"Undocumented Worker," "Abortion," "Collateral Damage," and Euphemism in the Land of the Liar.

This morning, wakened by the clock radio and an NPR story concerning illegal immigration from Mexico, the commentator-reporter (no one simply presents the news anymore – it’s un-American) used the term “undocumented workers.” She did not once say, “illegal immigrant,” or “illegal alien.”

“There,” I said to Rita, “is exactly what I’ve been talking about. The language of the politically correct. YOU are an undocumented worker; you don’t have any “documents,” do you? How the hell do you jump from “someone criminally living in our country” to “undocumented worker?”

Once we had gotten out of bed, and I had gone outside to pick up the morning paper, I eventually read my way to the editorial pages. There, I found the column of Thomas Sowell. Guess what? “Immigration,” Sowell wrote, “is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally – in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric. We can’t even call illegal immigrants ‘illegal immigrants.’”

“The politically correct evasion is “undocumented worker,” he went on. “Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they applying for work? Most Americas are undocumented workers, but they are no illegal immigrants. There is a difference.”

Oh, yes, sir there IS a difference. I can tell you that. In 1996, during my war with the United States and its Internal Revenue Gestapo, I was working in a Mexican restaurant, delivering food, when a suit with a federal swagger walked up and shoved a federal ID in my face. Could I prove I was a citizen of the United States, he demanded.

Now, I happen to be about as Anglo-looking as you can get. I have spoken the English language since childhood, and my name is “von Luebbert.” As a matter of fact, it is “Harland Anton-Louis, Freiherr von Luebbert-Leiste.” How far from Mexican is that?

You will note, please, that this capon in polyester didn’t ask for my identification. Had he done so, he would have been shown not only a Texas Driver License, but a Texas Concealed Weapon License. You don’t get one of the latter while being an alien, sure as hell not an illegal one; oops, “undocumented worker.” As I related in my soon-to-be published book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I proceeded to take Elliot Ness outside and read him the riot act. If another federal agent or cop stopped me again like this, I would tear off his arm, beat him senseless with the gushing stump, then shove the gushing end up his robin’s ass.

Now, the reason for the scene I’ve described is that it was part of what had been going on for more than fifteen years. As just one example, I was stopped on the streets and highways of the nation more than (it took a while for me to realize and begin keeping a diary) 109 times by cops both local and federal, sicced by falsified police records, records falsified by IRS in hope of provoking a confrontation that would get me killed. But let us assume that such wasn’t the case for a minute. With something like 11,000,000 illegal alien Mexicans ranging about the nation, a considerable portion of them in Corpus Christi (the locale where the incident in question occurred), why would an agent of a U.S. Immigration Service really intent upon curbing or stopping illegal immigration be doing with a guy as obviously Anglo as me?

On the border with Mexico, with a torrent of illegals pouring across, he thought I was Canadian, maybe?

No, Mr. Sowell, politically correct language betrays guilt. You don’t call killing a child “abortion” out of pride, or even in self-justification. The truth about the evasion “undocumented worker” is that it covers the truth; and the truth is that politicians like our craven coward – the guy who was willing to do anything including fly a jet fighter to stay out of ware in the jungle, but is eager as hell to self-aggrandize by sending others to die in the desert – President fear losing the Latino vote. And, of course – as you also point out, Mr. Sowell – our willing-to-do-anything-for-a-buck business community wants the cheap labor.

Presto! The rapist, kidnapper, or terrorist from Mexico becomes an “undocumented worker!” I can name a few more of those, but it will suffice to say they all got on four airliners one day in September 2001, high-jacked the planes, and crashed them into buildings.

The “difference” between “undocumented worker” and “terrorist” is the angle the speaker is working. “War on Terror” is ever-so-much more heroic-sounding than “Operation Make the Military Industrial Complex Rich as Croesus.” “Iraqi Freedom” is easier, much easier, to say than “Force the Bastards to Give Us Their Oil.” And remember the archetype of it all? “Collateral Damage,” is much less disgusting, and revealing, than “Thirty Women and Children Obliterated.”

No, sir – and with all die respect - Euphemistic language is everywhere in the U.S. these days because to say “bomb that vaporizes everything within a radius of 500 feet, and with a radius of destruction measuring 2,000 yards” is easier – much more politically correct – than to say “precision munition.” “Servicing the target” makes the people who are reducing a neighborhood to rubble, and killing half the people who live there, sound like delivery boys. Much more palatable that way.

During the 23 years the federal government did everything it could to make my life Hell – if I could only have been an “undocumented worker! – I was a “suspect.” I was never so much as charged with anything more serious than traffic violation (and there have been extremely few of those), but “suspicion” is possible where the Blessed Virgin is concerned – and it makes a lovely substitute for “harassment.”

That this is a nation of profligate and committed liars is everywhere evident, from the avalanche of commercials anyone who turns on a television set sees and hears, to the hideous marathons we euphemistically call “political campaigns; but nowhere is it more evident that in the very language we speak.

Those unwilling to face the truth are likewise never willing to speak it.