I’m in the burbs, though not by choice, sitting in a backyard surrounded by grass and bugs and sunshine. My son wings by in his electronic car with the neighbor’s kid riding shotgun; they’re screaming happily and trying to run over the dog. A bee roughly the size of a small airplane buzzes close – reminding me of my plans to pave over every square inch of the yard and build a subway station under it. God, to show His mercy, has kept me within radio range of the city so at least I can listen to the Mets.
For a change, the Mets are winning. I’ve got my New York Times, leisurely smoke, and try to ignore the bees as best I can so as to read about the people of Arizona. Unlike the Mets, they are not winning and what they’ve done, if left to stand, can drag us all down with them.
Arizona, home state of the vile Sheriff Joe Arpaio has passed a law so draconian in its treatment of illegal aliens, so open ended and unthinking in its vast extension of police power, that it prompted the rare spectacle of a sitting American president deigning to notice one of the Empire’s outlying provinces. The Arizona law will surely, the president insists, "undermine...trust between police and our communities". That’s an understatement.
It is a law of such lawlessness as would make Lavrentiy Beria proud, and it’s telling how fast the "tough on crime" yahoos (those starched shirt Jesus Freaks who sing about doing unto the least of their brothers on Sundays) have all latched onto the two-minute hate. Ironically the law (which was signed into effect Friday) will grant men like Sheriff Joe Arpaio wide, arbitrary power of a kind often found practiced by the police of the wretched, lawless banana republics the people targeted fled from.
With this law, every legal alien found without his immigration papers on his person will be arrested by the Arizona police, and having papers on you is no guarantee of safety, either, as any person a police officer merely suspects to be in the country illegally may be held against their will while databases are checked and double-checked. Feel free to make comparisons to Nazi Germany - Los Angeles city Cardinal Roger Mahony has already condemned the law as "Nazism", so God’s on your side.
Granted, when laws such as this are passed in America they give an outward appearance vastly different from that seen in Hitler’s Germany, as here the demand to see one’s papers will not sound of the guttural Ihre Papiere, Bitte but by the more musical Sus Documentos, Por Favor; at least at first.
The dog yelps and scampers away, my son and his friend had found their target. His friend’s mother comes into the backyard with my wife, and taking a moment she slaps a helmet on her little precious and straps him in tight with the seatbelt. I make a mental note to never let my son play with Little Lord Fauntleroy again, and light another cigar to make sure Safety Mom keeps her distance. She avoids the cloud of smoke as if it were radioactive. Mission accomplished; I return to my Times.
In her sordid political calculation behind signing this odious law, Arizona Governor Brewer seems far more concerned about upcoming elections than principles. Well aware of the potential for abuse in granting policemen such arbitrary power, she shrugs it off with a blasé "we have to trust our law enforcement". So much for Thomas Jefferson’s radical cry "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution".
She blandly insists she will keep a sharp eye out that "the police have proper training to carry out the law" as, of course, racial profiling will be verboten, so I relish the thought of many a Arizona Good Ol’ Boy, his gut held up by a Confederate Flag belt buckle and his pickup’s bumper sporting a USMC sticker, submitting sheepishly to a police officer’s demand to see his papers, all done just to keep up appearances.
The Governor, in a further bid to look "tough" on the issue, has called on the federal government to "post National Guard troops at the border", failing to think that a border strongly defended enough to keep people out is strong enough to keep people in. Ms. Brewer is a perfect example of the modern American mind, with its frantic, overriding concern for safety at all costs that subsumes any thought for the long term, for the eventual effects of our actions today. It is the mindset of a barbaric, savage race, unconcerned about anything past the immediate. The article insists that "a majority of the thousands of callers" to Mrs. Brewer’s office urged her to veto the bill, but with Republicans facing "challenges from the right" in the upcoming elections any thought of standing on principle went right out the window of the governor’s mansion.
The reaction of the Democratic segment of our ruling class is no better, merely the tired combination of teary-eyed emotion, lack of principle, and ignorant stupidity that donkey revels in. Too busy sobbing and pounding their breast for the cameras to think about what they’re proposing, they present little more than the spineless, feeble rear guard action of sending Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva to call for a convention boycott of his own state, as if convention center owners and their employees should be punished for Governor Brewer’s sins.
I stop reading for a moment to help with the blood pressure, but it’s no use as I spy Safety Mom returning to the backyard. I see a momentary flicker of worry cross her face as our boys race through my cloud of cigar smoke in pursuit of the dog. Her air is thick with fear of second hand smoke, thick with a fear of everything, in fact. She is the type of parent so desperate to protect her brood from every conceivable danger, so intent to wrap her offspring in a protective cocoon that the little precious is sure to grow up utterly incapable of any initiative, always looking for a protector from on high to save him.
She gathers him up, carefully, and with a final disapproving glare through the cigar smoke disappears out of the yard and, I pray, out of our lives. By the time she’s through with him her son will be the perfect modern America citizen: an overgrown, thoroughly helpless man-child, trembling at every bump in the night.
The immigration debate that sparked this madness is "increasingly talked about on Capital Hill", and its one of the very few things debated in that swamp that actually falls under Congress’s Constitutional powers. How quaint. Arizona, it is to be reminded, is only looking to "demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents" so this law may easily spread to other states or, should the Obama Administration show a little forethought, be made hollow by removing the federal requirement for legal aliens to have their papers on them at all times. This is not likely to happen as (sing along now) November elections loom, and a sure-fire way to lose votes is to instruct the American mob that everyone should be granted equal protection under the law. Perish the thought.
Freedom is an all or nothing concept – either everyone has the protection of law or no one does. When all was said and done, the Nazis slaughtered far more non-Jewish German citizens than Jewish, and to think that a law like this will not spread to the rest of us, Hispanic or no, is foolish and irrational.
If history and human nature is any guide be assured the day will come when Sus Documentos, Por Favor will be Americanized into Your Papers Please and the great American experiment with democracy will make yet another advance towards blessed equality, we all will live in fear of the police, and the braying mob will move that much closer to the promised land of perfect safety – but the gates to paradise will be opened only for those with their papers in order.