The Voice of Treason

Whazzup wit’ Cynthia McKinney an’ Naomi Campbell? Girl, don’t be slappin’ ’round no lackies juz cuz you be all high ‘n’ mighty! Damn, Russell Crowe gets hisself all in a tizzy an’ opens a can o’ whoop ass on a lackey an’ heat comes down on him like one big mutha Super Solano X Hair Dryer.

Yo, Cynthia! Beee-atch! Don’t be actin’ all like it’s not yo’ fault the police ran into yo’ fist. An’ don’t be draggin’ Mister Day-O out to call Bush a terrorist when everybody knows George Bush ain’t the one slappin’ lackies upside the head. An’ Naomi? Girl, take a chill pill! Someday you gonna be handin’ out slaps to some lackey who’s gonna turn ’round an’ kick yo’ skinny model ass an’ break both yo’ skinny stick legs an’ you won’t be walkin’ down no catwalk - you be crawlin’ after that cell phone you flung at lackey’s head to call 911!

Role models, indeed.

Did I hear Ted Kennedy call immigration a civil rights issue? Wow. The audacity of Democrats never fails to amaze me. That they can pander to both black and Hispanic voters, insult both groups, and still get their votes is fascinating to me. Sorry, if I was black and someone tried to tell me that “unauthorized migrants” were experiencing the same thing my ancestors did, I’d be forced to remind him that my people didn’t sneak across the border to pick his ancestors’ cotton.

But Republicans are pandering, too, and it’s making me wonder about my own civil rights. Politicians on both sides are sucking up and making promises to blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, soccer moms, seniors - how ’bout someone taking some time to pander to my special interest group?

I am merely a taxpayer, but I say taxpayers have rights, too. Right now we have the right to be thoroughly pissed off and we will be voting.

I’d mentioned a couple days ago that, when I was working in Silicon Valley, my Central American coworkers didn’t display flags or bumper stickers on their vehicles. I actually saw a car today that had a Costa Rica sticker on it. And that made me think of something.

When I worked at that company, I was dating someone who was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Costa Rica. His father was a successful tailor in New York, but he didn’t have much contact with him. His mother had pretty much raised him by herself: He spent his childhood in Central America with her and some aunts, then he and his mother returned to California and settled in the Bay Area.

Our relationship was serious enough that the word “marriage” came up in conversation. It was great when we were dating because he’d take me to little taquerias that non-Hispanics might not frequent and he’d order in Spanish. We’d get some amazing taste treats at these places.

People would always look at him when he’d say he was Costa Rican. “You don’t look Costa Rican.” He was six foot four, had green eyes, and very fair skin. In fact, I’d joke that I would have killed for his peaches-and-cream complexion - and I’m pretty fair myself. People would also question his heritage because they couldn’t detect any dialect. I’d tell them, “Wait ’til he’s really tired. You’ll hear it.”

So, looking at him, a person would see a tall white dude who was smart, funny, played trumpet in a jazz band, had a cat named after his favorite musician, and loved Vietnamese food. He drove a white 1971 Corvette. In high school, when he won college scholarships that were intended for specifically Mexican-American students, he accepted them.

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“They offered them, so I took them.”

“If I’d been offered a scholarship designed for children of Sicilian mothers, I wouldn’t have accepted it.”

“Why not?”

“My mother’s family’s from the Abruzzi region of Italy. They’re not from Sicily.”

“That’s silly.”

“No, I don’t think it is.”

“If someone offers a scholarship, you take it.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I would. I did.”

And that was a problem that came up often in our relationship. My Italian mother had taught us that if it’s the hottest freaking day on record and someone offers you an ice cold Coca-Cola with a lot of ice and you want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted in your life, you smile and say, “No thank you.” As a result, we hated socializing, but people always extended invitations to us and loved having us in their homes because we were so polite - and we didn’t eat or drink anything. My mother prided herself on having children that would never even think of embarrassing her in front of other people. It wasn’t that we were perfect — we just didn’t want to die before we reached adulthood.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, never said those three little words. No, not “I love you” - he never said “no thank you.” People would offer to pick up the check and instead of grabbing it first, he’d let them treat. His explanation: “If they didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t have offered.”

Our mothers were very different. His lived in a small subsidized apartment with her parrot. She fed that bird everything - including chicken. She’d invited me to dinner one night and she was very sweet, very warm, but she was uncomfortable and seemed a little shy. A woman in her sixties, who’d spent most of her life in America, and she spoke virtually no English. She watched a lot of soap operas on the Spanish station and she didn’t go out much. She worked at low wage jobs with other Spanish-speaking women and kept in touch with relatives in Costa Rica. She’d visit them often.

Her son would have liked it if she had mastered English and sought higher paying jobs. She was afraid to move out of her comfort zone, so she stayed at the same job for years, making the same salary. He had told her that I liked the Cubs, so she made me a gift. A cloth doll in a Cubs cap and uniform. The workmanship, the delicate stitches, the attention to detail - I was speechless. Her son explained that she liked to sew, so she’d sit and stitch and make dolls while she watched TV at night. He said: “I told her she should sell them, but she won’t. She doesn’t think anyone would want to buy them.”

She was a wonderful woman and a talented one, too, but she was living a half life. Her only joy, her only connection to the outside world was her son. She had cloistered herself in an apartment with her parrot and the only other people in her life were the women she worked with.

I used to talk with people who moved here from other countries and ask them how they managed to learn a language as difficult as English. “I watched a lot of TV!” It made me wonder how my grandparents learned it. Television didn’t exist. And my friend’s mother only watched the Spanish stations and related to people around her who spoke Spanish. She had shut herself off from a life that was possible - a life her son was fully enjoying, but she couldn’t.

Apparently protest organizers have learned very little from the recent riots in France, perpetrated by “Muslim youths,” or the ones by Muslims who objected to a few Danish cartoons. When all the auto and flag burning finally subsided, most onlookers were left with an uneasy feeling about the protesters. It didn’t help their cause.

Now we’re seeing the “immigration marches” in major American cities and people are feeling that same uneasiness. First they’re led to believe that these gatherings are somehow spontaneous. Getting hundreds of thousands of people in the same place at the same time is never spontaneous. Especially when they all happen to wearing the same outfits and carrying the same professionally printed signs.

This is where the organizers went terribly wrong. First, the average American has been told that not all the immigrants in question are originating south of the U.S. border. If that’s the case, why are the protest signs in Spanish and why are the protesters carrying Mexican flags? The average American has also been led to believe that these “undocumented workers” are simply here to pursue the American dream. They just want to work hard and be productive…Americans. Fine. So why aren’t these hard workers working? Why are they marching down the street disrupting those who are trying to work? And if the students are claiming that what they want is an education, why are they storming City Hall instead of sitting in a classroom?

It’s a visual thing. Consequently, the average American sees a bunch of angry people holding a Mexican flag on the front page of his local newspaper and he starts asking a lot of these questions. Another one he might ask is:

What is the significance of the white T-shirts?

The last time he heard about gangs of Hispanics wearing white T-shirts was when he was watching the local news and there was a story about white T-shirts and Hispanics and that means “gang.” Gang means crime. So these people in white T-shirts, marching down the street carrying Mexican flags are…criminals. Democrats like to refer to this method of thinking as “connecting the dots.”

If this average American gets past the front page of that newspaper, he might see that it includes department store ads in Spanish. If he flips to the classifieds, he’ll see job ads written entirely in Spanish. Several ads written in English might look more appealing, but if he isn’t bilingual he need not apply.

If he has a job and he’s headed off to work, he might notice that there are a lot of billboards in town that are also in Spanish. If he listens to the radio, he may hear all-Spanish stations and even on non-Spanish stations he may hear PSAs that use actors who speak with heavy Hispanic dialects. He might question the target audience. If it’s payday, he might question where half his paycheck has gone.

Is he a racist? Not at all. He’s simply connecting the dots. If this American lives in the West, he’s been familiar with these dots for a very long time. But now, after all these marches have been on the news almost non-stop for a week, Americans in other parts of the country are now beginning to see what Westerners know as commonplace. Now they, too, are connecting the dots. And what happens when you connect all the dots? A picture emerges.

This one’s not pretty. And it might just be too late for any future protests to erase that initial image.

David Gregory: “You know, you also talk about some public figures in this book, including former President Bill Clinton. You write of him, ‘even after open heart surgery, he has more life force than most men of any age.’ And you go on to say, ‘I wonder if I’m trashy enough for Bill Clinton, but I can dream, can’t I?’ You’re talking about having an affair with the former president?”

Erica Jong: “Right. Well, it’s a fantasy, and my job is to release fantasy, not necessarily to do it, but I did have a dream about Bill Clinton in which he and I were having this affair, and suddenly we’re in an apartment up near Columbia where I went to school, and our spouses both walk into the room. Now, I told this to my shrink, and I said, ‘I guess I have a fantasy about Bill Clinton. I guess I really think he’s sexy,’ and she said, ‘Get in line.’”

Eeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwww!!! Get in line? For what? The latrine? I’d heard about the Gregory/Jong interview last week and I tried to dismiss it, but next thing you know Sharon Stone’s on record with a quote about Hillary.

“I think Hillary Clinton is fantastic. But I think it’s too soon for her to run. This may sound odd, but a woman should be past her sexuality when she runs. Hillary still has sexual power and I don’t think people will accept that. It’s too threatening.”

I tried to dismiss this one, too, because I know Sharon’s going to be saying a lot of peculiar things while she’s out and about, promoting her new sequel. But it just wouldn’t stop. Now there’s a book out there that regurgitates the old story about Barbra Streisand spending time in the White House when Hillary wasn’t there.

Will there ever be a period in world history when the name Clinton isn’t associated with sex? And will there ever be a time when females actually vote with their brains?

Well, I guess I can fantasize, too.

A good way for the immigration movement to lose support is if immigrants start pissing off other immigrants. It’s real easy to do because just about everyone is an immigrant - or at least is the relative of immigrants. My relatives were poked and prodded at Ellis Island when they came here…legally…almost a century ago. I myself did not get off the boat, stand in lines to be interrogated and examined, and wonder if I would be allowed to stay or even maintain my family name. I didn’t have to struggle to learn a new language and culture, to fit in, to find work to raise a family, to build a new life. I wasn’t called a dago. But those before me…you pick on my immigrant family, you’re picking on me.

Immigrants who came here at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries know the hardships. Ask the Irish, Germans, Italians, and Poles. Ask the Jews who fled Russia. Immigrants came here before then and settled in places where no one else wanted to live. Like the Swedes and Norwegians in North Dakota. Immigrants came after. And they keep coming. And as long as they do it legally, very few Americans have an issue.

But, like I said, it doesn’t take much to tip that scale. A talk radio discussion erupted again the other day when a Hispanic caller chimed in with:

“We built this country!”

Excuuuuuuse me? Not to diminish the contributions of our compadres who have come here from south of the border, but this caller was clearly overreaching. He stated that the people who had come from Mexico had made the greatest contributions, had worked the hardest, had made the biggest sacrifices, had done the heaviest labor. I suspect listeners were bristling. Our country is relatively young, but it has a long history of immigration. Ask the Chinese who helped make it possible for America to move West when they built railroads. Ask the Italians about the bridges and skyscrapers that make our cities the engineering marvels of the world. Like in baseball, every group of immigrants made their mark. To insist that your group alone has been responsible for “building the country” is a little presumptuous.

Who came here to help pull metals and minerals from the land? Who helped to reclaim swamplands and build irrigation systems? Who plowed fields, planted, and harvested crops? Who worked to develop the fishing industry? Who operated manufacturing industries? It was the Chinese. A few people remember the railroads, but mostly they think of laundry and opium dens. Every group has experienced their own period of slavery and every group has been vilified.

I lived in California for almost a quarter of a century and watched the rise of several different ethnic groups. The Asians are a powerful force in the state. I watched as they moved into Hispanic areas, then dominated them. When it started I was living in a small rural town nestled against the rolling foothills of the South Bay - a town that was, in essence, the laughing stock of the entire Bay Area. Its residents were mainly lower income Hispanics and the town had orchards, fields, and a K-Mart. It was at a time I was working for a Bay Area retail chain that specialized in office furniture and supplies, greeting cards, gifts, and wedding and business stationery. Most of our customers were Hispanic and we had several Spanish speaking employees in the store. When I took over managing the gift department at this location I continued to receive shipments from our warehouse of low end crap. Other stores in the chain were getting better product. The perception was that most of the customers didn’t have a lot of money to spend and therefore had no taste.

I spoke to the buyer and the owners of the company and asked them to spend a little more time down in our neck of the woods. The demographics were changing and they were changing fast. In a few years that city boasted the highest income per capita, and once I convinced the powers-that-be that there was cash to be made, I started getting better quality products ordered especially for my department which, of course, resulted in the highest sales in the chain.

One day I was in line at the bank and noticed I was the only non-Asian in the place. The city had evolved. Gone were the fields and orchards - even K-Mart had disappeared. I’d walk the dogs around the neighborhood and saw subtle signs. Some traditions, quietly observed, like fresh fruit and flowers carefully placed in the front garden as an offering to the gods. Not so subtle, of course, were entire shopping centers filled with Asian stores and no subtitles in English.

After I moved here I was asked to chaperone two trainees back to the Bay Area for some training. Two guys - one Native American, one Hispanic - were in the area for the first time so I made sure I gave them the grand tour. We drove past the shopping malls. When they asked how people who didn’t speak “Oriental” knew what the stores sold, I told them that it was easy to figure out. You go inside and look around. And we did. I brought them to a local grocery store and their jaws dropped. It was like they’d flown over the Pacific Ocean and were in a new land. I was able to explain most of what we saw, but even I was stumped by a few items. They shopped for exotic things to bring home to show friends and family.

In the Bay Area, most of my coworkers were Asian, but to find out specifically where their families were from, one sometimes had to ask. Names and physical characteristics were not always accurate indicators of nationality. I can hardly think of a country that wasn’t represented. Yet go into the parking lot and there wasn’t one of those country’s flags displayed on a car and no bumper stickers that would reveal an owner’s ethnic background.

If any cars displayed any trace of ethnicity, they belonged to a specific group. My Central American coworkers did not display flags of El Salvador, Nicaragua, or Costa Rica on their cars. Employees whose heritage was Mexican - even if they were born here - had items on their cars and clothes that signified allegiance to another country.

The question Americans are justified in asking, then, when they see the immigration marches is: Who are these people and where is their allegiance?

Our town has been on lockdown this week because of a miscreant - uh, alleged miscreant - who - uh, allegedly - shot a local deputy to death. This piece of human debris - sorry, alleged piece of human debris - has been the subject of talk radio discussion ever since the deputy pulled him over on a traffic violation. Friends of the alleged debris make calls to the authorities, then five helicopters take to the skies and a SWAT team closes down part of the city. I think it’s safe to assume that residents will be pleased when the alleged piece of human debris is finally captured.

What was interesting, however, is that during a radio discussion of the alleged piece of subhuman sludge, a caller piped in to complain about the criminal justice system. It isn’t this alleged subhuman’s fault - it’s the fault of the system. Sounds like something only the mother of such sludge would say. And, as it turns out, it was indeed the mother of the alleged subhuman sludge.

Our afternoon talk host checked her out to verify that she was the real deal and let her speak. She insisted he’s a good kid, innocent of all charges. Our radio host quietly pointed out that there’s a rap sheet thicker than War and Peace on him, and he’s been committing crimes since age 14. The list even includes a previous murder. Mom was asked why he was breaking the law at 14. She rattled off excuses: she worked two jobs, it was hard, he was unsupervised. “Where’s the father?,” asked our host. “He left. He’s a deadbeat dad!,” responded Mom. “You picked him!,” said our radio host. She denied that he was ever involved with gang activity - he’s just a good kid with a baby on the way.

When a relative of the slain officer got on the line to engage in a conversation, Mom was alternately rude, cold, heartless, and defiant. Nothing is her fault. Nothing is her son’s fault. He was treated badly by the justice system. That’s the problem.

When challenged, she lost her temper and hung up. Then the calls from single mothers with kids who haven’t murdered anybody started pouring in. One woman, incensed, called to say that she was forced to raise her boys by herself after a 15 year-old punk stabbed her husband in the heart seven times when he went into the alley behind the house to see what their dog was barking about. The punk went to a juvenile detention center and has been free since his 18th birthday. I’m sure his mother insists he never should have gone to a detention center.

As offensive as this exchange with the mother of the alleged piece of human debris was, what was even more disturbing was the number of people who questioned the funeral of the deceased law enforcement officer. Whenever an officer is killed, there is a service and a funeral procession. Some callers were annoyed because these processions tie up traffic. Why all the fuss? What makes this deputy more important than anyone else?

You have to ask?

But if you’re a woman in Afghanistan engaged in a custody battle, you can tell the authorities that your husband is a Christian. Not only will you get to keep the kids, but you’ll never have to worry about visitation rights. Your husband will be sentenced to death and be permanently out of the family picture.

Forty-one year-old Abdul Rahman confessed that he converted from Islam to Christianity sixteen years ago when he was working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group in the Pakistani city of Peshawar. You’d think they’d cut him some slack for being honest about his conversion but, under Islamic law, becoming a Christian is punishable by death. So much for freedom of religion.

There is hope. If Abdul can be found insane, his life will be spared. Better to be crazy than to be a Christian. Perhaps Hillary Clinton, another recent convert, can pull some strings and save Abdul’s life. An act of a Good Samaritan - something the Senator professes to know a lot about.

“It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scriptures, because this bill would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself.”

– Hillary Clinton on a House bill that would make illegal immigration…well, illegal

Why do I get the heebie-jeebies when Hillary Clinton starts talking about Jesus? I think she’d be better off if she steered clear of Biblical references and just stuck to attorneyspeak:

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘illegal’ is. If ‘illegal’ means ‘felony’ but never has been, that is one thing. If it means ‘misdemeanor’ that’s another thing. Now, if someone had asked me on say…Tuesday, are you thinking about any alternative kind of legislation in regards to an undocumented immigrant, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, and used the term ‘undocumented worker,’ I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”

Doesn’t she ever pay attention when her husband’s lips are moving?

Not to be outdone by our lackluster school district, in which a school principal was arrested for cocaine possession when he was pulled over for drunk driving, a first grade teacher from another district not far from here was arrested for possession of methamphetamines. Almost $3000 worth. I imagine she could have had even more in her purse but, as you know, we just don’t pay teachers that well. They’re struggling. The price of narcotics keeps going up; how do we expect our educators to afford them on these measly salaries?

Chances are no one would have known that this teacher had drugs and drug paraphernalia in her classroom. It’s just that a sheriff’s deputy thought it odd when he saw two cars parked on the elementary school campus in the middle of the night. They were blocking the school entrance and that was a potential problem. He ran the license number of one vehicle that he recognized from previous incidents and decided to take action.

To make a long, sordid story a little shorter, a female teacher was in her classroom with a guy half her age who had a criminal record and a syringe on his person. She explained that she was there to grade papers. Later her friend admitted they were there to get high and have sex. Then the deputies found the meth.

Local reaction was interesting. No one seemed too surprised, and one mother who was interviewed said that her son didn’t like the teacher and had begged to be moved to another class. Talk radio callers are getting used to these stories; one said he knew her well and the two of them used to do drugs together all the time.

Our tax dollars. Hard at work as always.