Saturday, June 30, 2007

Outsourcing Mexico's Poor

Did you ever get the feeling that with this overwhelming influx of Mexican immigrants into the US that the Mexican wealthy/hierarchy/government might be outsourcing their poor?

The Mexican poor in Mexico have to eat; they need educational and medical services. The poor need welfare and social programs. Why keep them at home and spend Mexican dollars on them!!? The wealthy are smart; instead of raising taxes on their own wealth to help their native poor, why not send them (or at least do little to stop them from emegrating) to the US? Once here, the generous (stupid or naive, from the aristocracy's point of view) US allows the illegal-immigrant-Mexicans to send their children to US schools, to be serviced at US emergency rooms. An additional benefit: When the poor work in the US, they generously send much of their money back home to help family members to live better at home...giving more foreign exchange for thegovernment to play with. (Mexican-in-the-US dollars sent back to Mexico almost equals or exceeds foreign revenues derived from their most successful--and other--export, oil sales!)

Also--and most importantly--illegal emmigration relieves the revolutionary pressure of the poor that if remaining at home might and should be aimed at the Mexican aristocracy itself. The aristocracy/government attitude/policy seems to be: get rid of the home grown problems before they reach a critical mass and topple our aristocracy!!? Help/encourage/don't impede poor people-who-seek-a-better-life's flight into the US.

Illegal immigration into the US is not the fundamental problem. The continuing repreheasible social inequities in social and economic Mexico itself is the fundamental problem fueling illegal immigration into the US. Viva la (hoped for) Revolution!!

Friday, June 29, 2007

Schools and Education

Schools are to educate, not socially experiment. Students should not be sent to school to learn to get along; students will best learn to get along because it makes efficient their learning. Cooperation is not an educational goal; it is a successful tactic. Harmony, order, peace, understanding better enable us to learn 'reading, writing and arithmetic'...and the better, more successfully we learn those essential human interaction tools (the educational function; above all), the more and better we will learn and desire to interact. Tell me I have to get along with someone and I will not accede; I will rebel; show me how it is in my best interest to get along with someone, and I will follow. By emphasizing educational focus on 'reading, writing and arithmetic' the schools will more quickly first create educational equals and, subsequently, are more likely to get students--all of us--and for the rest of their lives--to accept the logic of accepting everyone as social equals.

Forgive my absence; I have returned.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Attitude

While living in the fast social lane of Los Angeles lately, I find I have been deeply questioning my social values. Am I a racist? A misogynist? An anti-immigration bigot? I seem to be very angry at one time or another toward blacks, young people, successful people, Hispanics, women, and the homeless. The list does not stop there. Maybe I don't like anyone anymore? I am an irredeemable hate-monger?

After six hours today of deep-probing social angst, I found the answer to my dilemma: what I hate is not groups but attitude. I dislike blacks with attitude, young people with attitude, successful people with attitude, Hispanics with attitude (both documented and undocumented), women with attitude and the homeless with attitude...you get my point.

Attitude is "Fuck you...I am better than you...get out of my way...I don't say please, thank you or I'm sorry...I've been fucked over all my life so I deserve the right of way and I can head directly to the head of the line." Los Angeles breeds attitude. I once described Los Angeles as 'six million ambitious people pretending to be laid back.'

Does that mean I have to leave Los Angeles to find nice, courteous people...the opposite of attitude? Where are the nice blacks, nice Hispanics, nice young people, nice women, nice homeless. I want to live with them. I'd really like to stay here in LA. Then I can be nice at home. A dear friend of mine (full disclosure: he was born in LA) said to me over dinner the other night that he "hates anyone that likes nice people". Now I have a new category to be angry at: cynical friends...(is cynical another definition of attitude?) Oh well, I guess that makes me a "friendist". Because I hate him now.

A Brief Curriculum

There are only two subjects to be learned: history and decision-making (or cost/benefit analysis). The rest is derivative.

Monday, June 04, 2007

The Post-Modern US

Almost all of multiculturalism, diversity, race, ethnic and cultural discussions in the US today are arguments about power: who gets a bigger slice of the economic pie. The cry of exclusion is nine times out of ten only a negotiating tactic; an attempt to use guilt as leverage. That is why discussion of history--the past--is most often skewed, distorted, and incomplete; these reviews seek not objectivity nor a comprehensiveness but rather an intellectual and emotional weaponry; armaments, fodder for the cannons of debate and zero-sum negotiations. Balance and rationality are seen as undermining adversarial positions. They erode conviction, surety, and certainty. Heaven help us if we enter a battle without having fully demonized your opponent--as racist, fascist, imperialist, chauvinist, etc.--it might lead to defeat. Remember, we are not seeking truth; we already have that. We are seeking advantage. Or to be truly post-modern about it: their is no singular, unifying truth; so why bother.

Sunday, June 03, 2007

SPECIALNESS #3...Growing Taller

There are two ways people use to feeel taller (a form of specialness); grow, or hold everyone else down.

SPECIALNESS #2....Branding

This is another in the series of 'specialness' stories and essays under the category of: 'What-we-won't-do-to-feel-special".

A bartender friend of mine works at a nightclub that is noted for its wide selection of domestic and foreign beers. He told me about a customer who wanted a particular beer. My friend pointed out to the customer a selection of sixty beers on the shelf beind the bar. But the customer demanded Brand XYZ. My friend said that he didn't have that brand...but he had six beers that tasted indistinguishable. The customer was skeptical. My friend offered to give him the blindfold taste test; see if he could distinguish any difference in taste from his favorite beer. The man was given six small glasses of beer. In each one was a different beer. The man tasted, admitted that the beers all tasted the same: "Exactly like Brand XYZ". My friend asked triumphantly: "So...Which one do you want?" The man said, "I only drink XYZ" and walked out.

'Branding', which is today's term for creating loyalty to a product, is the clever advertising task of making an individual feel special only when and if s/he is consuming the 'branded' (named) product. (90% of the time the specialness is: 'You'll get laid more often if you use our product!') It has nothing to do with the product's size, nothing to do with it's shape, color or taste. It has to do with the consumer being convinced that he/she is joining a special elite group by using that product; getting 'hooked' on the specialness of a desired group identification. It is similar to (if I remember my college literature course properly) the social category of Epsilons being convinced by the governmental leaders in Huxley's "Brave New World" to feel special because they wore green clothes and no one else in the society was allowed to wear green... in spite of the fact that the government consigned the Epsilons to work in sewers.

Demagogues everywhere use a feeling of specialness to divert a group from it's unproductive or miserable condition. (SEE poor US Southern whites and the feeling of specialness RE Southern blacks which for 200 years kept the Whites satisfied with their ongoing economic impoverishment by their local money-ed interests.)

Branding is a form of 'specialness' which reveals the need to compensate for how un-special consumers really feel. Sad; but true.