the little burro chase game

So I saw Juan Pablo today and he promised he hadn't stolen his job from a real American like O'Hannigan, Smith or Scherzbach in at least a week. The nativist lunacy that burrows like a cicadda is back again visiting another plague on the manipulated, short-sighted and deluded American people and has brought forth its populist political leeches who make a practice of making policies of hate sound like "messages of the people". They would never presume to rule by ignoring the voice of the people! They must heed it! That great and terrible voice! The one that during the commercials for American Idol and Pimp My Ride has cried out for justice against the oppressive terrorist dishwasher who everywhere seeks to block advancement for the white people of this country...I mean, excuse me, not the white people. Did I say that? No I said the Middle Class. You know, the backbone of this country. Meanwhile these same leeches have no compunction about allowing banks to raise huge fees on the consumers, avoid meaningful discussion of social security and its benefits nor address the huge inequalities that exist in public education. How exactly is New Orleans doing these days again?

Iraq?

Better to legislate by responding to the will of the people than by addressing nagging issues that the liberal press makes too much of.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher believes hell, let the prisoners pick the fruit. That's what the American people want. This is the same Dana Rohrbach of Orange County, California, you know the guy that let Jack Abramoff use his name as a personal reference when he was getting a $60 million loan for some casino boats in Florida.

Old Dana, he really worries what the people of America want. And they want rapists and people who wave the Mexican flag at rallies picking fruit in the noonday sun.

Surely it was what Americans wanted when Rep. Rohrabacher helped out a guy who promised to make a movie based on a Rohrabacher script. Rohrabacher set up some meetings with some Republicans serving on the committee liasoning with the Department of Homeland Security and the guy offered to make one pro-American movie a year and generally be a good citizen. He'd make a good American movie that any mom, pop and their tyke could watch without having to worry about the homosexuals, the deviants or the liberals funding it and influencing it. And if that filmmaker happened to rip off his investors of five or six million bucks, well, look, he said he was going to make pro-American movies. You don't see Steven Speilberg doing that.

Rohrabacher was also the guy that wrote California's legendary prop. 187 and in 2004 proposed a bill to withhold emergency room treatment to people who couldn't prove they were citizens of our fair country.

Apparently Americans are an angry, vengeful lot. At least the ones he represents. And why not, the forces of hate are strong in this world -- as a matter of fact he supported the Taliban as enemies of terrorism and hate in 1996. They would bring order he asserted in the November/December 1996 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. After 9/11 he said the attacks were because the Clinton administration was blind.

And even though Rohrabacher's political campaigns have been largely funded by a friendly billionaire, and though he's friends with "an honest man", the person he was referring to there being of course, Jack Abramoff, Rep. Rohrabacher really is concerned with representing the views of Mr. and Mrs. Joe America.

And if America is a vengeful, vindictive, xenophopic place right now, who is Rep. Rohrabacher to blow against the wind? Hell, he's turning on the fan and opening the windows so the voice of true Americans (not ones waving some spic flag) can ring out. "Blow wind blow," he breathes to himself and to everybody that will listen.

Give me that spic flag, that Mexican flag to be correct and I'll wave it in your face too (and I'm no nationalist, the country is about as valid as the sports team -- at best it's a way of quantifying who needs to be helped and amassing ways to organize the morpheus and bring assistance to those who need it, meanwhile the Cubs are a way of life), and I think of all the people I know who came here, some risking things to call this country their home that few would be willing to do who were born here, and these people who have been so good to me so many times, some of their kids I've tutored, I've taught now, and who made my life as a waiter, a teacher, a friend, so much fucking fun I didn't worry about when I was leaving, what I was doing or how I looked, who work as hard as any other person and who don't have to apologize for anything, and I see some bastard like this, spitting on these people with his flag-spitted lips, saying the Mexicans are the ones tearing this country down and meanwhile, him and all the other opportunist low-lifes like him who have brought down the level of political and social discourse in this country to the neanderthal level acting like they're protecting us and have our best interests at heart when they are leeching off of us and seeking to instill the fear necessary to manipulate and the hate necessary to manipulate. When is the point that to call an ass an ass is more than honest, it's necessary?

How does he come to represent the views of so many of our citizens? This is a sick, sick country, with a middle class so jittery and uncertain of its economic and social future that since we laid that atom bomb over the small river jutting through Hiroshima it has been easier and easier to co-opt the middle class in a brutal, arrogant and expensive foreign policy. To gather their support has only taken the breath of a potential threat to their way of life, fragile as it is because it is built on the broken eggshells of a foreign policy that has supported far more tyrants than it has fought, and has involved a blossoming of slave labor and a need for willful blindness as the complicity of the many.

And now it's the Mexicans fault. Whatever that means.

That keeps the Arabs off the front page because things aren't too cool on that front right now, but it reminds all those voters just who they need to keep in mind for protection. Because it's a mean world out there. And I don't want to say anything, but you know that Mexican clipping your hedges, he could have helped some Al Qu'aida guy get in here. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon? How about three degrees of Osama bin Laden? You, that hedger, Osama.

How about measures to help the lives of the people who help build the fabric of our society? Not just the illegal immigrant, but those people not pandered to by the commercials during Desperate Housewives?

This battle, for the meaning of government, at worst this political opportunism will cost yet more lives. The political alter of sacrifice is hungry these days. A couple more American soldiers were killed in Iraq today.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, I'm sure, is quite comfortable at the moment.

Many of those he seeks to further punish, are toiling away at jobs that only further define the oppressive gap between the comfortable and jittery constituancy of Dana Rohrabacher and the struggling and growing population of those who shoulder this economy on their backs. Many of those he claims to support, he's sent on a fool's errand, and they are at this moment, some of them, patrolling Iraqi neighborhoods already spilling over and veering toward civil war.

Meanwhile, Wood is out until May and Prior's at least a few weeks away. As dreary as that thought is, it's the one that keeps me sane. That and that Zambrano still throws. The vines aren't there yet at Wrigley, won't be until mid-May at the earliest, but next week there's baseball, the beautiful beginning, middle and end broken up into threes.