It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free culture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undoing vandalism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page conflating him with the conquistador of the same name — replacing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc.
It’s somewhat disappointing that real Wikipedia vandalism is as pointlessly childish as that…
God damn, god damn, god damn.
But not all of them are focused on border concerns. If you talk to the Minutemen long enough, the subject of immigration inevitably floats to the surface.
“I see the nation descending into poverty, philosophically, and part of it is illegal immigration, a big part of it,” says a twentysomething young man named Eric, who declines to give his last name. “It’s also outsourcing, increasing corporate power, excessive corporate power, that kind of stuff. What I can do here, since I’m so close to the border, is help out with the immigration issue.” His fiancée, he says, can’t understand why does it. David Niewert, Borderline Personalities
So this particular Minuteman is concerned about the globalization of capital, and the “we all see it but pretend it isn’t staring us in the face” future economic downturn in the U.S., and he chooses to do his part by stomping on brown people.
God damn, if that isn’t the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Way stupider than healing crystals and intellegent design.
The alternative is the stuff about corporate power was thrown in there because more people care about out-of-control, legally un-accountable corporations than they do brown people, and “Eric” is simply talking up the same bait-and-switch that got the word “Socialist” stuck in the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party”.
The Witch is Dead! The Witch is Dead!
Here’s a gentle fist in the air, dedicated to The Wicked Witch of the Midwest, the man who made it acceptable to say “democracy” when you mean “free-market capitalism”.
One summary of his position on Chile described it as “freer markets led to free people, and that Chile had an unfree economy, which led to a dictatorship, which then implemented open economy policies, and later became politically free.” A loose translation of that would be “stop fucking with the money and we’ll let you vote, you damned peasants.”
(For the naysayers, I’ve seen the movie the summary describes, and the summary is faithful to his expressed views.)
Last Wednesday night, I was calling friends to try and do a little street theater downtown Chicago, in the hopes of providing a particularly gritty infomercial and generating pressure on the Senate to not pass S.3930 (aka the “Just Confess to Something Act of 2006″). It appears I wasn’t the only one with the same idea. No one was down for it early that Thursday afternoon, and the bill went on to pass by a hefty majority.
That night, I couldn’t help but think that this is no longer my country. I’m living on the same landmass, but “America” has packed up and left for greener pastures.
That is a fiction. The America I pine after has only ever existed in the fever dreams of its bohemian idealists. America as a whole has always been a brutal, mean-spirited hypocrite. It enslaved millions of Africans in the name of God. It slaughtered millions of indigenous Americans in the name of civilization. It conquered Cuba and the Phillipines in the name of colonial liberation. It setup banana republics in Central America in the name of democracy. It used nuclear weapons in the name of peace. It impoverishes a large chunk of the planet in the name of development. It conquered Iraq in the name of freedom, and continues to decimate it in the name of stability.
Now, it has decided to let itself disappear anyone it wishes and abuse them forever — in the name of security.
Good to see more evidence that America is now a third-world/developing nation (albeit with toys on credit). Social services continue on the brink of collapse, the government violates its own laws in the name of “security from terrorists,” wealthy corporations with tight connections to the government get bid-less contracts while the country accumulates ever larger foreign debts. The poor are told to save themselves in a natural disaster, prices of foodstuffs are on the rise, and a corporation owned by a foreign monarchy gets to purchase a large chunk of the country’s infrastructure outright. Oh yeah, and there’s a totally dumbassed war killing thousands in the background.
About the only thing missing is the Army manning checkpoints and throwing dissidents out of airplanes. They’re already patrolling the airports now, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the next terrorist attack for posse comitatus to go completely out the window.
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