By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
McALLEN, Texas |...You could look across the landscape and see it. I suppose you could, if that's what you're looking for. Internal unrest, we mean. A nation in turmoil. Reds against Blues. Antsy whites against everybody else. Politics on a tear unlike any seen in modern times. A congressman wishing for a return to dueling in the nation's capital.
What to make of it, Maria?
Is it the arrival of lasting Doom & Gloom, or is this just the now-popular politics of rage and ruin? Yes, and yes. The country is in for a long, harsh summer & winter of discontent. No one wants to go easy; no one wants peace and tranquility. It's us against you, Baby. Deal with it.
America has been too comfortable, they say. Others fear their ethnic group's demise, or at the very least a devaluation. Line it up for Uncle Sam. He's wondering what the Hell is going on, too.
The cold Russians are on record as saying they wish for an American Civil War, something perhaps rising from anger over that breakup of the Ol' Soviet Union they still blame on the United States.
Gorbachev, front center! Tell them the truth. Tell them the USSR over-reached, bankrupted itself with no help from Ronnie Reagan. Star Wars? A mirage.
Just like this crazy talk of a new civil war in the Lower 48.
I've been talking with some old pals from the World of Daily Journalism, asking about this civil war noise.
"I’m gonna get political here," said one. "A second American civil war would never happen as vast majority of Americans are too comfortable for war."
What would it take, however, I kept going. A few armed uprisings, maybe. Perhaps a shootout at the Mexican border in which 12 or so visiting Rednecks would be mailed back home in a casket. Sparks will spark, we agreed.
More to the point went the idea that civil war is only in the minds of our low-rent, self-serving politicians, that no serious, career-minded district manager for McDonald's is even thinking about it. Profit projections? Yes, that has their minds on the end-of-year accounting.
Texas seems ready to play Fort Sumter in this re-make of a time in America when it was mainly Whites dying for the cause. They seem to be interested. A massive convoy is said to be headed for the Mexican border to aid Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in his ongoing partisan silliness.
I've not caught the Invasion Fever and I live some 11 miles from the Rio Grande. Neither have most of my friends in town. We're busy with getting our asses to the breakfast restaurant, where we do discuss the political crap, but never to the point of ridiculousness.
Abbott has some fans.
Texas is still Red, led by Republicans at pretty much every meaningful level of government. They will talk tough and act it even more. It's in vogue, see. Republicans think they have America by the short hairs, that their time for staking claim to it all has come. It's now or never, as an on-the-commode Elvis would readily and gladly sing for them.
Hail, Mary?
Eh. For some of these flaming, fentanyl-fueled Republicans, the words would be: "Heil, Hitler!"
We'll keep tabs on the goings-on so you don't have to.
We know - what a waste of fucking time...
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