“Here is how it works: first some incident, say twelve men buried carefully in the backyard of a condo in a decent neighborhood, catches one’s attention. Then one investigates and sees the incident as part of a larger problem. Then one sees the problem as really an issue. Then one sees the issue as really a question that demands a new policy. Then, one feels comfort. Problem/issue/policy/defined and question answered. This is the death of the mind that slaughters the intellect of the educated on the line. Sometimes this death comes before anything but little fragments have been examined and the mind dies wrapped around the notion of, say, the drug war. Or of illegal immigration. Or of trade as embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Cures are suggested: just say no, hire more narcs, an open border, guest worker permits, vigils against violence, poetry readings, plays, magazine stories such as I have written, heralding new horrors to savor.
I’ve moved into some place beyond that. I am here to announce the obvious, the war. It rages all along the line, it kills thousands, it slaughters beneath notice and it will spill gore on my ground when my bones rest in the brown earth I love. Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of bumbling imperialism. But what took place in this patio, what is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States. The future is here, even though I can’t even catch a trace of the rotting bodies with their gaping, toothy mouths.” [i]
...The machinery clanked in my mind. NAFTA had destroyed the future of peasant agriculture in Mexico and hurled millions toward the fence. NAFTA had spawned a legion of U.S. factories in Mexico and now they were going to China because Mexicans at ten bucks a day wanted too much pay. Nothing on the horizon would alter these facts. Millions were being starved out of their lives in Mexico and coming north. Drugs were simply one more thing accelerated by NAFTA: increased trade meant that searching vehicles for drugs became a mathematical farce. Every year the narc budget increased in the U.S., every year drugs became cheaper in the U.S., every year more people went to prison for drugs in the U.S….
The only flaw in my notion is this: the Mexican war is simply part of a global breakdown, the shredding of traditional cultures by the machinery of trade, by overpopulation, by the destruction of natural resources by teeming human numbers. It does not matter if it is a man slipping through the wire with a baby in my desert, or a teenager living in a village in Eastern Europe for the whorehouses of the West. It is all part of that big picture that wonks tend to in the temples of think tanks. But this one facet, the Mexican war, was happening on my watch, on my ground. [ii]
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