Archive for Opinion
Prejudice with a Halo
Posted by: | Comments“Why are some people so afraid of immigrants? Why is xenophobia so in vogue?”
That was the question asked by a local blogger recently. I’m not sure if he is referring to the hostility he shares with a few other Antiguenos towards white Christian foreigners, or if it was a veiled reference to Arizona’s recent legislation making it a state crime to be in the US legally. Effusive reader comments would seem to suggest the latter.
I enjoy observing the art of message manipulation, and so seeing the hate that has spilled forth because the people of Arizona are tired of the federal government empowering the drug dealers, rapists and murders who happen to be in the country illegally is, frankly, entertaining. As has been pointed out here and elsewhere many times, neither Mexico nor Guatemala tolerates illegal immigration and yet my countrymen are ‘xenophobic’ for preferring the rule of law. Not to mention that it is already a federal crime to enter the country illegally, making the AZ law superfluous, especially relevant for those who oppose or are ignorant of a federal system of government and the growing legal battle by the states against the central government. It’s gratifying to see that a dozen other states appear to be following my state’s lead. The real fight is with the federal government of course, not the immigrants, but those are just details that get in the way of good propaganda.
You would think a people with a history such as those who are migrating would prefer law and order after so much civil unrest, abuse and corruption in their native countries. But you’d be wrong. Ask a local if you may enter their house without their permission and take their possessions and return to your home at a time of your own choosing and they will quickly agree this is wrong, but the idea of a nation controlling its borders and admitting who it wants when it wants is simply outrageous. Until, that is, you remind them that Guatemala does this very thing. Oh, but that’s different Don Marco, we don’t need you, but you need us. Tell that to my maids, my employees, or the Guatemalans I keep employed through my profligate spending around town. There are even Guatemalans who live on the tourist industry here but secretly resent the tourists. I’m shocked, just shocked!
In fact, of all the developed nations, the US has the greatest history of immigration-legal and otherwise. Latinos now outnumber blacks, Indians and Asians continue to come to the US (if only to learn and then go home), and at every level of society first generation immigrants are thriving. Most of them are legal and wish other immigrants would respect their new nation’s laws. Perhaps all those legal immigrants are racist xenophobes too for wanting others to work and wait and play by the rules, like they did.
One ‘friend’ here called me a racist to my face for supporting the AZ legislation. Of course, I found out immediately he was completely ignorant of the law, thinking as he did that cops could stop anyone they wanted and jail them if they didn’t have immigration papers. I tried to explain probable cause to him without success (there is no such legal protection here, a point I found deliciously ironic), due process of law, etc. I told him that I thought the AZ law didn’t go far enough, because in my opinion to enter the country to work and live you should have to pass a physical, demonstrate a certain net worth, pass a literacy test, and have the recommendation of three native-born citizens.
He was appalled and thought he had ‘caught me’ in my own argument by pointing out that I couldn’t pass a literacy test in Spanish. When I pointed out that this higher bar for entry to the US was in direct proportion to the much higher demand for entry, I think I lost him. When I offered military service as an alternative path to citizenship, he protested vigorously that military service was ‘offensive’ and that the Guatemalan people were ‘peaceful’. Tell that to the families of the 16 people a day murdered here. He became apoplectic when I suggested that even better would be to allow anyone to vote, citizen or not, so long as they owned property. Yes, even those dirty, stinky brown Spanish speakers, so long as they own land. White and homeless, try again in four years. Merit-based anything can make some people crazy.
The answer to Rudy’s question, of course, is that few people in the US are afraid of immigrants. They’re afraid of losing their job to someone willing to work for less than the minimum wage, being run over by a drunk driver, having their little girl raped and murdered, paying ever-higher income taxes to support an exploding welfare class or getting beat up for walking on the wrong side of the road or wearing the wrong basketball jersey. Having grown up in Tucson and Phoenix I’ve seen all these headlines on a near-daily basis, which perhaps to others is really just a mass delusion without basis in fact that we’ve cooked up (and convinced the leftist, pro-migrant media to support), to mask our hatred for our darker-skin neighbors. We Arizonans hate everything about Latinos; we hate their tequila, their women, their food, their music, their soccer, their Christianity. Yeah, that’s why you see whitey in their restaurants, at their concerts, marrying their women and supporting their churches; we don’t mean what we say we mean about the rule of law, it’s because we’re really just racists. Como se dice: red herring?
For my part, I never experienced racism and discrimination until I came to Guatemala. Even in Mississippi at the black-run BBQ joint they didn’t charge me more for ribs because I was white or from the ‘Yankee’ state of Arizona, and when I asked at the Jewish deli in Philly if Catholics could order off the public menu they laughed and made jokes about wishing they had their own Pope to stop all the bickering. But here in Guate I can’t get a work visa, after all, I’m a foreigner, and while I’m welcome to visit for 90 days at a time and pay higher prices for things based on my skin color, I can’t even serve as the registered agent for my own company. You have to be a Guatemalan to do that. Walk into the Secretary of State’s office in Phoenix to form your own corporation and as long as you can pay the $100 (it’s $600 here), they don’t care whether you’re legal or not, black, brown or white, carrying TB in your lungs or a nuke in your suitcase or even if you hate America. That’s just how xenophobic we are.
What’s the old saying about hypocrisy? Kicking with the hind feet while licking with the tongue? How apropos.
Good Corporate Neighbor? Not So Much
Posted by: | CommentsReaders know I’m no fan of revolutionary humanist movements, but I do believe corporations have a responsibility to their fellow men and to nature. There’s an article on MiMundo (in English) about the Canadian GoldCorp operation here in Guate, which those in the know tell me is pulling out more than $350 million a year in gold. I won’t say they’re obligated to give some of that to the locals-I assume they are heavily taxed by the government who has the responsibility of promoting the common good-but it would be prudent and noble to try to return some of that water to the environment in a sanitary fashion. If they don’t, it’s the responsibility of the government to correct it. Your thoughts?
Thank God for Honduras
Posted by: | CommentsBack during the 1992 Presidential election Ross Perot was scolding Bill Clinton for thinking that he was qualified for the presidency based on his term as Governor of Arkansas (something Perot compared to having run a tienda and thinking you can then run the local Super WalMart), I remember Clinton’s spin team saying how much progress Arkansas had made under Clinton’s terms. At some point a snarky commentator noted that Arkansas was no longer dead last in the nation for everything (thanks to Alabama, or Mississippi, I don’t remember which).
Well, according to El Blogador Guatemala has scored rather well in the hemispheric race to the bottom:
Antigua may have been voted the world’s top travel destination, Tikal the world’s greatest historical experience ahead of the Taj Mahal and the pyramids, the whole Central American isthmus may be a global specialist in the generation of happiness, but this week Newsweek published an interactive infographic which saw Guatemala come in a lowly 84th out of a 100 of the world’s best countries — and if you sort by ‘Latin America & Caribbean’ the Chapines end up with the wooden spoon. Yes, we are officially the shittest place to live in the whole region.
Even though Haiti was apparently not competing, how this state of affairs could have arisen is a complete mystery to me frankly. Have the people responsible for these metrics (Health, Education, Political Environment, Economic Dynamism and Quality of Life) ever been to Honduras? They even have a higher per capita murder rate over there, as well as a lower per capita GDP and 80s-style throwback political shenanigans.
PS: Cuba came in above Colombia, a statistic that is bound to please those nice folk over on NT24.
With a -100 score (because -101 isn’t an option), in both Political Environment and Economic Dynamism, how did Cuba manage to beat Colombia?
That AZ Immigration Law and Racism
Posted by: | CommentsSeveral of you have written me asking about-or baiting me, as it were-the AZ immigration law and the Federal Court injunction. One person implied I was a racist for supporting the rule of law. (Note: I dislike the same % of brown people as I do black, white or yellow).
Another said, “How can you come here illegally and yet support a law which condemns illegals in the US?” Maybe he knows something about my residency application that I don’t.
Yet another wrote me saying, “How can you claim that people won’t be stopped because of the color of their skin?” Uh, because cops don’t have enough time, resources, or special vision courtesy of their badge to see the color of every driver’s skin, and besides, there are tons of darker-skinned people in AZ, including in law enforcement, who are legal. It’s called ‘probable cause’, and yes, it even applies to Latinos. Come to think of it, there is no probable cause in Guatemala, is there? Oops.
The whole anti-rule of law argument is specious. They want the law they subvert to protect them from everything except personal responsibility. The only people raising the race issue are, as usual, those who want special advantages based on race, viz., “I’m Latino so I should be able to break laws, but blacks from Nigeria or asians from Vietnam should follow the rules”. Here’s a legal analysis of the ruling. My own bet is SCOTUS hears it and upholds the AZ law. But for political purposes, the federal injunction does wonders for the right, with just 100 days to go until the election. I still think the Senate is out of reach for the GOP but the House is definitely in play. Very little will change post-November, but at least they’ll put the brakes on…maybe.
There Are Two ‘Strict Constructionalists’ in Guate
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s too bad really. Elena Kagan has a brilliant mind and is supremely qualified academically to be a Supreme Court justice, but the confirmation hearings and a reading of some of her opinions reveals a fundamental wrong-headedness about natural rights.The wordings found in the Declaration of Independence (which is not the basis of law), and the Bill of Rights and Constitution (which are the basis of law) make it very clear that those documents are acknowledging pre-existing rights that all people have. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution do not confer any rights on the people. Those documents prohibit the government from infringing rights the people already have.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” (The right is preexisting.) “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (The right already exists.) “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” (The right already exists.) And so the wording is throughout the Bill of Rights and Constitution.
The founders were very clear in their position that those rights are inherent in every person–God-given if you prefer. No man and no government has the power to confer those rights, so the founding documents of the United States do not make the error of attempting confer rights. Instead, those documents are the basis of laws that prohibit the government from infringing the rights we as human beings already have.
Yes I know that if you ask people on the street, many of them would agree with the statement: “our rights come from the Bill of Rights.” Well they don’t, and the distinction is critically important for a Supreme Court justice. Elena Kagan does not agree with the position of the founders on natural rights. In various opinions that Kagan has written, she uses the word “confer” with regard to rights protected by the Bill of Rights. She worded her opinions to say that the Bill of Rights “confers” those rights, and this is wrong-headed. It’s so wrong-headed that in my opinion it disqualifies her from serving as a Supreme Court justice, regardless of any other opinions she may have. She doesn’t agree with the fundamental thinking behind our founding documents. Instead believes that government has the power and the ability to confer rights on the people. Government has no such power. Despots and dictators like to believe they have those powers, pretend to have those powers, and use physical force to make it look like they have those powers. Perhaps Ms. Kagan would do better serving on the Supreme Court of a country like Myanmar, Iran, or North Korea, not the United States.
Sympathy Deformed
Posted by: | CommentsI’m not the most notorious blogger in Guatemala just because I’m a white male conservative (well, at least not only because I’m a white male conservative), but because I dare criticize NGOs, volunteers and all those who are here to save Guatemala from itself. This makes me unpopular with everyone-the conservative evangelicals who are here to save souls and perhaps help out in temporal ways, and the liberals who see my conservatism and constructive criticism as the very cause of the injustices they are here to fix. Add in the atheists who dislike rigorous logic and Catholics who dislike my criticism of pedophilia or corrupt or incompetent Bishops and, well, if you don’t like me I have to say, “Get in line”.
Now, if you believe in an eternal soul and a just God, then nothing could be more important than saving a soul. It reasons that eternity would be more important than this (relatively speaking short), life on earth. But when I point out that the evangelicals are ’saving’ Catholics, who were after all the first Christians and were saving souls long before King Henry or Martin Luther decided to start their own churches, well, watch out! Saying those kinds of things just isn’t cool! I mean, obviously it was wrong for the Church to try to prevent protestants from forming their own churches, but to consider evangelization of Catholics as anything less than the work of St. Paul himself is, well, heretical.
Not every evangelical is here to save Catholics though, many are helping people with nutrition, housing, medical care and the like, and some of these suffer from the same fallacies as do their well-intention liberal friends. I was explaining-or defending-myself from a hostile group of do-gooders in Antigua recently and attempting to persuade them that after teaching people how to wipe themselves and wash their hands, education itself was the most important thing. A man who knows how to think and learn is capable of most anything, and an educated man who has also been taught discipline and self-responsibility is the bedrock of an advanced society. I made the mistake of explaining how this was a principal difference between this country, and much of Latin America as Spanish colonies, and the US and Australia, as English colonies. Whoa…you just can’t say things that get to the heart of the matter without risking a stoning. Funny how those who list diversity and tolerance as commandments are quick to call for a ban on dissent.
These ‘progressives’, by which I mean that they belong to a liberal political faction, not that they are in any way truly progressive thinkers, didn’t want to hear the explanation for how the Spanish colonial rule was so different from the English, and how the Church in Latin America was both the source of greatness and great evil, or how the Indian culture and racial differences had influenced so much here while having little effect in the US, or what the effect of mass immigration or climate or the presence of large, working mammals had meant for progress in the English colonies in the US, so instead they called me a racist and an apologist for imperial America.
I was reminded of all this because of a recent article on sympathy:
To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.
No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up. This was not the consequence of poverty in any raw economic sense; it resulted from the various kinds of squalor—moral, familial, psychological, social, educational, and cultural—that were particularly prevalent in the country (see “Childhood’s End,” Summer 2008).
My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist was the chief of a charity devoted to the abolition of child poverty (whose largest source of funds, like that of most important charities in Britain’s increasingly corporatist society, was the government). She dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.
I Thought This Day Would Never Come…
Posted by: | Comments…When I would have to publicly defend Obama. My friends who happen also to be subjects are whining that Obama is picking on BP because they are British. That’s patently false; he’s picking on them because they are a successful oil company. He would do the same to Exxon. And, Americans own as much of BP as you whingers do. You know it’s bad when the British are whining that Obama is referring to BP as ‘British Petroleum’. Welcome to DC spin. You have to realize that Obama was the darling of the far left, and while in the US Senate consistently received the ‘most liberal Senator‘ award. That would put him in the mainstream of the Politburo in the Krushchev era. And that means that his religion is environmentalism and his eternal enemy is the profit-seeking capitalist. If you had a conservative elected President on a pro-life platform and suddenly joined the Democrats in advocating forced abortions for anyone with more than 1 child, you would see outrage on the right similar to what you are now seeing on the left.
Defenders of the President rightfully point out that his administration was equally as hostile to Toyota when their little scandal erupted, even though everyone who knew anything knew this happens to all automakers and, oh, by the way, those cars were made in Kentucky or something. Obama was merely defending his investment in GM, I mean, you don’t exactly expect him to treat the competition favorably, do you? That’s the beauty of nationalizing private industry; you get the full power of the government behind a ‘private’ company. Look how well it worked for Fannie & Freddie. I mean, when you have the government involved, what could possibly go wrong? Aren’t they the infallible successors of Marx?
Furthermore, Obama has been charged with failing to do enough about the oil spill itself. Sure, he has earned some of this blame by setting expectations so high during the campaign and continuing to behave as if he were a hereditary, absolute monarch. But really, what is he going to do, swim a mile down and stick his finger in the hole? Granted, he has proven to be an incompetent chief executive, and the irony is that even Democrats are now whispering that while they were diametrically opposed to everything in the Bush agenda, he was a better crisis manager. (He did graduate from Harvard with an MBA, after all). You know it has to be bad for BSNBC to criticize Obama, and they’re all over his lack of leadership.
But we can’t blame him for that either, because you can’t blame someone for not being able to exceed their skill set. Obama is a very able speechmaker (with a teleprompter), and by all accounts excelled at community organizing. Let’s face the truth though; he coasted through his campaign for the US Senate in a Democrat state, and coasted through a general election against an old, weak, poor candidate in John McCain. Instead of the comparisons he likes to draw to Lincoln or FDR, he should be thinking Jimmy Carter. They are both intelligent men who are so out of touch with the mainstream and in love with themselves as to not even realize their elections had little to do with them and everything to do with misguided public anger.
Welcome to Democracy!
Kids in Guatemala
Posted by: | CommentsI’m frequently asked what life in Guatemala is like for gringo kids. It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because life in the capital-where most gringo kids live-is so different than Antigua. Out here we are living in what you liberals derisively refer to in the US as ‘flyover country’ (for the uninformed that means all the ‘red’ states between the east and left coast). The capitalinos look at Antigua the same way, kind of like country bumpkins that are neat to visit occasionally and to watch their quaint little traditions on holidays.
In the capital the wealthy/gringo kids live a life very much like that in the US, and most of the local kids they associate with will be similarly pampered, spoiled and culturally the same. Here the kids live in ‘real Guatemala’ (except that Antigua isn’t real Guatemala), and so instead of sharing the same interests as foreign kids, they tend to resent them. That manifests itself in rock throwing, assault, etc (infamously known as ‘GuateGrudge’). Tough to sell perky gringo soccer moms on that, ain’t it?
So anyway recently a pretty blond mommy from Wisconsin knocked on our door with her two young daughters and wanted to introduce herself to our kids and see if anyone could ‘play’. She remarked how her host family had promised her the neighborhood was perfectly safe and so, couldn’t they come out and play? I wasn’t going to say anything about the attempted assassinations of my children in said neighborhood until she said, “Yeah, you know, it’s like, so neat that we’re here in Guatemala and it’s supposed to be so dangerous and yet I can just let the girls out to run around the neighborhood by themselves.”
Now, some expats are a little more free with their kids. ExpatMom takes her kids out, but they look local and sound local. The kids are not likely to get stoned just because their mommy is a Canuck. (Although that should earn any kid a little ribbing). But even before the slingshot attacks, when we lived in an exclusive, uppity, gated community filled with ex-Presidents (and their brothers) and ex-Vice Presidents (and their brothers), and the like, I wouldn’t dream of letting my pretty blonde daughters roam the neighborhood alone, and I certainly wouldn’t in a neighborhood where a little blond girl draws as much attention as a flipped armored car with money (or sugar?), pouring out.
So I had to break it to her as gently as I could. “So you don’t mind if your daughters are kidnapped, gang-raped, strangled and tossed into the creek?” Actually, that’s what I wanted to say, to try to give her a sense of the danger, but instead I said, “Perhaps you should reconsider” followed by, “Our kids go outside only under our supervision, during the morning hours when local kids are most likely to be in school, with a guard dog we don’t feed until after play time, and we always have one person scanning the surrounding area for threats.”
She no doubt thought, as many of you who aren’t raising children here likely think, that such an approach is unreasonable. This isn’t lilly white, Lutheran Wisconsin, honey. I would have characterized it similarly had my two year old not been felled by a slingshot and my eldest daughter recently escaping by mere inches from a similar projectile.
So what’s the answer to the question about kids in Guatemala? Well, if they don’t look and sound like locals, you need to live in an upscale gated community. My local friends here have said as much-always hushed and making sure no other Chapins can overhear-and a few pragmatic white liberals have begrudgingly admitted they would do the same if they had children, and it’s unfortunate but true. Those gates and walls-much maligned by romanticists-do keep the riffraff out, although the gates generally open for anyone who works in the neighborhood, is related to someone who works in the neighborhood, or who has a plausible-sounding reason for being there, so even under those circumstances I urge great caution. So mommy, move to a gated community, get yourself a great big protective dog, and tie him to your daughter’s chastity belt whenever they leave the house.
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