It's About Them

"If they're prepared to work to become American citizens in the long line traditionally of immigrants who have helped make this country, we can have both a nation of laws and a welcoming nation of workers who do some very, very important jobs for our economy."

- Arlen Spector, United States Senator

* * * *

If I interpret the honorable Senator correctly, he is saying that so long as Mexicans don’t mind being as mistreated as were the Polish, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian immigrants during the time in American history that spanned from the Industrial Revolution through the Eisenhower era; then the United States would certainly allow them to cook and clean and shovel horse-shit while they beg for a chance to pledge allegiance to the flag of a country that claims to have the greatest human rights record on the planet. A nation of laws and a welcoming nation of workers, says Spector, is what the United States wants to be.

The more laws, the better, I assume. After all, this was why the Department of Homeland Security was formed, to take more laws passed by angst-ridden legislators and to enforce them in the most neo-fascist method possible. Rather than to simply find a way to enforce existing laws – laws that have not been adequately enforced at any point in history – making illegal immigrants felons would give the Homeland Security people something else to do.

Building a wall would be a waste of time and money. The Great Wall of China, the only man-made object on Earth that can be seen from space (so they say), merely slowed the Mongol raids for a while, eventually they got over, too. That is how I view walls, between regions and legions. Walls are usually a big waste of time and money.

Usually.

Unless you are a politician, in which case, walls could be your meal ticket to a quick and easy re-election.

* * * *

Monday was yesterday, it was the first day of May. In Tijuana, and all over Mexico, it was their version of Labor Day, which is, coincidentally enough, called Labor Day. The streets, that morning, were as vacant as a cantinera’s eyes during happy hour. It was overcast, like it always is in May, no sympathy from the sun or the rain. No sympathy for anything, and dead to the world.

Dead, like gray usually is. And like grey usually is!

I got lucky, caught a cab right away and the light traffic brought me to the border in no time. No one was there, save for the Mexican news crews, interviewing each other – no other interesting person was around. They looked at me as if I was a rain-storm in August. I passed quietly by, slid through the SENTRI line, and went out to buy my trolley pass.

No line, not one soul wanted any sort of a ticket, no one was going nowhere or anywhere.

Pass in hand, I walked the platform, American news crews in my peripheral vision. Suddenly, I was cut off by a camera and a man with a microphone, trapped, interviewed via a pedestrian hijacking on the platform at the San Ysidro Trolley station.

They had to have been desperate to have interviewed me. A white man. Clearly. Grey bearded, black backpack slung over one shoulder.

Desperate, they were.

Who else was there?

* * * *

Javier came into to Dandy Del Sur tonight, and he asked me for my autograph, mockingly.

"I heard that you saw it," I told him.

"How was it?"

"Let me tell you," he said, smacking his lips smugly, "You were one ugly motherfucker!"

"Hah!"

"Ah," he continued. "Look, I was half asleep, and then, there you were. I said, ‘Hey, I know that guy’, and then twenty seconds later, they found something else to talk about."

"Did they get to the part that I told them how scary it was that no one else was on the trolley platform?"

"Nah," Javier said. "They cut that shit out."

"FOX news," I replied.

"Unfair and unbalanced."

* * * *

According to Andy Warhol, those motherfuckers still owe me four minutes and forty seconds of pure fame.

And I ain’t signing no autographs because, as they so succinctly edited out, it isn’t about me.

It’s about them.

And I love them so much.

And they edited that part out, too.