Like a taco in the sun

Of all the vile stupidity that the Fraudulency Administration has foisted on this nation the latest round of beaner-bashing - the promised elimination of the rule that allows people who were snuck into the United States as minors to remain in the United States - is perhaps the vilest and most stupid.

Vile because, like it or not (and the Trumpkins DON'T like it, which is why they're shrieking and stamping their widdle feet so hard to make this a thing) these people are U.S. nationals. Not citizens, but American in all effective senses of the word. Tossing these poor sonsofbitches into Guatemala City or Sinaloa would be no different than snatching some random gringo out of the nonexistent salad bar a Applebee's, stripping them naked and parachuting them out over San Pedro Sula. This will result in some predictable number of these people, whose "crime" is infinitely less egregious than the shameless grifting indulged in by some greater-than-random-percentage of Orange Foolius' appointees, being raped, murdered, robbed, beaten, and more-or-less enslaved.

Stupid because, frankly, this is more of the same nonsense I fulminated against here, here, and here.

Only worse.

Because the vast, VAST majority of the people targeted by this nasty little piece of xenophobic racism are, as I said, American. They are employed, many in college, many in position to be valuable contributors to any sensible civilization. But because of the gibbering lunacy of the GOP C.H.U.D. base they will be wasted, thrown away to appeal to a group of people who, by and large, appear as useful to the future of the United States as print-shop employees for a glossy skin mag.

One reason I really hate writing about politics these days is how utterly vile are the politics of the current ruling party and its' adherents. There's a point to be had in discussing controlling the entry and exit to the United States. There's no point to discussing that by shrieking demonization of the people trying to evade those controls. They're simply doing what every human being since Olduvai Gorge has done; make their lives and their families' lives better. A sensible polity would be trying to figure out ways to integrate many of them into the life of the nation, and to ameliorate the problems in the native lands of the others so as to wake them from the nightmares that drive many of the immigrants to flee their native lands.

But given the last year's history this nation is, quite obviously, NOT a sensible polity.

Aside from simple sensible policy, the deplorables that are squealing and squeeeeeing because His Fraudulency is punishing these "others" aren't even going to get the woody they anticipate out of this. They're highly unlikely to benefit from the expulsion of these people in any material way. Cletus and Lulabelle aren't going to pick tomatoes in the California sun, or sheetrock Houston in the swampy misery of late summer, or cook frantically in the back of a diner in Sherwood, Oregon. The "jobs" they think these people they hate are taking? They're not good jobs. These DACA people have no legal rights; they cannot afford to take any job that will do a thorough enough background check to expose their legal status.

That will make no difference to the deplorables; for them it's all about just wanting to make "those people" pay.

That's a fucking insane way to run a great industrial nation.

But insanity has never stopped modern Republicans before and it won't now. It's all tribal, all resentment, all whining and bitching all the way down, along with stooging for plutocracy and licking the guns of the ammosexuals and the cross of the God-botherers.

The dark heart of Treason in Defense of Slavery and the decades of segregation and racial oppression that followed was the the people who "counted" - the wealthy white elite that founded the U.S. based on what was good for wealthy white elites - conned the po' white trash into sucking up to them with the bestial promise that, no matter what, no matter how worthless and vile and shitty those white trash people were and would be, they would always be "better" than a nigger.

And a beaner.

And, as we can see, that hasn't changed an iota.

So, despite the obvious fact that, as I said back in February, that

"...the results will be at best underwhelming. The promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee will turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals.

The result of all this huge slug of spending - surely paid for by a tax hike, right? - will be, outside of personal hardship for those involved, a vast expanse of...very little."

his Trumpkins will fight for this like crazed hashashins because nothing, nothing, is more important to them than reminding those dusky little devils that this is still a White Man's Neighborhood.

¡Fuera de acá!

I hate to even admit this.

But.

I'm not TOTALLY hating on the totally-expected roundup-the-wetbacks directive from the new Administration.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a Trumpkin. I want to Make America Great Again. Ugh. I know.

Bear with me for a moment, though.

Now. Don't get me wrong. This thing will suck for millions of people whose crime is trying to get a piece of the American Dream for themselves and their families. I hate that on a purely personal, I-don't-like-to-make-things-suck-for-innocent-people level. As a person, I hate it.

As a citizen, as someone who thinks about politics and governing...well, let's start with this; to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States.

In case you're interested, I wrote a loooooong post at this joint three years ago where I discussed what I see as the vast, almost insoluble complexity of this problem, which concluded with the following:

"The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance, and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by "Real Amurikans" (that is, legal citizens) who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things."

But this post isn't about those things; it's about the Trump-promising-to-deport-the-beaners-and-going-ahead-and-doing-it.

As opposed to the ban-the-raghead rule, which really was poorly thought out and complete geopolitical foolery, the idea that the United States should police its borders and return those who have entered the country illegally to their homelands is not, on its face, as freakishly boneheaded as most Trump stuff.

But...

(...and you KNEW there'd be a but, here, right, because, well...Trump.)

Here's the problems I DO have with this.

First, I can see a gajillion ways that this is going to be a fucking total shitshow. American citizens will be grabbed up and deported by mistake. Sweeps will result in a seething mob of people shoved into FEMA trailers without any sort of organization or preparation. Screening will be a disaster. The optics - "jackbooted ICE agents handcuff adorable tiny Latino kiddies" - will make the Land of the Free look like the Land of the Assholes. People will get stranded in Mexico City airport with nowhere to go and no hope of relief.

I can see about a dozen ways this will be a smoking crater - it's Trump, for one thing, who seems to have a gift for employing people who couldn't run a child's birthday party - that will make the Iraq War look like VE Day.

Second, I can also see how this could turn into something far nastier and far worse, along the lines of the Japanese internment of 1942. There's always been a hell of a strong strain of race hate and xenophobia in America (as there is in about...well, pretty much everywhere humans live...) that could take this from a calmly conducted law enforcement process into a screaming ratissage against every person or group of people that every whacko wingnut hates and freaks out over (Hello? Alex Jones? Hello?).

And, finally, I think that, even if this isn't a dumpster fire, that the results will be at best underwhelming. The promised Day of Alien-Free Jubilee will turn out to be a quiet monotone of unpicked crops, uncleaned hotel rooms, unwiped asses, and uncooked meals.

The result of all this huge slug of spending - surely paid for by a tax hike, right? - will be, outside of personal hardship for those involved, a vast expanse of...very little.

What do you think?

Burning Down The House

One of the reasons I no longer post much about politics and political issues is my growing sense that 1) doing so is utterly pointless except as a means of bloviating, and the reason for that is because 2) pretty much everyone on the bulk of the two sides has no intention of making statements or taking action because of any sort of actual evaluation of the evidence. A perfect example of this is the recent "controversy" over various aspects of what let's call the "Illegal Brown-ness" problem.

As they have for the past hundred years or so, people born in the nations of Central and northern South America are trying, and in many cases, succeeding in entering the United States. They do this for as many reasons as there are people; ambition, poverty, restlessness, greed, fear, hope, despair, foolishness, criminality, boredom...and in all probability a mixture of all or much of the above.

This is troublesome on several levels.

It is troublesome for their home countries, who often lose the very people that might help those nations grow; the people who are motivated by their existing conditions to do something about them rather than sitting around with their thumbs up their asses and their brains in neutal.

It is troublesome for the region, in that it increases disruption, secrecy, and chaos; among the migrants, in their native lands, the places they pass through, and their destination - where they are "illegal", by definition a challenge to the common law.

It is troublesome for the United States as it brings home the vast disparity in political stability and economic wealth between the migrants, their home countries and their destination. The northern part of the Western hemisphere is a geopolitical conundrum unlike anything I can think of in history; an incredibly wealthy, politically stable empire connected by an immense, nearly indefensible land border with an incredibly impoverished, politically volatile congeries of semi- and nearly-failed statelets with which the empire is not openly at war by attempting to either physically subjugate or suborn.

Not surprisingly, these troublesome conditions have produced a group of U.S. domestic political "solutions" that can be roughly divided by the hue of their proponents.

U.S. "conservatives" - or radical reactionaries, to give them the name befitting their actual politics and policies - being the party of the old, the white, and/or the wealthy lean towards punitive ideas that can be summed up as "wall 'em off, hunt 'em down, ship 'em back" since those walled, hunted, and shipped are presumed to be so overwhelmingly young, brownish, and poor that the sorts of people who make up the current GOP cannot imagine how any of that could ever harm them and the current ideology of the GOP can be summed up as "Fuck you, Jack, I've got mine!".

To me this is nonsensical, trying to hold back the incoming tide. The political and economic disparity is too great, the attraction of El Norte too strong, the deterrent of punishment too weak because the expense of actually walling/hunting/shipping would be astronomical if enacted.

U.S. liberals, being the party of who-the-fuck-can-figure-out-what but typically younger, browner, and poorer than the typical GOP constituent is kind of all over the shop about this but tends more towards accomodating at least some of these migrants with options; towards becoming citizens eventually, and up to that point reduced harrassment and pursuit for the crime of existing inside a country not of their birth.

To me this is craven, ignoring problems because that are "too hard" or wilful denial of the problems inherent in the existence of people who are in but not of a republic, residents but not citizens of a democratic state. First, because a polity that cannot control its own borders controls nothing else worthwhile. And, second, because the problem of allowing a large population of people in one's nation that exists outside the law and its formalities is that this group must work to eat, and, because it has no legal protections, will and does work for pittances. This, in turn, acts as a boat anchor for the wages and conditions of the rest of the society's working people. If I can replace you with someone who cannot and will not strike or otherwise protest when I abuse them for fear of being deported...where is your protection from my abuse?

I will admit right here; I don't have a "solution" for these problems simply because I think that the problems are too complex for "a solution" and I suspect that the solutions, assuming that there are any realistic ones, involve a level of difficulty and expense for the United States that I honestly doubt my nation and its citizens are willing to suffer. The last time I wrote about this - in 2010 - I said the same thing I said the time I'd written about it before, in 2007:

"Perhaps because (we) don't want to remind (ourselves) that governments who build walls between peoples often find themselves building walls and barriers against their own people. Or that even the most fearsome barrier can and will be overcome if the people trying to cross it are desperate enough and brave enough.

The real issue - the one Which Dare Not Speak Its Name - is that the institutional poverty, misgovernance and social maladjustment of most Latin American countries is so profound and so destructive that to address it would take every penny that the U.S. has spent on poorly planned foreign adventures and more. Much more.

So instead we get this idiotic argument that all we need to do is fence these little heatherns out and everything will be Good. God will once again be White and in His Heaven, the food will magically get harvested, processed, cooked and served by "Real Amurikans" (that is, legal citizens) who will suddenly, magically, want to work for the pittance we want to pay for these jobs to prevent our food, clothing and service costs from reflecting what it would cost to pay humans actually living wages to do these things.

As Hadrian himself might have said: Nam tua res agitur, paries cum proximus ardet.

It is your business when your neighbour's house is on fire."

What makes this frustrating is that I've been saying this same thing for seven years now. It made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now, and from what I can tell not a fucking particle of that fucking sense has made its way into the public fucking debate on this fucking subject.

So here we are. Again. With people showing up on the southern border because their house is burning down, and our collective reaction is anger and hatred from one side and despair and resignation from the other, and nowhere to be seen is anyone willing to say what I've said above.

Or listen to me saying it.

So I might as well blog about fucking kittens.