Ignominy

NPR featured a very disturbing story on "Morning Edition" this morning. It documented the movement of the so-called "Minutemen" into the heartland and away from the Mexican border. Given the behaviors displayed by some of the people NPR quoted and talked about in the piece, I'm beginning to wonder if the group's name ought not to be pronounced "My-newt-men," for the size of their brains (and, I'm sure some would say, their membri viriles).

One of the people NPR interviewed for the story is trying to start up a new Minutemen chapter in North Carolina, because he says although the Mexican immigrants he used to work with on the tobacco farms when he was a teen-ager were great guys, hard-working, loyal, the salt of the earth, he now believes that their presence threatens our national culture. To which my shouted response, as I was driving in to work this morning, was that if that attitude properly constitutes part of our national culture, it should be threatened. In fact, it should be extirpated, root and branch.

Another numbskull featured in the story actually stated on-air that illegal immigrants brought "certain types of diseases" with them--even as he made it a point to drive around to local emergency rooms and take photographs of anybody in the waiting room who might be an illegal. I mean, Christ on a pogo stick! That's a three-point shot right there. First, it's eerily reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric about Jews, Slavs, and others they considered to be Untermenschen--and not that far away from some of the things the KKK used to proclaim about the Negroes, either. Second, if you're worried about people bringing diseases with them, wouldn't you want them to be seeking medical care? And third, again, if this is any part of the American culture, I say we should be criminalizing it, not encouraging it.

Have these numbskulls not learned anything from George Allen's "macaca" gaffe in Virginia last week, fer cryin' out loud? How in the hell are you supposed to tell, from a photograph, whether someone is an immigrant at all (as opposed to an American citizen of ethnic descent), much less whether or not s/he's here legally? And should it not be a proud characteristic of American culture that we take care of people who are sick or injured whether they're citizens or not, whether they're legal or not, whether they can pay or not?

An equally ignominious (and downright stupid) plan mentioned in the NPR story was an effort to penalize utility companies for providing services to illegal immigrants. Excuse me? Worse, they want to encourage their fellow citizens to start turning in people they suspect of being illegals.

It was at that point that I well and truly blew my stack. As far as I'm aware, there is no statute on the books anywhere that says you can only get electric, gas, water, sewage, telephone, or cable service if you're a U.S. citizen or a legal resident--and if there is such a statute, I'm amazed it's survived judicial scrutiny and hope that the ACLU or some other responsible body will see to it that the statute receives plenty of such scrutiny, in a big hurry. If you've got a place to live, you need electricity, water, sewer, and gas service just to keep the place clean and the inhabitants healthy. And if you've got the money for cable service, you should be able to enjoy it: whether you arrived from Guatemala last week courtesy of a smuggler or whether you were born here 40 years ago.

It sounds to me as if what the Minutemen are really about is not protecting our borders or our "national culture" (if, in fact, such a thing even exists, a proposition concerning which I am in considerable doubt). Rather, they want to "protect" the power and security of uptight white people who don't want to have to see people of color in anything but a subservient role, preferably housed somewhere out of sight of their gated enclaves, to which they can only gain entrance through the back way when their services are required and which they must leave with great dispatch once those services are completed. And if our national culture contains, or is slated to contain, elements such as informing on our neighbors, looking down on members of certain racial, ethnic, or other groups as inferior and seeing to it that they are confined to squalid quarters and made to know their place, well, then all I've got to say is I hope that culture dies, fails, or is tossed aside onto the compost heap of history post-haste--where it belongs, and where any decent society would have left it long since.

Comments

[Andrea]

Holy shit. I heard the beginning of this story, but I was still in bed. I must have fallen back asleep before the campaign to shut off the utilities, etc.... Good thing. I was already pulling the covers over my head and planning my move to Canada.

[Michael]

Most un-holy shit I think I've heard all week. And in this sixth year of the Shrubbery, that's saying something.

[Incertus]

It's clear that racists have become increasingly emboldened during this administration, but it seems to have really exploded just recently. There's CBS's little foray into racial competitiveness with this season's Survivor, and Limbaugh's subsequent breakdown of the team that he thinks will win, for instance. (For the record, he's got his money on the Hispanic team, because the whites won't be allowed to win, the blacks can't swim, and the Latinos will go to any length necessary, as is shown by their willingness to endure any burden to get into the US.) And then of course, there's the whole Minutemen fiasco. Orcinus has done the best online work on this subject I've ever seen.