20 October 2007

Holy Places, Absent Friends, and Fallen Heroes

Laredo is a holy place on a par with Lourdes, Mecca, and Jerusalem. It is the Vatican of trucking, and truckers the priests. No other place exists and thrives on transportation over roads by men and women in large vehicles like Laredo.

That would make it special enough. But Laredo's trucker chapels hide on every dusty street of this border town, each one holding treasured memories for those who have had their fellowship there.

Tonight, I went to one of the great trucker's chapels and offered a prayer in honor of the friends who were unable to accompany me. To the civilian, the layperson, it's a Whataburger with a somewhat oversize parking lot. To a trucker who knows Laredo, referring to the Mines Road Whataburger guarantees a memory of an adventure which began or ended there.

I remembered my friend Oscar, from Corpus Crispy-the misspelling is intentional, as nearly everyone in Texas says it that way. I haven't seen Oscar in six years, after he told me he had a front row seat to an event that still resonates, while on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Part of me wished he were lying. I hoped he had been telling me a great trucker story. But some part of me knows that he had been very credible, and having been a witness to mass murder probably would have driven me mad with survivor's guilt. We once spent a long night traveling from Laredo to Little Rock.

He was the last person I saw from the first era when I traveled regularly to Laredo. I saw him a couple of months after I ran across my friend Earthquake in a Georgia truck stop. Four years passed before I returned to Laredo, and another year passed before I found Earthquake again.

Earthquake comes from rural Oklahoma, and exhibits the kind of character that the world expects from America. He speaks slowly, but in a crisis he is the kind of person you hope to see walking up dressed in camoflage, because he will be hands to the task until you both come out or die trying.

'Quake isn't much for misbehaving, not because he is unable, but because he can find better things to do that legitimately are not misbehavior.

On a warm night last fall, across the street from the launch pad for our earlier highjinks, I heard his real name on the intercom. Unfortunately, his real name is, well, pretty common. But I followed the name, to see if it was my missing friend. Lucky for me, it was. Otherwise, this story would be very different.

I found 'Quake five years married to the woman he had just married the last time I had seen him, prospering in Oklahoma, and still doing what he ought to be doing. We discussed a few of our mutual friends. He wasn't as close to Oscar as I was, so Oscar remains missing.

Then I told him I had run across our friend Moose at a truck stop in Missouri, but Moose had seemed quite unlike himself when I saw him.

Of course, when I saw Moose at the Mizzurah truck stop, I had three years of believing that he had died. That was a case of mistaken identity. I was quite overjoyed to discover my friend alive and kicking, and I freaked him out a little bit.

At the time there was one other person I could not find, and I feared the worst. I married her 26 months later. She lived in the morning shadow of Manhattan.

To be succinct, 'Quake put me in contact with Moose. Moose and I had shared similar personal setbacks, but we were now in respective places of greater prosperity than we had known during the nine months we worked together, and partied together, years before. We found that the friendship had not atrophied during a long dormancy.

Moose is now in a committed relationship with a lovely lady in Oklahoma, and pointed toward a future that neither one of us dared imagine for its positive possibilities. I will also remind her that February 29 is considered "Sadie Hawkins Day," which is customarily a day when a woman may propose marriage without social exclusion.

As I finished my meal, I considered that while my friends were physically absent, they were as present in the Mines Road Whataburger as the poster offering the limited-time peppercorn ranch burger.

And if being able to connect with a spirit of love and friendship isn't church, y'all, I have no idea what a holy place is supposed to be.

14 October 2007

The People's Observer

Lou Dobbs is a fraud.

With rhetoric that evokes the best work of Herr Joseph Goebbels, Dobbs has managed to sell a phony "war on the middle class," that threatens to ensnare those it purports to liberate.

His tactics are not noble. He focuses upon anecdotal evidence, unvetted sources, and slavishly sycophantic commentary and opinion from peripatetic politicians and media hosts. Beyond that, Dobbs uses a style book which relies upon constantly repeated adjectives to reinforce a xenophobic, isolationist, and authoritarian outlook.

Imports from China are always dangerous, tainted, or merely unsafe.

Troops and laws are always ours, which discounts CNN's penetration into nearly every country on the face of the planet. The "royal collective" is a tactic beloved by managerial seminars and retreats as a means of getting those deemed to be inferior to take ownership of organizational errors as part of the collective. This includes "our broken borders." (italics are mine.)

God forbid that any heinous crime is committed by someone who crossed the border and stayed too long, or came without a pedigree. Instantly, that individual is labelled an "illegal, criminal, alien Mexican, drug smuggler/gang member/rapist/litterbug." Anyone who may suggest that under the United States Constitution, individuals are innocent until proven guilty and deserving of due process is immediately part of an "amnesty agenda."

If no crime exists where the accused's immigration status is included in objective reporting, Dobbs chooses to pick his go-to guys, the two ICE agents who shot a man in the tuchas, then covered it up. They did not get sent up for shooting the dude in the butt; they got sent to prison for lying about it.

Dobbs is somewhat less than intellectually honest, here. No record exists of Dobbs offering the same benefit of the doubt to Bill Clinton, for discharging something arguably less lethal than a bullet, then lying about it. No one really wants to be on the receiving end of either shot, but only one of the two has a chance of going wide and hitting the femoral artery.

No attempt will be made here to assign a pretext of bigotry to Dobbs on the immigration issue. Like a socially maladroit teenager, it would be too easy to attempt a bon mot, and too easy to get wrong. However, what is clear is that Lou Dobbs has found an issue which can be utilized for maximum effect on ratings, book sales and Lou Dobbs' profitability.

Nevertheless, some of the "experts," (quotations mine) who have spoken on the issue have been revealed to be connected to white supremacists. There have been charges of undocumented immigrants causing a resurgence of Leprosy, as well as taking a disproportionate level of funds for social services.

First of all, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 165 cases of Leprosy were reported in 2005, the last year of reporting found in the Wandering Gentile's research. Of those, 125 cases were among persons born in the United States of America. This concurs with research vetted by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and is in fact lower than the average number of cases reported per year by the same government agency.

Dobbs was forced to recant the statistic quoted on his program in an amusingly humbling moment on the air.

With regard to the disproportionate funds for social services, it is absolutely wrong. This is a hypothesis tendered by anti-immigrant groups which discounts the fact that Federal requirements for social services include ascertaining that the recipient of social services is legally entitled to said services by being a citizen of the United States.

Please understand the confusion here; if undocumented persons are receiving federal benefits, then it is the negligence/fraud of federal employees not fulfilling their duties as prescribed by congressional mandate. That is worthy of investigation. There is a very large difference between persons who obtain benefits, and those who are being paid to know who deserves them.

Likewise, there is a clarion call in Dobbs' nightly tirade for "Government" to get involved in inspections of "dangerous imports from Communist China." If you want to call for a war on the middle class, then there would be no better opening salvo than starting a trade war with China.

This is not to defend the environmental/human rights/economic record of the PRC. The point of Chinese trade practices and the current imbalance being anticompetitive at the moment is salient. But in the long term, openness and prosperity in China will be in the best interests of the free world because these are the conditions in which education and democracy grow.

For the time being, low cost imports from China, proffered through large retailers, contribute to a high standard of living in the United States. Should a consumer choose to find goods from a source closer to home, options exist via the internet to find a product that suits the consumer's need. It's called free enterprise. The consumer is required to be proactive, though.

The Chinese don't have a monopoly on products which are dangerous or unsuited for the market. Anyone who remembers the Chevrolet Vega or the Ford Pinto is quite aware that Americans can do a spectacular job of producing unfit or dangerous products.

Finally, Dobbs is absolutely wrong about what he calls "amnesty." In February, this blog suggested the result of removing twelve million productive individuals from the source level of food production and construction would be fundamentally detrimental to the United States economy.

Since then, most readers will confirm, through their own experience, soaring food prices. The collapse of the subprime mortgage market has taken some of the sting out of the effects on the construction industry, but growth markets like Dallas, Atlanta, and Houston are seeing the beginning of an inflationary spiral owing to a lack of willing labor in the construction industry.

Not coincidentally, these are also areas where anti-immigration sentiment has produced an environment hostile to those who build homes. Forget a wall. If one wants to live behind a wall in a controlled environment, there is another word for it: prison.

Somehow, your Wandering Gentile holds no illusions about empowering Lou Dobbs as warden.