who have the temerity to view these people as human beings possessing human dignity.  (The immigrants seem to have been indiscriminately targeted; El Paso bused 223 migrants to New York City many of whom were Venezuelan refugees.  Venezuelan-Americans, like Cuban-Americans, tend to favor Republican candidates.  Looks like the GOP successfully alienated a bunch of future voters.)

One key difference between then and now is that the Louisiana legislature refused to fund the 1960 campaign while the Florida legislature appropriated $12 million in support of the current effort.  (Governor Ron DeSantis has pledged to spend every last dollar.)  I am unsure of the cost to Texas taxpayers of Greg Abbott’s mischief, though indications point to private donations. 

One wrinkle is that this caper could actually benefit the receiving communities.  Many of the immigrants may be eligible for Temporary Protected Status.  If granted, those with TPS will be legally able to work.  While I’m not familiar with the labor economics of the various destinations, let’s assume that they are having the same hiring troubles as the rest of the country.  The arrival of the migrants may help alleviate labor shortages in at least some places.

Like all the other wingnut shenanigans of the last six-plus years, the bus-off will be superseded by even barmier escapades.  I’m not sure what they are meant to accomplish.  They’re not “triggering” or “owning” the libs.  All they’re doing is jerking each other off as they become less relevant over time, a development that cannot happen soon enough.

  

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar 

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

For the Bible Tells Me So

The Trump Administration’s policy of separating detained “illegals” from their children apparently now has the endorsement of The Man Upstairs.

In a speech late last week Attorney General Jeff Sessions cited Romans 13: 1-3 as justification for the detention policy.  Actually, Sessions quoted the Apostle Paul out of context.  Paul did enjoin Christians to obey the temporal authorities as they would the spiritual; but he tells them to welcome strangers as well.

The Bible is notoriously open to interpretation.  In the various news stories about Sessions’ speech, we’re reminded that the same passages were used to justify slavery in the United States and that the Lutheran clergy drew upon them to instruct Germans to acquiesce to Nazi policies.  Normally, Godwin’s Law would make me hesitant to mention the latter fact.  However, the passive role of churches in 1930s Germany has received considerable attention from contemporary historians and so bears special mention here.  Given the xenophobic bent of our own Christian Right, the invocation of Romans 13 in this controversy is unsurprising.

Donald Trump’s appeal to religious conservatives is, well, puzzling.  As Bill Maher once described him, Trump is the world’s “least godly man.”  He’s dishonest, crass, profane, proud to the point of hubris, unkind, uncharitable, and bigoted.  Then again, maybe that’s why he’s appealing.  Some of the angriest, most resentful people I’ve known have been evangelical Protestants who proclaimed their faith in Blue-Eyed Jesus at every opportunity.  These folks are livid at the social changes of the past few decades and would love to see the calendar turned back to 1955 with everything that that implies.

Evangelicals have a particularly strong authoritarian streak which turns to the Scriptures for justification even while cloaking it in the Christian message of love and forgiveness.  An uncle used to like to quote Isaiah 1:18 to me.  “Come now; let us reason together,” it begins.  (Lyndon Johnson also liked to quote this particular phrase to his political opponents.)  “Though your sins be of scarlet, they shall be white as snow.”  So far, so good; this sounds like the Message I recall from Sunday School.

But let’s remember that this is the vengeful God of the Israelites speaking and not Jesus of Nazareth.  The next verses are downright chilling, for you are given no alternative.  “If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land / But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword…”  Yikes!

I always wondered why my uncle always left the second part out.  It spoke so strongly to his conservative values, and he was a gun-loving, pickup driving, blue collar Nixon and Reagan man.  A kickass line like that should have appealed to his overbearing, my-way-or-the-highway nature more than its namby-pamby preamble.

For the denizens of Walmart-like megachurches, the thought of an action hero God is undoubtedly a selling point.  (An impromptu Google search tells me that there are actually action hero movies and comics marketed to Christians.)   Their resort to fantasy is understandable, since their fictional conception of a God-fearing U.S.A. is dissolving like a wet tissue.  Media chimeras such as the “War on Christmas” help them maintain a relentless sense of grievance.  And the presence of people with darker complexions speaking a language other than English is a reminder the country has changed and is changing still.  Tie all these factors—authoritarianism, revealed religion, an aversion to change, and xenophobia—and Mr. Sessions’ claim sounds convincing.

The White House is standing by its man, despite the President’s recent complaints about Sessions.  Sarah Sanders, when confronted with the Attorney General’s remarks at a press conference, retorted that “it is very biblical to enforce the law.”  (Well, she is a preacher’s daughter after all.) 

At least on this issue, the administration is presenting a unified front.  But Sessions' and Sanders’ pronouncements ring hollow when we hear of nursing mothers being separated from their babies, children being herded en masse into cells, and families being unable to ascertain the whereabouts of detained relatives.  We are witnessing an appalling lack of empathy for the less fortunate, and I have a sinking feeling that there is a dead silence on that subject these days in our houses of worship.  If so it’s a damning commentary on our society’s character.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

You Anew

I didn’t anticipate writing three posts in a row on the unending furor over public speech.  However, after Roseanne abruptly lost her newly rebooted sitcom over a bizarre late-night tweet I felt I had to cover the same terrain once more.

Free speech has become something of a crapshoot lately.  Offensive statements—and just about anything can be offensive to someone when it reaches a large enough audience—can cut even the most successful public figure’s career short.  Just like that. 

But not all offensive speech is created equal.  Roseanne, for reasons peculiarly her own, tweeted that former Obama Administration official Valerie Jarrett was the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Planet of the Apes.  (Figuratively, I’m sure.)  A furry of apologetic follow up tweets did nothing to save her; Roseanne then compounded the problem by claiming that she wasn’t responsible because the Ambien she took made her do it.

Just as the Roseanne controversy was escalating, Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a “feckless cunt.”  Bee was referring to a photo Ivanka tweeted showing her with her son.  Bee attacked the hypocrisy of the photo while the Trump Administration’s deportation policies separated mothers from their children.  A fair criticism, I thought, though Bee’s choice of epithet was wincing.

So, what’s the difference between the two cases?  Roseanne’s out of a job.  Bee lost a couple of sponsors but at least her show wasn’t canceled.  It’s up to you whether this outcome is fair.  The conclusion you come to probably depends on which side of the Trump Divide you sit.  Take your cue from the top: President Trump expressed regret over Roseanne’s firing; his press secretary, the godawful Sarah Huckabee Sanders, demanded TBS cancel Full Frontal. 

Running in the background are conflicting narratives.  One is that so-called political correctness is unnecessarily ruining people’s lives for exercising their First Amendment freedoms.  The other is that certain individuals are hiding behind the First Amendment to justify hate speech.  Either way, it’s clear words matter.  But to what extent do they reflect or shape belief?

A linguistic theory of sorts, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis even though neither of the men it’s named after ever formally stated it, says that words shape our worldview.  Ideas vary over whether words are merely an influence or are a determinant.  The conceit that one can shape thought through language is controversial but it extends into the current debate over speech.  More on point, there is the matter of whether we can change not only discourse but social relations by changing how we talk about them.

Left and Right alike accuse each other of intolerance.  It’s true that progressives, especially on college campuses, are sometimes overzealous taking on perceived social ills, and I suppose that is a kind of intolerance.  But if both sides are intolerant, what they’re intolerant of differs demonstrably.  Conservatives target people and groups for characteristics they cannot change, such as race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and sexual orientation, or for cultural differences like religion and language.  Progressives oppose behavior and language which diminish the rights and dignity of others.  Conservatives want to preserve existing oppressive hierarchies while progressives want to uplift the oppressed.  

The kerfuffle (or covfefe?) over Samantha Bee’s takedown of Ivanka Trump underscores this polarization.  Ivanka is a privileged woman who enjoys a safe existence while ICE and the immigration courts break up Latino families.  The paradox becomes even more bitter when we consider that the First Daughter is herself the child of an immigrant mother.  How we square the circle of who is worthy in the conservative universe is dependent upon a simple heuristic.

It goes like this.  Whiteness is superior to all other races, but it is particularly superior to the black race.  Masculinity is superior to femininity.  Heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality.  Cisgender is superior to transgender.  The able-bodied are superior to the disabled.  Christianity is superior to all other faiths (except perhaps Judaism).  English is superior to all other languages.  Western culture is superior to all other cultures.  Depending where you fall on any one continuum, you will be fully accepted socially or be otherwise subjected to a range of abuses from verbal insults and microaggressions to the full coercive and punitive power of the state. 

In this calculus Ivanka Trump may be a daughter of an immigrant, but her mother was a European immigrant so that’s okay.  Immigrating to the U.S. the “right way” is particularly important.  A colleague serves in the state legislature, and in her campaign literature she likes to mention her parents were immigrants who “came here the right way” (which is to say from Europe).  The “right way,” if you haven’t figured it out already, is code for Europeans Only.

The alleged weakness of our immigration laws, such as the President’s latest concern over so-called chain migration, is itself subject to double standards.  Please indulge me in a short personal digression.

In graduate school I was a teaching assistant in my university’s teaching and learning center.  Our director was an aging, absent minded woman I’ll call Marilyn.  Marilyn was an inept administrator and, despite being our institution’s alleged subject matter expert, was herself a poor classroom teacher.  Marilyn was in way over her head and quickly became defensive about her work.  Instead of taking the advice of those who suggested improvements, Marilyn began instead to depend on the other grad assistant in the office, an international student from Eastern Europe named Katya.

Katya quickly established herself as Marilyn’s confidant while alienating everyone in the office except Larisa the administrative assistant who was not too bright and also overwhelmed by her job.  Katya managed this because she was dishonest and manipulative and because she was willing to tell Marilyn what Marilyn wanted to hear in the face of contradictory evidence.  Katya would show one face to Marilyn and administrators and clients.  She would show another to everyone else whom she thought were beneath her, which was…just about everyone else.  It’s fair to say I despised her, but when you read what comes next you will see she was a despicable person. 

After a couple of years Katya finished her degree which meant her student visa was to expire.  It wasn’t fair that she was expected to go home when she had become so used to the good life in America.  What was a girl to do?  Enter Tobias, a warehouse worker with an easygoing disposition and oatmeal for brains.  Katya swept him off his feet.  After a whirlwind courtship, they wed just as Katya’s student visa was to turn into a pumpkin.  

Did they live happily ever after? you wonder.  Sure, for the first 24 months.  After that Katya could keep her green card even if she divorced Tobias, which is naturally what she did.  Katya had realized her American Dream by signing a paper and peeling off her panties.  Meanwhile desperate mothers and children are dying in the Sonoran Desert for no better reason than that, unlike Katya, they don’t have the advantage of blonde hair and blue eyes.

Ah, you say, but Katya immigrated the “right way,” even if she did stretch the rules a bit.  Sure, but the chain migration bogey that the Trump base is wringing their hands over can also be construed as rule bending.  Refer to the heuristic I mentioned earlier; if their complexion is sufficiently pale foreigners are not really foreigners.  On the other hand, everyone else is implicitly less human and must be barred, forcefully if necessary, as a consequence.

Conservative hypocrisies are a given in the national conversation.  Progressives are hardly perfect, but they know that self-awareness can guide them through ever-changing mores as we move toward a more inclusive society.  Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend Comedy Central’s second annual Clusterfest in San Francisco.  (Think of it as a Woodstock for smartasses.)  The closing act on Sunday night was Jon Stewart, who I’m happy to say is making a return to standup. 

Stewart talked a little about the Roseanne / Samantha controversies and about how his own views have changed as he realized from time to time that maybe he wasn’t as enlightened as he thought.  He pointed out that the conservative hysteria about speech being policed is basically bullshit.  Stewart said the only changes he made to his own speech was dropping a few words from his vocabulary and stopping for a moment to think before saying something stupid. 

Is this an argument for the draconian censorship conservatives are so afraid of?  All that is expected is a modicum of consideration of the rights and persons of others.  Not difficult.  Not difficult at all.  And yet for half the country this small concession is a bridge too far.

It may be a bridge impossible to cross for some elements of Trump’s America, however, particularly economically distressed white working-class men.  The establishment has long counted on keeping the masses distracted by setting them against each other.  Referring again to the rules described up-page, straight white males, no matter how humble, have traditionally had an advantage. 

For these whites on the lower end of the economic scale, however, social change is a threat to their slim privilege.  The end of legal segregation in the South is one example of this; the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1950s and 60s was a reaction to this social reordering.  As one man interviewed at the time lamented, “If I’m not better than a n----r, then who am I better than?”  This statement is sad on several levels, the least of which is that it reflects how contradictions in the system victimize everyone on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in some form or fashion.  Basic civility is perhaps a luxury for such people when their “right” to dominate someone even less fortunate is in question.

We’ve only considered public discourse so far.  A thornier question is whether changing minds through changing words can lead to the inferential leap of changing hearts.  It is an open question as to how much we can actually shape character.  Past attempts are an unsettling guide.  Consider the Stalinist era ideal of the New Soviet Man.  A propaganda exemplar more than anything, the NSM nevertheless sought to leverage cultural diversity whilst presenting a single national identity.  If you believe that words can shape thought for the better, perhaps a New American really is conceivable. 

But now that we’ve decided we can shape the ideal individual, that raises the question of how we do the shaping.  Self-monitoring one’s speech is a good step forward, but that won’t work in the absence of social pressure.  Slipping down the logical slope, maybe public struggle sessions reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution would have a salutary result.  It would dovetail well with our penchant for public humiliation as a spectator sport, that's for sure. 

In reality, though, any attempt to coerce good behavior is likely doomed to failure.  By extension, it's not possible to recreate the national character as a whole.  Social engineering ignores the truth that human nature is complex and nuanced even if the idea of free will as it’s commonly conceived of is not literally true.  The best we can do is to improve our own attitudes and behavior towards others in the hope it may encourage others to do better.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Borders

Standing in the U.S. immigration and customs line at Vancouver International Airport waiting to board a flight to San Francisco, I felt a twinge of mingled anxiety and resentment.

I was coming back from an academic conference in Edmonton.  I had only been in Canada a few days.  It was a short stay, but a welcome relief from life south of the 49^th parallel nonetheless.  As we inched through the endlessly snaking queue I regretted not staying longer.

My regret was amplified by being sandwiched among a bunch of returning cruise ship passengers.  Saddled with mounds of luggage, handbags, shopping bags, backpacks, and gaudily wrapped boxes of all sorts, fumbling with their passports and declaration forms, they were miserable company.  To make matters worse, the overfed, loudly dressed, loudmouthed couple behind me would not stop fuming about how they were being inconvenienced and lamenting why they should have to wait on line and jump through so many hoops to get back into their own country. 

I bit the tip of my tongue to keep from asking them to please be quiet, that we were all in the same boat and should just deal with it…but deep down, I couldn’t help agreeing with them. Travel to and from the United States, post-9/11, has become an ordeal.  It’s particularly galling when the “international” travel is to one of our immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

I began mulling over the idea a few months ago when, attending another conference in San Diego, I took a day trip to Tijuana.  I hadn’t been there for several years.  Friends warned me about the drug gang violence on the border they’d heard about, urged me not to go, the risk wasn’t worth it. 

They needn’t have worried.  I had a pleasant and relaxing afternoon in TJ.  Feeling pretty good about life and the world in general, I headed back toward the border.  As I neared the pedestrian crossing at San Ysidro, my heart sank.  Even though it was ten o’clock on a weekday evening, the line to the border station was over four blocks long and stagnant.  After a spell, a young man offered to help me jump the line for ten bucks.  My impatience getting the better of my sense of fair play, I followed the guy.  He came through and got me a spot in line about fifty feet from the entrance. 

Even then, it took 45 minutes just to get in the door and another twenty to get to the Customs and Border Protection post inside.  Having a lot of time to study the posters on the corridor walls, I noticed one depicting a CBP officer of deliberately indeterminate ethnicity, her head tilted slightly upward, gazing meaningfully into the distance.  The poster was captioned, “We Are the Face of Our Nation.” 

The face of our nation was not particularly welcoming that night.  In fact, it verged on the outright hostile.  Watching a clutch of CBP officers hustle several dazed, handcuffed men past our line made me uncomfortable enough.  Arriving near the head of the line did little to allay my worries.  The officers at the windows barked orders at people to come forward, stay put, present identification, declare goods, etc.  I felt badly for the fellow in front of me who made the mistake of putting his toes a few inches over the red line we had to wait behind to be called: “Sir…SIR!!!  Get BACK behind the LINE!!!” 

I was somewhat more fortunate.  The officer I ended up speaking with was curt and peremptory, gimlet-eyed, suspicious.  He looked at me, at my ID, and at me again. 

“Are you bringing anything back from Mexico?” 

“No, just myself,” I said with a forced smile.  The officer glared at me, unimpressed with my feeble attempt at humor.  He jerked his head grudgingly toward the exit door.  I had been granted dispensation to go home. 

While the American CBP officer I encountered on my return from Canada was a little more courteous than the one I faced at San Ysidro, I still couldn’t help but feel as if I was somehow a suspect.   I contrast this with my experience with the Canadian border official when I arrived.  Her questions were direct and to the point, but civil—What was the purpose of my visit?  How long was I staying?  Absent was the ever-present undercurrent of suspicion I always seem to encounter when dealing with our own border officers. 

Yes, yes, I know the reasons why.  We’re at war, illegal immigration is a threat to honest native-born working people and a drain on the public purse, we have a right to control our borders.  However, our attitude toward borders and immigration is a reflection of our national character beyond the immediate issue.  In other words, our pervasive feeling of being threatened has led us to create and support the xenophobic policies that give rise to violations that heighten our sense of insecurity…a vicious circle born of self-fulfilling prophecies, if you will. 

Emma Lazarus to the contrary, we have not been welcoming of immigrants other than those from Western Europe. This hostility is partly based in fear of the immigrant as Other.  But in equal measure it’s an extension of our acquisitiveness and cupidity, of our ideological hyperindividualism, of a culture that is at its base rude and angry, its belligerence barely concealed behind a blandly smiling façade.  The antipathy against immigrants surfaces daily, in venues high and low—as we can see in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s just-announced decision concerning Arizona’s anti-immigrant law SB 1070, in which he wrote of the “evil effects” of undocumented immigration. 

I hope I’m not alone in thinking Scalia is overstating the case just a tad.  If I was a descendant of a once-marginalized immigrant minority, I would rethink using such loaded terms as “evil” to describe more recent arrivals.  Considering Scalia’s stated admiration of the nation’s founders, he would do well to remember that few if any signers of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were of non-English ancestry.[1]  Then again, maybe it’s a matter of who got here earlier.  After all, we stole this country fair and square.  Why share with the latecomers?

Fortunately, I don’t believe time is on Scalia’s side, or Jan Brewer’s, or the Arizona legislature’s, or the Minutemen’s, or on that of any other opponents of immigration from south of the border.  Down in Aztlán, a cultural ferment has been underway for a long time.  Not the reconquista, as some fear, but the emergence of a vibrant amalgam of Anglo and Latino cultures.  Border regions always produce cultural fusion; border walls, increased patrols, and discriminatory laws will do nothing to stop it.  Consider the emergent culture the outcome of an evolutionary process, its vitality the product of hybrid vigor.  Slowly, inexorably, albeit unnoticed by the whitest of white-bread Anglos, the new way of life is suffusing the old.  I don’t just mean salsa outselling ketchup or norteamericanos learning to appreciate Mexican cuisine that doesn’t come from a drive-thru window.  I mean lasting shifts in our national identity and worldview, ones that may actually be for the better in this age of globalization. 

The seeds for this transformation were planted before Anglo Americans arrived in the West.  From California to Texas, the Latin influence is evident in place names, culinary practices, architecture, and even the law.  (Community property laws, which are prevalent in the western U.S., are a carryover from Mexican legal codes.)  Subsequent waves of migration have enriched the cultural soil.  More are rolling in.  By the middle of the century, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that “Hispanics” (its term; a bit dated) will comprise a quarter of the population and non-Hispanic whites will be in the minority.

Perhaps by then crossing the border will be a little easier…

© 2012 The Unassuming Scholar

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[1] William Paca, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, may have been of Italian extraction.

Deportee

On this day in 1948, an airplane chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service crashed in Los Gatos Canyon, California.  The accident, commemorated in the Woody Guthrie poem, “Deportee,” took the lives of 28 Mexican migrant workers who were being involuntarily repatriated.  The victims included:

Julio Barron

Manuel Calderon

Francisco Duran

Santiago Elisandro

Rosalio Estrado

Bernabe Garcia

James A. Guardaho

Severo Lara

Elias Macias

Jose Macias

Tomas Marquez

Louis Medina

Manuel Merino

Luis Mirando

Martin Navarro

Ygnacio Navarro

Roman Ochoa

Ramon Perez

Apolonio Placentia

Ramon Portello

Guadalupe Ramirez

Alberto Raygoza

Guadalupe Rodriquez

Maria Rodriguez

Juan Ruiz

Salvadore Sandoval

Jesus Santos