Pot-Kettle-Black and the Arizona Problem

Some Arizonans were out in force April 25, denouncing Gov. Jan Brewer and thanking Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon for warning out-of-staters not to come to Arizona if they're seniors or under 16. But others, maybe a majority given recent polls, were muttering at that damned Seth Meyers on Saturday Night Live, for having the audacity to suggest that the real Nazis in the debate over SB1070 were not Obama and the Justice Department, but the residents of Arizona that approved the "track aliens" bill. "Hey Arizona," Meyers said. "You know who says 'Show me your papers'? Nazis. Hitler even gets a commission every time someone says 'Show me your papers.' Arizona: It's a dry fascism, but it's fascism."

I get sick of name-calling, admittedly, but I have two bigger problems that loom larger than both the current immigration bill and how Americans fear the unknown and those that are different. My problems stem from the 1992-93 era when Colorado was referred to as the "Hate State" after passing the notoriously homophobic Amendment 2. Rationally, Coloradans should have admitted their stupidity when the nation reacted in anger. Instead, they (I can't say we) circled the wagons. What's happened to the notion of publicly admitting you're wrong, maybe admitting you're a moron?

First, Americans don't easily grasp that democracy does not mean the majority rules. It means majority rules in the context of preservation of minority rights. Therefore, any legislation initiated by legislators or citizen initiative is bound to be overturned if it seeks to take away rights from a certain class of people. As well it should. You cannot take away rights from people by popular acclaim - even from undocumented aliens. I might add that conservatives who defend the Arizona law say that this is intended to make the federal government "get off its ass" in enacting immigration reform. Wait a minute, isn't this the same group of people that don't want any new federal laws, because they want lesser federal government at all times? Seems as confused in the role of the feds as the attitude of many tea-partiers regarding health care.

Second, whenever radicals, liberals, or even middle-of-the-roaders point this out to conservatives, the conservatives are ready to act shocked and talk about "liberal hate speech." The conservatives talk about liberals as oppressors. Is this attitude-projection, schizophrenia, or denial of reality? I am someone who doesn't particularly like liberals as they are traditionally defined, because they are compromising types who are unsure of their own value systems. Thus they are very unlikely to be spewing "hate speech," because they are the ones most likely to say, "Well, you may have a point..."

Closed-minded hate speech comes from people who have a high emotional content to what they are talking about, and those are people who are using fear and anger to point to a group of outsiders - such as illegal aliens. "Hate speech" comes from the likes of Beck, Coulter, Hannity, O'Reilly, Malkin, and Limbaugh. Sure, it can come from the left, I've seen Maher and Olbermann go overboard, but it's native to the right.

I love to chat with conservative friends, but I demand rational-based discourse of the type you might see from Eric Cantor, Rob Corker, Andrew Sullivan, precisely the types you don't hear on Hate Radio because they don't scream really loud. When conservative acquaintances start quoting Beck or Coulter, I say to them "I'm sorry, there's no there there. I'm sorry, but Seth Meyers is right. I'm not trying to engage in name-calling, and I won't call you tea-baggers. But I am telling you my limits of acceptance of crazy rights-denying shit like SB1070, and I am saying that if you reject rationalism and make decisions based on fear and anger, then you are just as mentally disturbed as the Saturday Night Live folks want to make you out to be."

That's not hate speech from me. That's reality-based riffing. Sorry if you don't get it.

Thanksgiving Day

Abby helps the kids create decorations, above. For those who wish to see a chronological blog of the whole day, you can start with breakfast, followed by Gunnar's run, kitchen preparations, appetizers, table talk, turkey carving, prayer circle, the kids' play (Acts I and II), after-dinner gaming, and the discipline of Decker. Happy Thanksgiving!

And of course, on the morning after, there's always games of Balloon-Jaws. Caution: Dangerous to toddlers. You might not want to try this at home.

Arizona Thanksgiving at the End of the World

Carol's best friend in Arizona, also named Carol, likes to have an annual Thanksgiving soiree with more friends and relations than Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh. We hadn't been there in a while, so we piled in the car with dog in tow to hit the Valley of the Sun. Best line of the whole trip was in Gallup, where we were having a falsetto-singing contest and Abby said, "Dad, don't quit your day job - oops, never mind."

We stopped in Walnut Canyon, a national monument outside Flagstaff, to see the cliff dwellings:




The wonderful thing about the Phoenix gang is you get all the hilarity of a happily dysfunctional family without the muss and fuss of truly dangerous or disturbed relatives wrecking the week. Carol's son Decker is a strapping six-foot-something lineman for Salt River Project, but he's the intellectual type who reads The Economist, keeps up with the IBEW, and goes through novels voraciously. Since the list can include anything from the Oprah book club, he can cart around a Jodi Picoult novel while teaching a class on basic transformer theory, and not bat an eye. He's living at mom's following a divorce, with the three kids on tradeoff. We didn't realize the ex was barred from the house, she came in to pick up the sick two-year-old, and was charming and delightful, but Decker pointed out later that photos appeared to be missing from the walls. Typical. His new girlfriend, with almost the identical name as the former wife, is a charming and funny Chicago native with her own two-year-old son, who wants to play endless games of pirate and monster.

Carol's daughter Corey and her husband were living in the house for a while, while their own home was being finished, and they still drift in for visits. Her husband is a hilarious process engineer at Intel who's into beatnik culture and Trent Reznor, bearing a goatee and a Maynard G. Krebs grin. Corey is artistically inclined and often stoned, but she's the token Republican in the gang, a source of endless ribbing. She seems to admire the natural dominance of the ruling class, but gets into convoluted defenses of why she feels that way. It reminds of a new song Dar Williams released, "I Press the Buzzer," about stimulus-response experiments and the nature of fascism, except that Corey has her S-R wires crossed.

Carol's brother David was usually a permanent fixture in the house, as a perennial bachelor with custody of a teenage daughter, except that now David has finally married at some grizzled age no one can keep track of. Will meet the new wife soon, everyone loves her.

Carol has warned Decker and David and myself that Uncle Eddy is coming down from Prescott and politics are not to be discussed, as Eddy is adamant about a secret UN-al Qaeda conspiracy led by Obama. I said I'll just leave the new editorial out from The Economist, positing that the Republicans now officially devalue intelligence, so that no one but idiots are left in the party. We'll have fun. Happy Thanksgiving!