South of the Border

I don’t have much to say at the moment, but I thought I’d say it anyway. We are much confused these days between legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants, whom the press often refer to as undocumented workers, and I thought I might be able to do something to explain the difference.  The first category in the previous sentence is an actual category of people living here in this our Great Republic. Those people are individuals who obeyed American immigration law, applied to come to the United States, and jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops the collective Kafkaesque mind of the immigration bureaucracy could devise to come out on the other side with a legal resident card, the legendary Green Card, which I understand is actually a sort of off-peach color these days. They are, by virtue of their obeying the law and acquiring the off-peach green card, allowed to live and work in our country with all the rights and privileges of citizens of the land. The only privilege not extended to these good folks is that of suffrage, the franchise being limited to actual citizens and those who like KFC’s chicken. This is one of the great mysteries of the modern world to me; I cannot eat more than a few pieces of the Colonel’s cuisine without started to belch uncontrollably. I think I am allergic to at least one of the eleven secret spices in the original recipe. 

On the other hand, the category of undocumented immigrant (or worker) is a euphemism and I think I can say without too much controversy that the point of a euphemism is to not call something by its right name because its right name accurately describes the person or thing described and that accurate description is, for one reason or another, uncomfortable or inconvenient or politically incorrect. In this case, the politically incorrect phrase we are looking for is illegal alien. This is a short phrase, but it clearly shows that the person who bears the name is one, currently living and working in the United States of America in violation of the laws governing immigration to the United States of America, and two, a citizen of a country that is not the United States of America.  Hence, illegal alien. That does not seem so hard to figure out, I think, and when I am confused with the concept, a confusion progressives and capitalists alike choose to foster for reasons both political and mercenary, I simply remember that my mother and her brothers and their wives are legal immigrants to the United States and that the guys who are mowing my neighbor’s lawn as I write this probably are not.  Now, I am sure that the guys mowing the lawn next door are very nice people who want what’s best for their families, but so were my paternal grandparents and my mom and her brothers and their wives and they didn’t see the need to come into the country illegally. What the guys next door mowing the lawn are, in short, line jumpers, people who make the thousands patiently going through the process feel as though they are idiots for showing up for interviews and filling out questionnaires and doing the right thing when all they have to do is cut out the middleman and get across the border one way or another. So why bother doing the right thing? 

The purpose of immigration law, as I understand it, is to give the federal government a chance to look over the people who want to move here and determine whether those people should move here.  This is not controversial: every country in the world, with the possible exception of Germany these days, does the same thing.  There is no inherent right to enter and reside in the United States, unless, of course, you are an American citizen or a legal resident.  For all others, entry to this country is not a human right, it is not a civil right, it is not a constitutional right, it is not a natural right. Entry to this country is a privilege that the government grants and that the government can withdraw at any time the government feels necessary.  A temporary visa is just that: temporary. You get to come in, maybe study at an overpriced college that will be more than happy to charge you twice what they are charging Americans, or go take a look at the Empire State Building and the Grand Canyon, maybe catch a bus tour of the stars’ homes in Hollywood, or hang out in the French Quarter during Mardi Gras and grab some beads and flash your tits to the crowd down on Bourbon Street. And then you go home. I fail to understand what is so complicated about that, but then, I do not need cheap labor to line my pockets—I can mow my own lawn, thank you very much—nor do I feel the need, in Brecht’s catchy phrase, to dissolve the people and elect another in order to make sure I can win elections.  Asking that people obey the law didn’t used to be a matter of such contention; that it is now tells me that people want the law changed but know that such change is not possible; the people who already live here, you see, get to have a say in such matters, which seems to annoy a great many Masters of the Universe no end.

Requirements of the law

"European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent."

 This warning appears in the editing functions of this blog and I'll be honest, I never really paid any attention to it. This bit of legal argle-bargle, to quote the late Justice Scalia, was just another example of the usual boilerplate nonsense that you have to expect in an increasingly bureaucratic society, something that the mind dismisses without ever having processed the information in the first place.  Now that I have noticed it, however, it seems more than a little presumptuous, doesn’t it? First, there is the question of sovereignty: can the European Union, which by its very name is clearly located in Europe, order me, a citizen of this our Great Republic, to do anything?  Second, how do I know which of my visitors are from the European Union and which are not? I am not some international Internet traffic cop who has the time and the energy to keep up with the people who come here and then question them about who they are and where they come from. Strange as it may seem to the European Union and the, I assume, very well paid paper pushers who devised this rule, I have an actual life here in the United States of America and that this actual life requires the majority of my time and attention and does not require me to pay attention to the European Union or its strictures about cookies and visitors.  Third, as to the question of consent, I wish to point out to the Eurodrone bureaucrats in Brussels who are behind the aforementioned bit of legal argle-bargle that nobody is forcing anyone to read The Passing Parade—the management of this blog can barely get the writer who provides the content here to write for the damned blog—and so the question of consent is largely moot, unless, of course, said Eurodrones are demanding that I get the reader’s consent, in which my response is that you can go kiss my royal Irish ass, guys.

However, in the spirit of international amity, I will point out that The Passing Parade is not terribly fond of cookies, but that we do have a very nice pineapple upside down cake that my mother makes from scratch and that on occasion we will indulge in some freshly made gourmet doughnuts from the new place across the street from the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread.  If you are ever up this way, I invite you to drop in and share a doughnut, unless you are intent on getting me to follow European Union law, in which case I will call the police and have you removed from the premises. Thank you for your time and attention.

The Gay Marriage Conspiracy, or Gregor Samsa's Diary, not by Franz Kafka

I was watching reruns of NCIS the other day—I will admit it, I could spend hours watching Ziva kicking bad guy ass—when a telephone survey company called and asked me to participate in a poll. I usually hang up on these morons, but I was watching NCIS on demand and I figured I could just freeze the show where it was and come back to it just as soon as I got rid of the surveyors or pollsters or whatever it is you call these people.  The pollsters / surveyors / whatchamacallits were asking about my reactions to current social issues and one of the questions was what I thought of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to make gay marriage legal. I said that I had no opinion on the subject at all, which seemed to perplex the young woman who was asking me the questions. I had previously identified myself as a conservative Roman Catholic Republican and she could not understand how someone with my ideological and theological background could not fail to be against gay marriage. I told her that whether gays married each other, married a non-gay person, or chose to marry an elderly sycamore tree named Elroy T. Hopkins did not concern me nor is the subject one that I choose to spend a lot of time thinking about.  The status of gay marriage in the law or how to adapt a traditionally heteronormative society to the new legal reality is a matter of indifference to me, except as a reason to use the word heteronormative in a sentence for the first time ever (really, I’m not kidding).

What people do in the privacy of their own homes is their own business and I see no reason to change my view simply because the people involved shelled out $35 to get a license from the county clerk. Getting a marriage license is not like getting a liquor license, which reassures the alcohol consuming public that their bartender is not serving them rotgut hooch he made downstairs in a dirty bathtub, or a pilot’s license, which reassures the passengers that the person in the cockpit knows how to fly the plane. No, it’s just a marriage license, which is the state’s acknowledgment that Person A and Person B are adult human beings who are about to do something incredibly stupid, that they are old enough to know better, and they intend to do it anyway despite their parents’ best efforts to dissuade them. Having invested in the license, having ignored their parents, and having spent a fortune on the wedding, the happy couple, gay and straight alike, should get what’s coming to them and get it good and hard, to quote the estimable Mr. Mencken.

I didn’t always feel this way, of course. Once upon a time, I thought the very concept of gay marriage utterly ridiculous. Why, I reasoned, would two sane people who didn’t have to get married actually choose to do so? What would be the point? Procreation? The reproductive urge having taken the high road to Loch Lomond in this case, why then bother with an unnecessary ceremony?  I thought this argument irrefutable, but there are people who do choose to refute it, strange as that may seem, and which they will live to regret, I fear. Marriage is a holy estate, you see, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency, and those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. So let it be written, so let it be done. And then there are divorce lawyers, whose altruistic motives and theological inclinations do not bear prolonged scrutiny.  I know that I should never think ill of my fellow human beings—it’s not the Christian thing to do, you know—but I can’t get over the feeling that gay marriage is a plot by a cabal of divorce lawyers to expand the client pool for their services. Granted, gay people only comprise some 2% of the population, but if you’re a lawyer who needs work any business is better than no business at all.  Indeed, in the rush to exercise their new found right to marriage, the gay community will dash out and commit most of the same silly mistakes that heterosexuals commit when they think they’re in love, which in turn always ends with the same result: divorce lawyers getting rich. I suppose I should get angry with divorce lawyers profiting from the stupidity of the hormone driven, but somehow or other it doesn’t really bother me. After all, why shouldn’t gays be as miserable as straights?  And why shouldn’t divorce lawyers soak gays for every last cent the lawyers can squeeze out of them? It hardly seems fair, either legally or morally, that gays can jettison an unwanted partner anytime they feel like it and straights cannot. If marriage is that important to gays then let them have at it, I say, and let the lawyers have at the gays as well. It’s a free country, after all, and divorce lawyers have to eat just as much as the next guy, and as a wise man once said, so it goes. No, I don't know what that means and I'm pretty sure no one else does, either.

A Federal court has struck down a Texas voter identification law, to the cheers of Democrats everywhere. This is because all voter identification laws are evil and racist, discriminating as they do against the ignorant, the felonious, the dope-addled, and the dead, all of whom are reliable Democratic constituencies. Don’t believe me? Ask Al Franken.

OF LAW AND DOGS: It is one of the great truisms of modern American life that anyone who says that they do not wish to complain is either a) about to complain about something; b) is already complaining about something and is taking this opportunity to start complaining about something else; or c) lying. The statement begs for a qualification, for a but or an and, especially the former; no one says I do not wish to complain so I won’t. No, saying that you don’t wish to complain needs a but even more than my brother does, and he’s up to a two pack a day habit as it is. So, as I see no reason why I should be any exception to the rule, here goes: I do not wish to complain here, but (see, what did I tell you?) I wonder if anyone here in our happy little burg realizes that there is a pooper-scooper law on the books?

Yes, there is, boys and girls, you can even look this worthy ordinance up online, if you wanted to; the City Code is available for the public’s perusal both online and in hard copy here at the egregious mold pit wherein I labor day in and day out. The law, which apparently had bipartisan support from both cat and dog owners, requires that pet owners who walk their pets on the public thoroughfares and whose pets consequently relieve themselves on those same public thoroughfares, must then pick up the pet’s droppings—with what is solely at the discretion of the pet owner—and place the excrement in the nearest litter basket. Now, I will be among the very first to admit that this law basically targets dog owners; cats relieve themselves in sandboxes or in private places of their own; tropical fish are hardly likely to leap from their aquaria nor will hamsters abandon their wheels in order to relieve themselves on the streets of our fair micropolis. The legislation is squarely aimed at dogs and their owners. But at the time, dog owners understood the need for the legislation. No one who remembers the bad old days, the days when you could see grown men and women hopscotching their way down Main Street in order to avoid the semi-mountainous piles of ordure wants a return to the filth-freckled streets of yesteryear. No, we are all for the pooper-scooper law here in our happy little burg, even if it is now very clear that some of the citizenry haven’t gotten the word.

I bring this nauseating topic up first, because I am tired of having to deal with the remains of Fido’s lunch on the sidewalks everyday, and second, I damn near tumbled down an old railroad embankment and into the creek that runs through the south side of town last week while trying to avoid stepping into some pooch’s poop. This, as you might imagine, was not fun, as I am entirely too old and out of shape to go around playing Tarzan at a moment’s notice, and the next time it happens there might not be a convenient tree or its branches available for the grabbing. I was down along the aforementioned creek in order to take some pictures of the old 19th century millhouses along the water’s edge, which are a favorite subject of mine—I actually have more pictures of them than I really need, now that I think of it—and to get the best angles the intrepid photographer must cross some old railroad tracks. Metro-North, a division of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a public authority renowned here in the Vampire State for its ability to lose money while operating a monopoly, owns these tracks and apparently does not care what the dog owners here do with them.

I suppose I could do the popular thing here and not bring the subject up at all; this, in fact, was my attitude towards the matter in general and the matter in particular for a very long time; but after the Tarzan misadventure and my hurried scramble up the embankment to the relative safety of the tracks I saw something that stunned me, something that caused me to stop, brought up by a toxic brew of shock, horror, and outrage. There, on the track, or rail, and not on the tie, or sleeper, for those of you accustomed to British usage, was a nearly fresh pile of dog dung. The disgust I felt towards the dog’s owner at that moment knew no earthly bounds, and had this fiendish wretch allowed his brute to defecate there in my presence I would have committed murder most foul and entirely justified upon this vile specimen’s loathsome carcass.

I do not blame the dog. The dog is merely doing what all animals must at one time or another. Take a moment, however, and think of how the owner has perverted this natural bodily function. This submoronic dolt has, with malice aforethought and with the complete and unhindered use of his admittedly limited faculties, trained an innocent beast to relieve its bodily wastes along a length of standard gauge rail and then, if this altogether dubious and completely noisome accomplishment were not enough, left the dog’s waste there on the rail for all to see. You would think that someone with enough wit to train a dog to perform such a feat would also have the wit to clean up the mess afterwards, but you would be wrong.

No, having trained the dog to relieve itself on a rail, this malevolent jackass left the pile of poop where the rest of us would have to look at it, no doubt to better advertise his dog’s intellectual accomplishments. It would not surprise me in the least to learn that this miscreant also videotaped his dog’s misadventure, if so willed an act can be rightly called thus, and has sent said tape in to some cute pet video show, so that others of his dimwitted ilk can likewise enjoy the sight of a dog crapping on a rail. The mind boggles at the possibilities for commercial exploitation here.

Clearly, a warning will not suffice with this scurvy knave. The law stands as warning enough, common decency stands as warning enough, a desire to protect the health of his fellow citizens stands as warning enough, and yet this whelpitudinous jackanapes still permits his mutt to pollute the public thoroughfares. No, mere deterrence is not enough in this case. A public example is needed here, lest others think that they, too, may flout the full majesty of the law with impunity. It is clear that the outraged citizenry of this our happy little burg must take matters into our own hands. We must tar and feather this contemptible lout and run him out of town on a rail, preferably the rail his dog has developed such an excretory attraction for. Then, and only then, will the decent, hardworking people of our town be able to walk the streets with their heads held high, and without keeping one eye peeled on the sidewalk looking for Rover’s next “accident.”