After Democrats read the following, I may have to re-register as a Federalist, a Whig, a Tory, a Laborite, a Silverite, a Communist or perhaps a Know-Nothing.
I’ve been called worse, but it must be said: Czar Donaldov has finally done something right. Quite accidentally, of course, a purely unintended consequence, kinda like El Presidente hisself who’s the personification of the pre-digital wisdom that even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Trump’s going to skim $2.5 billion from drug interdiction and slide it toward his border wall meme. (More on that later.)
In so doing, he has taken probably the biggest step ever in ending Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. A half-century ago, President Richard the Rotten researched the nation’s burgeoning drug problem by sending a pair of lawyers onto the streets of DC to find out what works. They did: treatment. Nixon almost moved forward, then saw that crime and punishment got more votes and the War on Drugs was on.
As with Vietnam, we lost. All you need view is the Oscar-winning film “Traffic” to see how government intervention acts as a price support system for the likes of El Chapo. Our for-profit prisons overflow with mostly black and brown people convicted of dastardly crimes like possession of two ounces of the Demon Weed.
Without the War on Drugs to keep prices high, El Chapo’s successors go out of business. No wall kept him from moving his product into this country.
CRIMINAL MINDS. A 19 year-old illegal immigrant sits today in the Washoe County jail accused of four Nevada robbery-murders. News reports say he came from El Salvador, a central American banana republic where the Carter and Reagan administrations funded death squads in the 1980s, including the murder of Catholic Bishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero. American nuns were raped and murdered.
The United States has been dabbling in banana republic skulduggery for more than a century, most notably with President Teddy Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy. “Banana republics” became the catch-all phrase for poor nations after those wonderful folks who still bring us Chiquita Bananas got the U.S. to invade to protect United Fruit Company plantations. We overthrew governments, crushed democracies and funded mass murder. To this day, their oppressed people detest our government but love what America stands for. That’s why they peacefully migrate north.
This country now greets immigrants with firearms instead of open arms.
I wonder about that young accused killer’s mindset. He grew up in a drug cartel-infested society where, as Mao Zedong once said, “power comes from the barrel of a gun.” The kid made it to America and found an unsecured pistol which he allegedly stole. Did he see that as his pathway to prosperity, just as he was socialized growing up? If you watch enough TV, you quickly learn that all disputes in the United States are settled with guns, right?
I’d like to know if four Nevada killings had their roots in our government helping corporations exploit poor countries.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL. Trump’s southern border abortion started as a reminder from recently-busted campaign manager Roger Stone as a way to remind a scatterbrained presidential candidate to talk about immigration. Trump saw how his cult responded to the wall demand and turned the gimmick into a promised reality, an Internet meme run amok.
The current buzzword “meme” comes from the Greek “mimeme,” an imitated thing, basically a cyberspace bumper sticker. Trump’s meme has morphed into a monstrous movie-style McGuffin to fan the flames of American fear of “the other.” Think of that huge dark domino from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” or the unseen Blair Witch. Or the dark side of The Force.
NYTimes Magazine story editor Willy Staley recently noted that what began as a gimmick has become “an idea that persists not because it will benefit us but simply because it thrives in our (short attention span, Internet-based) environment.”
I lament the emerging emoji/meme replacements for language as we devolve into the darkness of the post-literate society.
Be well. Raise hell. Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Barbano is a 50-year Nevadan and editor of NevadaLabor.com E-mail barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988.
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