"Dia de los Mejicanos" - in MY country~

Things grow more surreal every day under the Bush League Administration. In a nation whose government proclaims that it is at war, illegal aliend parade in the streets waving the flag of a foreign nation. In this supposed fight, how do I know that I can trust a compatriot who waves a foreign flag? How do I trust enough to follow a commander who recruits soldiers from a foreign nation? Isn't this the reason historians say Rome fell?


One thing is sure: the wound here was inflicted by the United States of America. I am a citizen of the United States of America.

Today is the day of the great Mexican Protest. La Raza on the march. Today, as many illegal aliens as have the incredible chutzpah necessary – and, owing to circumstances, that will be the great majority – will do everything in their now apparently considerable power to humiliate the United States of America and the Anglos. There’s really no telling what all they will demand (man, when a criminal has the nerve to parade in front of a cop waving a sign saying he’s a criminal, anything is possible), but it’s likely, witness the less than indomitable courage of the U.S. Congress and Government, vis a vis the monumental greed of corporate “America,” that they’ll get it. Where government and its bureaucrats are concerned this is no longer the Home of the Brave, and where our Sammy Glick industrialists are concerned, no longer the Nation of Laws.

And in a nation where more than 150,000 new laws, statutes, ordinances, rules and regulations are passed, and one in every 34 male citizens is in prison, jail, or free on probation or parole, any citizen who still thinks we are the Land of the Free is by definition insane. You can talk a coo-koo bird into anything – like going to war without any idea of how to end it.

I’d utter one of the old saws that goes “Maggie bar the door,” or “lock up the women and the kids,” but “Maggie” probably gave the key to an illegal “domestic worker” long ago, and the U.S. female, of course, would insist on the same kind of Dodo stupidity that gets her raped, killed, and discarded like a used wrapper so often, anyway.

So, all that remains is to be seen where “el dia sin Mejicanos” is concerned is how much we surrender, and how much we are humiliated.

It’s been inevitable, and deserved, for a long time, and I have mixed emotions. I started doing the work that “’Americans’ won’t do” at twelve, getting up at four A.M. to cleans stalls in a stockyards, going to school until four P.M. , then going to a local turkey farm to clean out brooder houses. I shoveled, and took, a lot of shit. In the summer, I worked in the fields with the “braceros” – migrant Mexican workers. They taught me to speak my fluent Spanish, prefer their food, music, and women. To say I’m “Hispanic” wouldn’t be far from factual.

More, I hate the government of the United States with flaming passion. Should I ever get a change to bring it down, I’d do it laughing, enjoying the proudest, greatest service I’ve ever done my country.

But there you have it. As much in sympathy as I am with people who work for a living, as much as I idolize Cesar Chavez, I hate criminals who insult and humiliate my country. That means the illegal aliens in the streets today have joined the U.S. Government on my shit list. First the sleaze of politicians on the Potomac, now the Mexicans. Wave a Mexican flag in my face today, in my country, I’ll feed it to you like I once threatened to feed the federal ID and badge a federal goon shoved in my face at the Mexican restaurant where I worked delivering food.

I digress here, to relate something that happened just an hour or so ago. I interrupted this writing in order to go to the local court house, in order to re-register my car, the annual shearing all we law-abiding people go through in order to drive a car without hassling by the cops. It isn’t, of course, lawful to force us to do that (Hackett vs. Tennessee), but the government will put you through hell before it concedes that laws requiring car registration are unconstitutional.

Anyway, I arrive at the proper court house office (second trip – it was packed last time and any attempt to use the mail-in method is pointless when you’re Hal von Luebbert) to find one guy at the counter, a guy speaking Spanish to the clerk (de rigueur, if you want a government job in Texas). When the guy leaves, I ask the clerk in my fluent Spanish if she was acquainted with the man. At her negative reply, I asked, “You don’t ask a stranger who speaks no English if he’s a citizen?”

Hoo, boy! –you should see the expressions around me. I’m pissed, and I make it apparent. “Then,” I ask – still in Spanish – “why the hell am I going through all this ‘obey the law by getting my car license’ crap? Why don’t I just say I’m an illegal alien, and forget obeying the law?”

I didn’t get anywhere, of course - behind the authority of the state, the smallest, puniest, stupidest, most poorly educated, and most afraid nothing of a human being becomes a god - but I had a little fun. At least the illegal alien who lied like a rug paid for a car license. You wonder why the hell he bothered with that. Stupid, I guess – like me. The malfeasant and imprisioning clerk knows that I knew she's a traitor to the legal system, too. By the way.

But the people who are marching in their neighbor’s streets today, or the people who refuse to do their duty and stop it don’t piss me off as much as I hold in contempt the “American” public who stands idly by permitting both to get away with this. We – you, actually; I can drop out of this menagerie and time I choose, just like I did before – are being raped and ridiculed by the Mexicans and Mexico, ripped off by corporate “America,” and made utter fools of by government because “we” – that’s you; I don’t play the federal rule by criminal conspiracy game any more – deserve it.

And the people marching in the streets today are telling you why – how I get away with it. I said it to a friend of mine one day ten years ago, a cop who’s also a friend. “I’m very dangerous, you know. What can you do to me? I don’t have a dime, and no property. There’s nothing you can take. You can’t even sue; a judgment and lien against nothing is nothing. Put me in jail, you have to feed me and give me medical care I couldn’t afford otherwise. I could drive without a license, drink all the booze in the place, kiss every girl, and knock every guy on his ass; and all you’d be able to do is give me a room, feed me, pay all my medical bills, and take care of all the medical problems I already have. You’d better stay on my friendly side tonight, buddy, ‘cause I feel like throwing somebody on his ass.”

There’s a song. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” If the Mexicans in the streets of the United States today manage to teach that to “Americans,” the government will fall in two weeks.

But it’s spooky. In a nation whose government keeps screaming that we are at war, we have aliens in our country waving foreign flags in our streets. Maybe we should declare war on Mexico. After all, not that many years ago, we put another entire ethnic group, the Nisei Japanese Americans, in prison on that very account. Can you imagine Japanese Americans – remember that they were born here – marching by the thousands in our streets, waving a rising sun flag? A declaration of war would tell us, probably, who’s loyal to the United States, and who isn’t. At least there might not be Mexican flags waving in our faces. I can't speak for the rest of you, but being in a war and part of an outfit where I don't know whose side my mates are on is too spooky for me. I want to know who can trusted.

There you have my solution to the “illegal immigrants problem.” Declare war on Mexico. Matter of fact, now that it no longer requires an act of Congress, and one of us is violating as many as seven hundred, fifty legal enactments by that same Congress (hint: and enactment by Congress is a law, and for everybody), I’ll do just that. We are now officially – de facto, too – at war with Mexico.

Oh, and by the way: How does the national anthem of Mexico go? I want to translate it into English, and have a little fun with the lyrics. Fair's fair.