Jack Burns Lives!

Thanks to my good friend Peggy for this find….while I cherish these old videos, they also make me sad.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=11293050&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Final Abbey Devane from Eric Temple on Vimeo.

The new law in Arizona allowing law enforcement officials to request identification that proves citizenship is causing quite a stir in the liberal community. Cries of racism and of an “expanding police state” are the most often heard charges, and I suppose there is some truth to both concerns.

After all, how do you decide who to ask for proof of citizenship? Is it anyone that looks Mexican? What about Iranians? Why leave out Italians? Israelis? I frankly can’t wait to see how the state government in Arizona plans to “train” its law enforcement agencies to properly carry out the intent of the law since it’s based on someone “not looking American.”

I recently returned from Southwest Texas, right on the border near Terlingua and Big Bend. I found it interesting that the Border Patrol was not a popular entity in and around Terlingua. It has a major presence; however, and Allison and I had to pass through a checkpoint only 10 miles south of Alpine, Texas, well within the United States. Most of the locals, nearly all Anglos, believe in free movement across the river since the the land contiguous to the river is in fact all part of the same bioregion. When one considers the geology, biology and culture, it is in fact a single unit where dotted lines drawn up by politicians and capitalists only have meaning to their creators.

The locals favor a “free zone,” perhaps seven to ten miles in each direction. Of course, the problem with the “free zone” is how you insure people don’t stray beyond that? Not sure, but the people in that region seem happy and willing to live and trade together as they have since roughly around the time of the Mexican Revolution, although Federal presence has always been strong in the area. Black Jack Pershing and his cavalry were stationed there after Pancho Villa’s raid into New Mexico. Today, we have the Border Patrol, and they were a constant sight during our visit.

As to the new Arizona law, a couple of conservative friends there say “we’ve just had enough.” The killing of the rancher was the excuse they needed to step it up, something many have wanted for some time. Yes, it’s racial profiling, but to them, there’s only one group causing the problem. Well, Muslims are another group they don’t care for, and I’m sure local sheriff’s will have no issue asking “Muslims” for ID, as well. Maybe if they harass ‘em enough they’ll get sick of it and just leave, but I’m also hoping they’ll take some Christians and Mormons with them.

Anglos, don’t get too tanned, because it seems to me that brown skin may be the common denominator.

And as Edward Abbey said, perhaps the American Indians should have done more racial profiling of their own in order to run us Anglos off the continent.

Which brings me to the next question, what would old Ed have to say about the law? Abbey advocated closing the borders, a position I agree with 100%. There’s too many featherless bipeds roaming around already. If you close the border to everyone, you solve multiple problems, but conservatives really don’t want that because it stops the flow of cheap, undocumented labor.

And although the Spanish speaking people were here way before us, wouldn’t it be more sensible to repeal NAFTA and do something to help them make their own country more livable?

“How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization?”-Edward Abbey

Seems clear to me that Ed might support the law, especially after seeing piles of trash and dying people all over his beloved desert, as he wasn’t too fond of the conservative position (regarding labor) or of liberals and their “cheap cause.”

He wrote about it in an essay called “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” which I’ve posted here:

From Abbey’s 1988 book One Life at a Time, Please.

“In the American Southwest, where I happen to live, only sixty miles north of the Mexican border, the subject of illegal aliens is a touchy one. Even the terminology is dangerous: the old word wetback is now considered a racist insult by all good liberals; and the perfectly correct terms illegal alien and illegal immigrant can set off charges of xenophobia, elitism, fascism, and the ever-popular genocide against anyone careless enough to use them. The only acceptable euphemism, it now appears, is something called undocumented worker. Thus the pregnant Mexican woman who appears, in the final stages of labor, at the doors of the emergency ward of an El Paso or San Diego hospital, demanding care for herself and the child she’s about to deliver, becomes an “undocumented worker.” The child becomes an automatic American citizen by virtue of its place of birth, eligible at once for all of the usual public welfare benefits. And with the child comes not only the mother but the child’s family. And the mother’s family. And the father’s family. Can’t break up families can we? They come to stay and they stay to multiply.

What of it? say the documented liberals; ours is a rich and generous nation, we have room for all, let them come. And let them stay, say the conservatives; a large, cheap, frightened, docile, surplus labor force is exactly what the economy needs. Put some fear into the unions: tighten discipline, spur productivity, whip up the competition for jobs. The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause. (Neither group, you will notice, ever invites the immigrants to move into their homes. Not into their homes!) Both factions are supported by the cornucopia economists of the ever-expanding economy, who actually continue to believe that our basic resource is not land, air, water, but human bodies, more and more of them, the more the better in hive upon hive, world without end – ignoring the clear fact that those nations which most avidly practice this belief, such as Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, to name only three, don’t seem to be doing well. They look more like explosive slow-motion disasters, in fact, volcanic anthills, than functioning human societies. But that which our academic economists will not see and will not acknowledge is painfully obvious to los latinos: they stream north in ever-growing numbers.

Meanwhile, here at home in the land of endless plenty, we seem still unable to solve our traditional and nagging difficulties. After forty years of the most fantastic economic growth in the history of mankind, the United States remains burdened with mass unemployment, permanent poverty, an overloaded welfare system, violent crime, clogged courts, jam-packed prisons, commercial (“white-collar”) crime, rotting cities and a poisoned environment, eroding farmlands and the disappearing family farm all of the usual forms of racial ethnic and sexual conflict (which immigration further intensifies), plus the ongoing destruction of what remains of our forests, fields, mountains, lakes, rivers, and seashores, accompanied by the extermination of whole specie’s of plants and animals. To name but a few of our little nagging difficulties.

This being so, it occurs to some of us that perhaps evercontinuing industrial and population growth is not the true road to human happiness, that simple gross quantitative increase of this kind creates only more pain, dislocation, confusion, and misery. In which case it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturallymorally-generically impoverished people. At least until we have brought our own affairs into order. Especially when these uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which – let us be honest about this – is not appealing to the majority of Americans. Why not? Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing; because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded, and beautiful-yes, beautiful!-society, for another. The alternative, in the squalor, cruelty, and corruption of Latin America, is plain for all to see.

Yes, I know, if the American Indians had enforced such a policy none of us pale-faced honkies would be here. But the Indians were foolish, and divided, and failed to keep our WASP ancestors out. They’ve regretted it ever since.

To everything there is a season, to every wave a limit, to every range an optimum capacity. The United States has been fully settled, and more than full, for at least a century. We have nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by allowing the old boat to be swamped. How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? (Howls of “Racism! Elitism! Xenophobia!” from the Marx brothers and the documented liberals.) Harsh words: but somebody has to say them. We cannot play “let’s pretend” much longer, not in the present world.

Therefore-let us close our national borders to any further mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source, as does every other nation on earth. The means are available, it’s a simple technical-military problem. Even our Pentagon should be able to handle it. We’ve got an army somewhere on this planet, let’s bring our soldiers home and station them where they can be of some actual and immediate benefit to the taxpayers who support them. That done, we can begin to concentrate attention on badly neglected internal affairs. Our internal affairs. Everyone would benefit, including the neighbors. Especially the neighbors. Ah yes. But what about those hungry hundreds of millions, those anxious billions, yearning toward the United States from every dark and desperate corner of the world? Shall we simply ignore them? Reject them? Is such a course possible?

“Poverty,” said Samuel Johnson, “is the great enemy of human happiness. It certainly destroys liberty, makes some virtues impracticable, and all virtues extremely difficult.”

You can say that again, Sam.

Poverty, injustice, over breeding, overpopulation, suffering, oppression, military rule, squalor, torture, terror, massacre: these ancient evils feed and breed on one another in synergistic symbiosis. To break the cycles of pain at least two new forces are required: social equity – and birth control. Population control. Our Hispanic neighbors are groping toward this discovery. If we truly wish to help them we must stop meddling in their domestic troubles and permit them to carry out the social, political, and moral revolution which is both necessary and inevitable.

Or if we must meddle, as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border, give him a handgun, a good rifle, and a case of ammunition, and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.”

Here’s what San Francisco will once again look like after Peak Oil…fewer cars, more horses, bikes and trolley cars! And one day, no cars….

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINOxRxze9k&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0]

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