W as it Donald Trump or the wolverine that lives on top of his head who
made the dumb crack over the weekend about Senator John McCain not being a
war hero? After all, that ambiguous patch of ginger-colored fur has taken on
a life of its own. If I were Trump, I’d simply disown the remark and say that
the hair-thing blurted it out, ventriloquist-style, because he (Donald)
forgot to feed it that morning.
I just want to go on record to say that if John McCain is not a war hero —
what with getting shot down in the Vietnam jungle and spending 5.5 years
being thrashed daily by his captors — than Donald Trump is not an asshole, or
a pendejo, as the landscaping crew might put it (perhaps even a maricón).
One thing the Trump campaign is proving — to the flustered consternation
of the moiling herd of other candidates — is what intellectual chickenshits
all mainstream American politicians are. I know it is hard to see through the
prevailing rainbow fog of diversity propaganda, but the USA really does have
an immigration problem. My peeps in the old Democrat fold are the worst, of
course, because they are not even capable of stating the plain truth that an
illegal immigrant is something more than just “undocumented,” as if some
bureaucratic error were made in God’s intake stack. And the issue of legal
immigration policy is simply unmentionable, of course, because being “a
nation of immigrants” means never having to say enough is enough.
It’s obvious that much of the developed world is now sore beset by past
immigration policy choices and by the current inrush of desperate souls
fleeing the evermore general breakdown of societies across the Middle East
and North Africa (MENA). European pols are at least willing to have the
debate, unappetizing as it might be. This dreaded political dance is now
occurring against the background of a probable financial breakdown across
Europe. When the utopian project of the European Union fails, as seems likely
now due to the sovereign debt fiasco, I suspect that we will see a renewed
effort to defend national cultures — French, German, and all the rest — in a
manner that has a great potential for turning ugly. Financial failure means
the death of the current banking system and the disappearance of massive
notional wealth, and if that isn’t a recipe for extreme nationalism (plus
xenophobia) than we are truly blind to the lessons of history.
And then, of course, there is the problem of Jihad. It’s for real, and
it’s on the move all over MENA, and quite a few of its faithful agents are in
place across Europe to make a whole heap of trouble in the event that the
Euroland project falls on its face. This is perhaps beyond the question of
merely preserving national identities. I think we will live to see an era of
mass expulsions, fair or not.
It is not so easy to explain why America has its head so far up its ass on
the issues of immigration, but maybe it is enough to say that sixty-plus
years of TV advertising have set us up to be suckers for every sort of paid
shill selling a sentimental sob story for one interest or another. This seems
to be true most particularly of the educated class that labors in the
trenches of advertising and public relations (i.e. propaganda). They have
come go believe their own bullshit absolutely. Apparently, these true-blue believers
are more hostage to the narratives they are paid to spin than the ragtag
followers of Trump. (We’re a nation of immigrants….)
Were I a pol, I would propose a “time-out” from immigration of all kinds.
The USA did it before, in the 1920s, after a half-century of prodigious
immigration when new states needed to be settled, and new industries needed
to be manned, and new cities needed to be built. We are not in the same
circumstances anymore. The empty places have been filled (and then some). The
factories were banished to China and elsewhere. Some of America’s farming
regions aren’t working out so well a hundred years later — Nebraska has been
depopulating and God knows what the fate will be of California’s Central
Valley as the epochal drought creeps forward. The Chinese may be building
super-duper mega-cities, but every fact of coming resource scarcity suggests
to me that they are making the wrong bet on that disposition of things. It
ain’ happening here, anyway. Our cities (with a few exceptions) face
contraction.
Unfortunately, Trump’s antics will make it only more difficult to hold a
sane debate about taking that time-out from immigration. So, one alternative
is an insane debate about it, one based on sheer grievance and gall rather
than the responsibilities of governance. I’ve proposed for many years that we
are all set up to welcome a red-white-and-blue, corn-pone Nazi political
savior type. I don’t think Donald Trump is it. But he will be a stalking
horse for a far more skillful demagogue when the time comes. There’s a fair
chance that the wheels will come off the banking and monetary system well
before the 2016 election. Who knows who or what will come out of the woodwork
before then.
Meanwhile, notice today’s headline from the fabled “newspaper of record” (The
New York Times):
Women
Who Dye Their (Armpit) Hair
Yes, these are the mighty issues that concern us most.
