The arguments of ignorance tend to recur. It will always be so: ignorance is by nature a limited beast. Originality and creativity are not required, to persist in seeing through a glass darkly.
If you live long enough, you will witness the marshaling of the same arguments at different instances of space and time. If the arguments prove ignorant on the first go-round, you can generally expect that they will likewise wobble wrongly in succeeding revolutions. This is part of what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when he wrote:
Whoever lives two or three generations, feels like the spectator who, during the fair, sees the performances of all kinds of jugglers and, if he remains seated in the booth, sees them repeated two or three times. As the tricks were meant only for one performance, they no longer make any impression after the illusion and novelty have vanished.
The cohorts of George II at present instruct that we must pursue all over the planet a War On Terra because "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here." If you slip in a disc of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, you can watch one of the first known invocations of this same mantra, as a band of ur-men brandishing bones crushes the skulls of a rival band at a strategically important watering hole. Fast-forward the planet some several million years, and you may observe hundreds of thousands of Americans and Australians, awash in the same shibboleth, floating over to Europe for WWI, there to ensure Germans do not occupy Topeka, and Turks do not site a mosque on Ayers Rock.
In my youth, the United States transformed Southeast Asia into a charnel house in order to "there" put a stop to Communism, so that "here" we would not be forced to burn all our money and construct refrigerators out of cement. The US lost that war, but there don't now seem to be any more Communists here where I live than there were before the defeat. Just the same one guy, an economics professor at the university, ready soon to retire. The US will lose the War on Terra, too, but I don't expect that as a result my daughter will be immured in a burka, or that I will be impressed into service as a dervish.
Gore Vidal, having despaired of any other method of teaching history to American young people, proposed in Screening History that it be imparted via film. There is merit in this idea. Peter Weir's Gallipoli, it seems to me, could ensure that few young men or women would in future be bamboozled into hamburger by barnums hardblowing the ignorance of "if we don't fight them over there, we'll have to fight them over here."
In that film, two heedless young Australians, off to enlist for the British crown and be sent to their deaths in Turkey, encounter in the parched Australian outback a grizzled old desert rat who has heard nothing of what would come to be known as WWI. Asked how it started, he is told by the young men: "don't know exactly, but it was the Germans' fault." The old man is surprised: the only German he ever met, he says, was a decent fellow. The point of Australian entry into a European war is lost on the old man: "I can't see what it's got to do with us." To which a doomed youth replies: "if we don't stop them there, they could end up here." The old man takes a long look at the arid desolation around him, and concludes: "and they're welcome to it."
Paperless brown people emigrating to the United States from Mexico and points south are a great evil, it is being argued--right now--on my radio. They are responsible for any number of moral and medical plagues, and our nation is on the verge of hernia, groaning under the unsupportable burden of providing for them.
Maybe I'd be tempted more to believe this balderdash if I couldn't reach over and open this volume of Orwell, and find that the ignoramuses of England were arguing the very same things in 1947--about Poles.
Recently I was listening to a conversation between two small businessmen in a Scottish hotel . . . We were sitting round a rather inadequate peat fire, and the conversation started off with the coal shortage. There was no coal, it appeared, because the British miners refused to dig it out, but on the other hand it was important not to let Poles work in the pits because this would lead to unemployment . . . They began talking about the housing problem, and almost immediately they were back to the congenial subject of the Poles . . . [I]t seemed that it was impossible to buy houses or flats nowadays. The Poles were buying them up, and "where they get the money from is a mystery." The Poles were also invading the medical profession. They even had their own medical school in Edinburgh or Glasgow (I forget which) and were turning out doctors in great numbers while "our lads" found it impossible to buy practices . . . .
The younger man remarked that he belonged to several business and civic associations, and that on all of them he made a point of putting forward resolutions that the Poles should be sent back to their own country. The older one added that the Poles were "very degraded in their morals." They were responsible for much of the immorality that was prevalent nowadays. "Their ways are not our ways," he concluded piously. It was not mentioned that the Poles pushed their way to the head of queues, wore bright-coloured clothes and displayed cowardice during air raids, but if I had put forward a suggestion to this effect I am sure it would have been accepted.
Have you ever heard of the great post-WWII Polish debasement of Great Britain? Neither have I. That's because it never occurred. Yet there they were, "solid citizens," "serious people," arguing their ignorance, as convinced that the Britain of 1947 was imperiled by Poles as the ignorant of today are convinced that the United States of 2008 is imperiled by Mexicans and their southern brethren.
I live in California, in the foothills overlooking the "great foodbasket" of the Central Valley, from where I can see a state and an industry that would grind to a halt, instantly, if it were not for paperless brown people, here on hejira from points south. The California Farm Bureau Federation, the powerful lobbying group representing industrialized agriculture in this state, explicitly admitted more than 15 years ago that it is dependent on paperless workers: without them, it would collapse. These people are not going anywhere. The only question is whether they are going to be treated decently.
The current system is the one most conducive to the interests of capital, which is why it persists. Paperless people may not organize or complain, either on the job or in the community. Anyone who causes any sort of trouble, in the workplace or in the outer world, can simply be picked up and dumped back across the border. The systemic failures of the industrialized health and education systems may be conveniently blamed on the few paperless people who use them. Just as crime statistics may be manipulated, by including those detained on immigration violations, to deliver the false impression that the foreign-born are largely responsible for the national villainy.
Unfortunately for the lords of capital, who would prefer to continue the current system (chaos controlled by them), overzealous politicians who slipped the leash have in recent years so worried "race hatred and mass delusions"--Orwell again--that a fallback alternative may now be necessary. This would be the disinterment of the disgraceful "guest worker" program, in which paperless brown people would be pressganged into service in the United States for some set number of years, and then booted back across the border. This is what will occur if Bomb McCain becomes president. If Barack Obama is instead allowed into the Oval Office, it is the present system that will persist--subject to race-based attacks from the right, and human-decency-based complaints from the left.
In the meantime, per Vidal's Screening History, people could do worse, in trying to understand, on a human level, the messy truths of paperless brown people in the US, than view The Three Burials of Meliquiades Estrada.
Once you have committed to "enforcement" of those artificial constructs known as "borders," you will require bureaucrats, who will inevitably bring forth injustice.
In the same Orwell tome referenced above, he reviews Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye, which contains a piece recounting Miller's unsuccessful attempt to enter England in 1935.
The immigration officials nosed out the fact that he had very little money in his pockets, and he was promptly clapped into a police-court cell and sent back across the Channel on the following day, the whole thing being done with the maximum of stupidity and offensiveness. The only person who showed a spark of decency in the whole affair was the simple police constable who had to guard Miller through the night. The book in which this sketch occurs was published in 1938, and I remember reading it just after Munich and reflecting that, though the Munich settlement was not a thing to be proud of, this little episode made me feel more ashamed of my country. Not that the British officials at Newhaven behaved much worse than that kind of person behaves everywhere. But somehow the whole thing was saddening. A couple of bureaucrats had got an artist at their mercy, and the mixture of spite, cunning and stupidity with which they handled him made one wonder what is the use of all this talk about democracy, freedom of the press, and whatnot.
This sort of thing reruns in our day. Also with artists (who, it must be stressed, are these days generally treated by border officials with greater courtesy and respect than those whose skill-set does not afford them the means to strike back). It will be recalled that Gabriel Garcia-Marquez has, several times, been denied entry to the United States. Even though, when the histories are written, Marquez will be credited with more advancing human liberty and decency, than all the presidents, and all the presidents' men, who worked so spitefully, so ignorantly, to keep him out.
(crossposted Never In Our Names)