Dana Blankenhorn

This Week's Clue: Faith of our Grandfathers

The following essay would be the lead of Vol. 11, No. 4 of A-Clue.Com if it were still an e-mail newsletter. Instead I'm now publishing it on this blog and offering it via RSS and e-mail links found on this blog's main page. Enjoy.

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Everyone's fall tends to reflect their rise.

Many people call this karma. I prefer to think my karma runs over your dogma, but it's true. The seeds of your destruction are contained in how you rose to prominence.

In my own case the fall of my income is a direct reflection of its rise in the 1990s. I would much rather write than do anything else, even market myself. I hit a mother lode with Internet Commerce, which I fell into through my work as a business reporter, but when it played out I just drifted into writing about other things, heedless of what the market wanted or my connection to it. My bad.

Everyone knows those cautionary tales of celebrities whose rise was fueled by a drug-induced worldview, and then were felled by a drug overdose. Or the artists who became mere copyists of themselves, creating the same thing over-and-over until it killed them.  Or the businessman who cut corners until he cut himself into jail, the ruthless who were ruthlessly put down, the socially conscious who drove their creations into a ground of good intentions.

Well, the same trend holds in American history. The way eras end reflect how they began. The same assumptions that began an era become over-used and destructive when a new era emerges.

• Jacksonian Democracy, north and south balanced by the west, ended when we ran out of west that could be balanced.
• Lincoln's Union, the money power driving all before it, could not deal with the rise of unions, and became inherently corrupt.
• Teddy Roosevelt's Progressivism, a system of incremental change, could not deal with Hoover's Great Depression.
• FDR's Thesis of Unity and liberal experimentation became disunity and chemical experimentation.

So it is today with the Nixon Thesis of Conflict. It was born in a search for enemies, both foreign and domestic. It triumphed with the Cold War, but is ill-equipped to deal with the rise of Political Islam, the challenge of China, or the need to save the planet from global warming and pollution.

In all the previous cases where a Political Thesis reached its sell-by date and a new Crisis came upon us as a result, there were fears that the whole system would fall. These were real fears, with a sound basis in fact. And it is amazing, in retrospect, how close we came, each time, to a system collapse.

In fact, each of these systems did collapse. 

• The Civil War did destroy the united States which had previously existed, replacing it with a United states that had one policy, one ideology, and one system of laws.
• The Progressive era did destroy the corporate state which preceded it,  creating a new system of checks and balances against corporate power.
• The New Deal did destroy this state in turn, moving the power center of the nation from New York to Washington, D.C.
• And the Nixon era has placed specific behavioral boundaries on all the American people, it has made government the perceived enemy, and it has made unquestioned Nationalism a central value.

(Sometimes we're so unconscious about these things. The old Washington baseball teams were the Senators -- the new one is the Nationals.)

The New Niggers

The title is deliberately provocative, but someone has to say it.

Mexican immigrants are the new Niggers.

They provide all the advantages blacks did back in the day. They're cheap, they're uncomplaining. They can be taken advantage of. They depress wages so other groups can't get up the economic ladder.

Best of all, these niggers are useful to black bigots as well as whites. There's been a rash of robberies, even murders, committed against Mexican immigrants in South Georgia recently. The suspects are black. They might not know they're doing just what their white neighbors did a century ago (wearing sheets) but they are.

As a start toward discussion, let's consider the language.

Open Source Warfare?

For some time John Robb has been writing a blog (soon to be a book, then a Major Motion Picture) called Global Guerillas.

In it he posits the idea of open source warfare, a global network of rebels united by technology and modern transportation, able to disrupt and destroy modern society.

Robb's is a "post 9-11 mindset," a paranoia born of the spectacularly "lucky" (from the point of view of its planners) destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That date (which will live in infamy) transformed a small time terrorist named Osama Bin Laden into the Great Satan (the angel who challenged heaven and became master of hell). In Republican mythology it also transformed George W. Bush into the Archangel Michael, and the neo-conservative movement into the defenders of paradise.

Robb is constantly bringing readers earnest dispatches from the front in order to prove his case:

• Criminal gangs in Brazil threaten the stability of the government.
• Iraq, once the cradle of civilization, is becoming its grave despite our best efforts to halt it.
• Maoist Naxalite guerillas are threatening the government of India.
• Nigerian guerillas have seized virtual control of oil fields there. (Robb estimates that the Nigerians and Iraqi thieves are each bringing in $4.2 billion in oil revenue per year.)
• Mexican immigrants are increasingly sophisticated and undermining the U.S.

Robb's thesis is these ethnic, political, and criminal groups are creating "virtual states" with the ability to destroy America and civilization.

Only two problems:

1. Open source has nothing to do with it.
2. His numbers just don't add up.

Let's take these one at a time.

 

A Wall is Worthless

Realism alert.

The funniest aspect of this whole immigration debate is the right-wing idea that a wall next to Mexico would "secure our borders."

It won't.

• Only about 23% of our undocumented or illegal (take your pick) workers are Mexican.
• We have a Free Trade Agreement (remember the giant sucking sound) that prevents us from closing the land borders to our north and south.
• Anyone with a valid passport can cross the border at any crossing point (by land, sea or air), say they're a tourist, get the passport stamped, then toss it and become someone else very, very quickly. That's how the vast majority of the undocumented get here.

No system of "identity papers" which are not mandated for all -- all Americans having "their papers" -- can hope to have any effectiveness. No matter how good the technology on those papers are, they will be copied -- which has been the argument against them in the first place.

So is there any hope?

Yes.