I was in the process of completing the essay below when fate rapped on the door. I answered.
At 9:30, I received a tip that students with placards were marching near the intersection of Sawtelle and Jefferson. Within minutes, I was there. The students were not. Returning directly to the office, I was soon distracted by chanting sounds from the boulevard below my office window. Dozens of students. Maybe a hundred, marching west toward City Hall.
After dashing down the marbled steps, I spent most of the next several hours observing and interviewing students. Funny, isn’t it, in a sadly ironic manner, how looking people in the eye can budge a man’s convictions?
When it is personal, it is different, as I told you awhile ago, dear reader, about my son who is proudly gay.
I came away from the protest with a vastly different impression about immigration and its effects than the tone I had formed about the Los Angeles demonstration.
In view of the change, I considered chucking the essay below. I would start over. About that time, my wall clock wiggled its hands at me, saying no, no. My Monday deadline was too close, the clock announced.
Sorting out my newly challenged beliefs yesterday afternoon, it still was too soon, too fast, to reach meaningful conclusions. I just realized they needed to be closely reviewed, and probably revised.
And so, while I am pondering the proposed immigration legislation, the nuances, the impacts and other remedies, you are invited to digest what I believed before meeting up with the students.
We shall renew this discussion tomorrow.]
Look Who Is Behind the Curtain
The hypnotic seduction of the law-tending citizens of Los Angeles — and Culver City — continues at a frantic pace that is cleverly disguised to look leisurely.
The intimidation of takeover is on.
The Chief Legal Symbol of Los Angeles, the Mayor, and the Chief Religious Symbol of Los Angeles, the Cardinal, both have declared that people who break the law by walking/sneaking across the Mexican border are not committing an illegal act.
With a hefty push from the Mayor and the Cardinal, the walls of justice in Los Angeles have come tumbling down.
Forget about guns and violence. They are so yesterday.
Since most people do not attend to the details of life, the shrewd organizers of last Saturday’s “pro-immigration” rally have manipulated the scene to look as if the demonstration was as innocent as two glassy-eyed lovers in a canoe cruising down a placid river on a becalmed Sunday afternoon.
If you swallow that rubbish, Freddie, you are as gullible as the organizers brag you are.
You may never suspect the vehicle by which well-organized, only partially visible, forces are seducing us:
They are wielding the commonest, the most deceptively powerful, of all modern weapons, manipulative language.
How Los Angeles Is Different
Guns and knives don’t play well, even in laconic Los Angeles. Words, like honey from the beehive, will bring ‘em to their knees before they realize they have left their feet.
Cloaking their words in the outer dress of populist morality, the key terms employed by the rally organizers were brilliantly cadenced so as not to attract unwanted scrutiny.
Last Saturday morning’s historic protest march by perhaps three-quarters of a million angry people will be studied for months, maybe years. It has belched up fascinating fingerprints for forensic scientists and pundits who love to poke through the dust of humanity and probe deeply for people’s true rudimentary motivations.
Over at the Los Angeles headquarters of A.N.S.W.E.R., Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, the chief organizers of the march, they are as giddy this morning at the size of the crowd as the cops are dazed at the LAPD.
A.N.S.W.E.R., routinely described as an old-fashioned Communist organization, overtly has been largely in the anti-war business the last few years. Those are much smaller potatoes than
stimulating the unprecedented masses who happily clogged the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
Their publicity depicts A.N.S.W.E.R. as an all-volunteer group, on the passive order of your friendly neighborhood PTA or Red Cross office. Try Hamas for a truer corollary.
Worldwide, A.N.S.W.E.R. offices are stocked to the ceiling with hot-tongued idealogues who are fueled by the same kind of zeal that propels suicide bombers. They are philosophical cousins.
For public relations purposes in the Western world, they are mandated to present a more genteel front. Say, grown-up Boy Scouts. Sells better to Ma and Pa Kettle, the better to seduce them.
After tapping into two of the most reliable streams of our culture for turning out the people — labor unions and the churches — the next step was to simplify the script:
Blur the line between legal and illegal immigrants. We are one. We are all immigrants. This country was erected by immigrants. “Illegal” has a chilling ring, and such a negative history. We are on, tell ‘em.
If you must refer to illegals, use the softer sounding “undocumented immigrants” or “undocumented workers.”
At all times, the chant in the background must never stop, “Si si puede.” (Yes, we can.)
Doesn’t sound anymore than your second-grader’s homework, does it?
Take a closer look at the devious, arrogant language of the pledge that A.N.S.W.E.R. asks all protestors to sign.
“I demand full rights and equality for all immigrants living in the United States. Neoliberal economic policies targeting Latin America, like NAFTA and CAFTA, have pushed millions of people into abject poverty. Immigrants are forced to come to the United States to look for work. Nobody should be criminalized for attempting to survive. No human being is illegal. Racism against immigrants emanates from the same forces behind the U.S. war to conquer and control the wealth of Iraq.”
Immigrants are forced to come to the United States? That’s twisting the truth in an arresting way.
The LAPD probably should have seen this throng coming. Amidst such myopia among residents and law enforcement — It can’t happen here, Gertrude — are successful revolutions born.
This rally was loaded with the exaggerated markings of a classic revolutionary takeover.
Portrayed as the moral equivalent of a nuns picnic, if the angry marchers were your daughter and the devious organizers were her boyfriend, the boyfriend would have had your daughter on her back on your couch under his spell before she could sputter “I had cold mashed potatoes for dinner.”
In the seduction business, the First Commandment is not to announce, “I intend to seduce you.”
Let the victim take as long as he/she needs to figure it out.
(To Be Continued)