Escorts A La Parrilla (Grilled Escorts)

An arsonist is targeting green Ford Escorts, approximately fifteen years old, in Medford, Oregon.

That Arsonist is a long way from being "right," starting with nascent pyromania and ending with his choice of target.

The Ford Escort of the nineties was a good kind of cheap, like a bologna sandwich made from name brand fixings. It was a great bologna sandwich on wheels, but that's all it ever would be. The engines had useful horsepower, and they were decent handlers on good tires, but it was purpose-built for transparency, universally adequate and uninspiring. The GT models charmed with 40 extra horsepower elicited the passion reserved for nude photos of Meryl Streep. (I'll look, but I doubt that I will become aroused.)

It was not bad, but it left the driver with the sense of being transported passively, much as if one had used public transit. It was cheap, dull, and until the recent unpleasantness, disposable.

Family members would give Escorts away until the point where nine-year-olds would curse about the potential cost of disposing of yet another Ford Escort. The well-meaning relative would be attempting to impress a kid and inspire a lifelong automotive enthusiasm. The nine-year-old would be lamenting the lack of a cash offering to be leveraged into the purchase of a bootleg copy of Grand Theft Auto:Peach City, featuring an even more phallic doppelganger for Atlanta's Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel.

This led to the employ of the first strategic abandonment technique: Enlist a tallish 12-to-15-year-old sibling, that young'un with the fever for getting behind the wheel of anything, and some of the ability to do something about it. Drive the Escort to a rough neighborhood, and leave it with the keys in the switch, the title on the driver's seat, with the windows open.

That would be how the police would find the Escort, often with the keys to hot-list luxury imports under the windshield wiper. These Escorts would find their way back to their rightful owners who had to lose another five bucks worth of GTA:PC savings on gas to try and dump the thing again.

In the nearly twenty year history of Escort-dumping this technique only worked once, at the home of one Austin Morris, in the Happy Holiday Acres Manufactured Home Plaza (nee Mobile Home Park), Emerson, Georgia. Mr. Austin Morris is a good friend and somewhat computer literate, promising to raise your Wandering Gentile's readership percentage by double digits...someday. He did quite well scavenging useful bits from abandoned Escorts and keeping his pricipal Escort in as-new condition.

On 12 May, 2005, while visiting his mother in Decatur, a freak windstorm removed Mr. Morris' Zayre Garden Storage Shed, featuring enough mechanical components to assemble up to six complete Escorts, given an adequate supply of bodies. Rumors of Escort parts raining in Hinesville, nearly 300 miles away, have been so viciously denied by authorities in Liberty County and on Fort Stewart that we are forced to believe that the rumors are true.

Mr. Morris, lacking the desire to continue using his wrench set, or collect his parts in Southeast Georgia, became a Toyota man, and hasn't had to fix squat since. And this has nothing to do with an individual torching Escorts 3000 miles away in Oregon. Yet.

The other Escort disposal technique was a much more successful codicil in the NAFTA treaty. Escorts are required to be towed out of the country as a condition of registering a Ford or Nissan pickup from the United States in Mexico. Of the 17 million Escorts manufactured between 1981 and 2001, fully 14 million have been expatriated/repatriated to Mexico. That makes them ubiquitous, just not as ubiquitous as before, except on I-35 in Texas.

Owing to the recent economic unpleasantness, some debate exists as to whether the nation's fleet should be repurposed abroad, with a goal of restarting manufacture. It is entirely possible that a person or persons unknown are acting in Medford out of the suspicion that these Escorts have been employed in the thwarting of immigration enactments, knowing how many Escorts have been repurposed to Mexico.

Does anyone know the whereabouts of Lou Dobbs on the nights of the fires?

When Right Is Wrong

As the worthy opposition in talk radio rants and raves about President Obama's economic recovery package, one wishes to suggest that the conservative talkers are spectacularly wrong about everything.

Privately-based solutions to issues facing the public are infinitely preferable to those coming from the public sector. However, the state of the private sector is such that the catastrophic collapse of large segments of the private intellectual infrastructure has occurred. Free markets can only survive when both the production and consumption sides function as equals.

In the case of the US banking and finance industries, the lack of public oversight left the consumer at a disadvantage to the producer. Ultimately liberties were taken which could not be supported by the market, leaving the production side of the equation with a handful of well-intentioned wishes which were legal and worthless tender simultaneously. Whether we like it or not, the public sector has a role in assuring that the practices of the production side do not overmatch the capabilities of the consumption side.

This goes the same for petroleum companies not gouging the price of gasoline and unions not gouging the price of labor.

At a moment when the economy is shrinking, government has a role as as a parallel conduit for capital improvement. If progress is blocked by large dead obstacles on the normal private path, then it is the necessary role of the public sector to ascertain that the well being of the nation continue to progress regardless.

President Obama's plan appears to have a functional system of mechanisms which appear to promote at least an illusion of rewarding initiative and empowering incentive for enterprises which accept risk. This is not Socialism, which attempts to restrain risk through planned production and scheduled shortage to perpetuate an underserved market receiving inferior product protected from competition by legislative fiat. Socialism isolates a nation behind walls, holding its people incommunicado from new ideas, ultimately enslaving multitudes by appealing to atavistic mistrust of the unknown.

Frankly, the cultural practices of socialism reflect more those of conservative talk radio than the last-resort leveraging of the public sector by a President faced with an economic crisis not of his making. We appreciate the thought that a strict orthodoxy of lower taxes, smaller government, and minimal reliance upon the public sector are keys to the nation's prosperity. Unfortunately, a sampling of large nations indicates that this is not true.

The tax burden in Germany is 42%. Norway's burden is 29%. The USA, Canada, and Australia are all at 24%. Mexico is at 8%. So far, if this wisdom holds constant, Mexico should be the most affluent of all of the countries.

A review of hourly incomes in manufacturing jobs after taxes in Germany, the US, Australia, and Canada has all four countries hovering between US$17-19. The Germans are at the high end, US$18.86, while the US, Canada, and Australia hover within about a quarter of US$17.60. The Norwegians smoked everybody drawing US$24.59, and the Mexicans came in at US$2.30.

Wait a minute, I'm confused! The Mexicans, with the lowest tax rate, the greatest local control of schools, the smallest presence of labor unions, a stricter emphasis upon border security and the strongest structures impeding imported goods, came in DEAD LAST? But, AM talk radio has been telling us that these things would lead to prosperity for twenty years!

Okay, well, Mexico has a heavily deregulated and completely private health care system. They should be the best cared for people, and the life expectancy should reflect that. The Mexican people only spend 6.2% of their GDP on medicine. Men can expect to live to 72.6, women 78.3.

Americans spend 15.2% of their GDP on a private health care system, over US$5700 per person, and get 74.8 for men, 80.1 for women. But this is supposed to be the best health care system in the world. So how come Norwegians, Germans, and Canadians pay less per capita (9-11% of GDP) but get over a year more life expectancy from their nationalized public health systems than we do in the United States? The average dollar outlay is even more dramatic, hovering at half(!!!!!) of what we pay for our health care as Americans.

One country would be a fluke. Two would be questionable. But a view of industrialized nations with nationalized health care shows a consistent per capita cost of between US$2500 and US$3200 per person. One may not speak for a gentle reader, but it looks like Americans are getting the raw end on this one.

After further review...the ruling is such...talk radio is lying to their listeners. The leveraging of public resources for the good of the population paying for them may qualify as socialism under a very broad interpretation of the term. However, the lesson of other industrialized countries, including our next door neighbors in Canada and Mexico, indicates that a certain level of taxaton is necessary and a certain level of publicly-based solutions are necessary for the continued wellbeing and prosperity of the nation.

For those who have invested their faith in the Portly Pundit and Hannie Pie, go get a World Almanac and prove me wrong. Utopianism, be it through a Capitalist or Socialist economic model, is spectacularly unworkable.

Imitating the practices of the Mexican Government is most likely to produce the same results as Mexico. We would be well served by taking our lessons from the neighbor which does not have millions of people risking their lives for a better existence as the object of scorn and prejudice.

Nobody is trying to deport Mike Myers, no matter how little they liked The Love Guru.

Comprehensive Means Comprehensive

First of all, it isn't amnesty.

As reports of the Senate compromise on immigration reform came across the news on Thursday, the usual group of anti-immigrant yodelers hit the airwaves within hours. From Tancredo to Dobbs to the right-wing ranters on AM radio, their one note screamed "AMNESTY!"

It isn't. By definition amnesty means a lack of penalty. There are penalties involved with the new senate bill. There are sacrifices to be made by an undocumented immigrant, and compliance will test and prove the difference between those who wish to commit to an existence in this country, and those with less honorable motives.

A better way to look at it would be to call it a mechanism for a No Contest plea to the charge of jumping the border. There has been a twenty year window where the current immigration system has shown profound flaws. It has not served the needs of this country, and the hard-line tenor of the law as written has served to stifle both assimilation and those who would have qualified under previous immigration laws for legal paths to remain in the United States.

Tough, but just and reasonable, the Senate compromise represents not the impossible- a good solution- but the least bad solution.

If the reader will imagine, as a caller to the Mark Davis radio program in Dallas did recently, the political will and repercussions after the appearance of a cell-phone video of an undocumented woman being removed, and her small child crying for her mommy. This would make Abu Ghraib look like a visit from Mother Teresa. And it would be political death for anyone who had supported the forcible removal of undocumented aliens.

The logistics of removing twelve to twenty million people; convincing the world community of how humane the United States of America is; and replacing that population in the labor force would devastate the nation. It would be suicide.

The manpower required to remove twelve million people would require at least a quarter of a million agents trained in law enforcement and logistics, plus dedicated areas and holding facilities and transportation. Figure upon the American taxpayers taking about a trillion dollar hit.

China and Mexico could call in their markers. The EU nations and Japan would. Without about seven million proven, but undocumented, participants in the labor force, and less than seven million unemployed (and a good portion of them unemployable) in the United States, productivity would fall. The economic engine of the United States would be stalled in mid-air.

With a broken economy and political instability, we could anticipate challenges to our sovereignty and our military from sources such as Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea, and their satellites. What would remain to be seen is if we had any good will remaining from our traditional allies such as Israel, Canada, and Australia.

Kids, don't try this at home. Because the last trained professionals who tried to (and succeded at) removing twelve million people deemed undesirable are not around to talk about it, jawohl?

The last, best option remaining option to save the United States as the country we know and love, is to swallow a population of people, who, aside from not following bureaucratic procedures, have been beneficial to our culture and economy, and haven't really done anything else wrong.

The Senate compromise is not amnesty. It is nothing less than the survival of this nation. These are people with a strong work ethic, deep love of family, and profound Christian faith. We need to be able to identify and embrace people who share our values.

No one is in favor of letting felons run amok on our streets. If someone commits a violent crime, let's get rid of that individual quickly. But if the only crime has been the escape from the desperate conditions that exist in so many of the countries to our south, as your Wandering Gentile's Daddy used to say, that ain't a killin' offense.

As for the impotent, arrogant, anal-retentive yard nazis, who find their very existence threatened by people who have entered without a pedigree, considering the source is the best option. These yard nazis are the same people who pushed a neighborhood covenant in the Atlanta area, and fined a man US$3,500 for the infraction of FLYING THE AMERICAN FLAG!

The tone of these collectivist authoritarians has spread to city councils and county commissions throughout the country, most notably in Farmer's Branch, Texas; Oceanside, California; Cherokee County, Georgia; and Hazleton, Pennsylvania. The most amusing thing is that their rage has been directed on a local level, to a federal issue, in places that are remarkably devoid of anyone but affluent, self-absorbed, English-speaking people of predominantly European descent.

The Senate compromise will have several desirable effects upon the illegal immigration issue in the United States. When employers in Mexico are forced to compete economically for a finite labor resource, the democratization of affluence throughout Mexico will be the result. At the point where the drawbacks of emigrating outweigh the benefits, people will stay home. The streets of Missoula are not crowded with people who snuck in from Alberta, Canada.

Labor safety and health standards will also improve in both countries due to the expectation of our more stringent and effective regulations, and their applicability by people functioning within a normalized environment. Abuses that have been tacitly accepted cannot survive when both parties have a voice.

Finally, the ICE resources that have been dedicated to behaving punitively toward people jumping the border in lieu of a functional immigration process can be turned towards capturing and punishing smugglers and other malicious individuals.

The people who have patiently sought entry to the United States through the current immigration system deserve a nod for their forebearance with a confusing, complicated, and infuriatingly indifferent bureaucracy. They merit nothing less than an expedited processing of their documents and a concession of fees beyond what would be expected of someone who entered extralegally.

Privatization of the vetting process could best achieve the necessary legwork, leaving CIS agents for the approval interview process.

Someone wise, quoted frequently by Dave Ramsey and Dr. Phil McGraw, once said that repeating an ineffective behavior and expecting a different result is insanity. The immigration laws that we have on the books have not worked. The time to scrap the malfunctioning system is now. The immigration laws we have now created this situation. These laws are a total loss, and any attempt to use them would be hazardous to the health of this nation.

And watching the Yard Nazis of America melt down would be priceless.