Susie Bright's Journal

Ready Freddy: Notes on the 2008 Primary

The first time I ever heard the expression, "he's not ready"— as in, "he, a black man, is not ready"— I was sitting in a tree with my best friend Laura Martin, in 1969. A black councilman in Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, was running against incumbent mayor Sam Yorty, a good ole' boy if there ever was one.

Our legs dangled from a big avocado tree in the back yard. Laura and I loved being out of our Catholic schoolgirl uniforms and  hanging out in our cutoffs. I'd been at St. Rita's for a year, and thought it odd that every single student there was white. But we were all for civil rights, weren't we?

I found out different that day. It was just before the election, and true to my mom's liberal beliefs, I was ecstatic about getting out the vote for Tom Bradley. I asked Laura if she wanted to go down to the Superette, and pass out leaflets.

She looked at me like I was crazy. "The colored people have got it all wrong," she said, no doubt echoing her own mommy. "Tom Bradley is not ready to be mayor of Los Angeles; he and the other colored have got to know their place and stop pushing."

I wasn't very good at argument at age eleven and I was little bit impulsive. Okay, maybe more than a little.

"That's not true, Sam Yorty is a pig, that's RAY-CIST!" I cried. And when she smirked at my red face, the tears welling up— oh Laura, how could you ridicule me!— I pushed her out of the tree.

I felt a little pushy again this morning, reading the exit polls and editorials following the Democratic 2008 primary. I've often been in this place, where I am not "in love" with either candidate— by a long shot— and yet I'm outraged when either of them are damned with euphemistic racist or sexist evaluations.

It seems like the down-low way to diss Obama, from the Clinton campaign, is to say that he's "not ready" to be President. Many people embrace this expression quite innocently, since they count the years that Hillary has been in office, or even been alive, and point out that she is the elder. True enough.

But this expression of "not being ready" has a legacy in the American Civil War and African apartheid. It's the other face of the "uppity Negro" complaint, a phrase no one can say with a straight face anymore.

Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister and apartheid defender, became notorious for saying, "the black man is not ready to run Africa before a thousand years.” His church supporters, people like Cardinal McCann, proclaimed: "the black man is not ready to assume control of his destiny."

And that's just recent history. It started with the abolitionist movement in the US, when slavery-protesters like Frederick Douglas were deemed "uppity"' because they had the nerve to call for emancipation.

If there's a doubt about precedent, I'd suggest you look at ANY electoral contest where a black candidate is facing a white incumbent, and you'll find some version of this race-coding.

The uniqueness of the 2008 Presidential race is that we get to celebrate our maturity in moving past the poison of prejudice. But we also witness seeping resentments against black and female candidates that show how far we've got to go. It's dug up a lot of unexpressed grudges and trash.

The Clintons have already been spanked in recent weeks for Bill's intemperate Jesse Jackson remarks, for downplaying MLK and the achievement of the black power movement (I never thought I'd see the day LBJ got coronated for that!)  and damning Barak with faint praise by admiting that he is "articulate"— for a black man, of course!

Meanwhile, Obama's campaign has not joined in with the "conniving, teary-eyed bitch needs to get back in the laundry room" misogyny that the Republican camp has no trouble slinging. Is he just being a sensible campaigner, or does it repulse him, as one would love to  assume? I'd like to think he's a feminist, an equal rights campaigner, and mindful of the strong women in his life.

Now's the time for Hillary to speak up from her side and condemn this "not ready" garbage. No one gets to this level of a presidential campaign who's not ready—  even if all that means is to be ready to serve at the corporate leisure, as George Bush has demonstrated. Like Mike Huckabee, Obama's ready to take the job, whether he's going be a "greatest-ever" president or not!

I'm not holding my breath for the Clintons to step up to the plate, and speak out against slight-of-word racial undercutting. So far, they've been content to play this trope against Obama's surging popularity. Unlike some of her followers, Hillary knows exactly what dynamite she's playing with. The only question is, will it blow up in her campaign's face?

Photo: Go Tell Mama

The Voting Confession Booth

Last night I heard from an old friend in New York, who was on the ropes:

"It's only hours away from the polls opening, and I still don't know who I'm gonna vote for!"

Her agony is not unique. A lot of people who want to see George Bush frog-marched out of office with a bucket of tar on his head, are, today, puzzled as to who they'd like to see take his place.

For Democrat-voters, the Obama vs. Clinton contest has been a Giant Dipper of Indecisiveness.

For independents, it's tempting, for once, to get involved in the game.

For GOP voters... sorry, what a freak show. I know a couple sensible Goldwater pornographers you might want to write in as an alternative.

I told my girlfriend last night, and I'll say the same to all of you here, "I'll be your kind confidante to confess your vote to— and I'll love you no matter what."

Yes, I love everyone's who's voting today, because I can't remember the last time I saw so much excitement about enfranchisement!

My New York pal has been afraid to speak up at her Obama-crazed office, to reveal that she's been a Hillary-supporter all these months. However, she just watched Will.i.Am's music video set to Barak's New Hampshire primary speech, and was so in awe of his entertainment and speech-writing staff she just might cross over.

But it's hard. She contemplated the sexism she's seen in this race, and rallied to Gloria Steinem's argument why women are denied the front-runner throne.

Then, she thinks of Bill, and wants to puke.

Still, she wonders what Obama can get done after all the Hollywood pretty people have left the building.

And then she dreams about the awestruck impression a "President Obama" would make to the rest of the world, especially the parts of the world the U.S. has gutted over and over again. That's inspiring.

I said, "Gee, you've been through the wringer. Here I was, just fondling my old Shirley Chisholm button, thinking of all I've seen since I got my 18-year-old vote in 1976!"

Like many left-wing voters, I wish there was a feminist, antiwar, sexually-liberated,  free-speech-loving, class-conscious,  civil rights-marching, slow food activist who would invite me to take my shoes off in the Lincoln Bedroom. Damn!

I started out with Kucinich— Elizabeth, I mean. I wish we could run away together on a unicorn.

Next, I stood wide-eyed and puzzled by the Edwards phenom, wishing again, that his wife was running, because she sounds so real, and she doesn't have a problem with gay marriage, either. It was amazing that this candidate was the one— the white guy with the fancy hair— who brought poverty and working class issues, and corporate-abuse outrage, to the table. THAT'S what's tearing this country apart, and that's what any White House will be facing, the true David vs. Goliath.

Today, though, I had to choose between Obama and Clinton.

I wish Obama was a Trojan horse of liberal goodies as the Republicans would like to portray him— but there's no evidence that he is.

Talk about embarrassing moments— Obama, in 2004, demanded that he not have his picture taken with S.F. Mayor Gavin Newsom during a fundraiser, because Barak didn't want to be pictured next to the guy who made gay marriage legal on Valentines Day. Ugh! Politics as usual.

But the Clintons... and yes, I think it's fair to refer to the plural...  have ridden their centrist, sellout, fundie-crooked-accomodationist  pony right into the ground. They've controlled the Democratic agenda and enabled the most egregious GOP crap. They are emblematic of a Congress that's done little to repudiate George Bush.

Witness the latest Feinstein-led rally to appoint Michael Mukasey as Attorney General, a guy who champions moral relativism on waterboarding, and is just another in a long line of stomach-turning, REPULSIVE events. That reminds me of the former Clinton administration.

The Clintons are admitted hawks, they're prudes, and they're absolutely quaint on issues like continuing the embargo on Cuba. Someone needs to surgically remove the Cold War out of their ass. They take advantage of liberals hoping that they are more "cool" in their private lives than they are in their public ones. Who cares? I don't want to "have a beer" with them; I'd rather they show their social justice colors in their public policy.

I voted for Obama today as an anti-DLC vote, as a repudiation to the party machine. It's sort of like voting against the old Daley machine in Chicago.

I can see that Obama is a beautiful and charismatic speaker, and that he has the emblematic, generous, Aloha spirit. His wife Michelle is awesome, and I'd vote for her in a hot second.

But I would love to appear before him like a Dickensian Bart Simpson at the foot of his bed, whispering, "Don't fuck this up, man."

"Don't sell out the people who are voting for you today, because the reason they are attracted to you is revolutionary.

"We want a COMPLETE change: an end to this war, to torture, to racist imperial politics. We want an embrace of the public good, democracy, a commitment to education and the future. A repudiation of corruption! And don't forget a defiant kick in the corporate ass, which is going to be the hardest thing you'll ever do in your life. Might wanna get Edwards as your new AG..."

Plus, baby wants new shoes, too. It's a tall order.

Now get out there, and vote!  And... if you'd like to reveal your thoughts, or voting choices in the comments below, feel free to post anonymously. I won't publish anything that's a loose cannon, either. 

P.S. To my local girls: Yes on Prop 93! Let's make sure the best US State Representative ever, John Laird, stays in office. If only he was our president!— Wouldn't life be fine?

Photo: Viva Che!  

Who Got Hit with the Ugly Stick?

I usually shy away from contests of any kind, as a judge or a contestant, since I'm the kind of softie who thinks every boy and girl should win a big kiss and a pie.

But this year I gleefully agreed to be a judge in a contest, The Golden Dukes, to decide which political figures in the US, this year, were the most atrocious liars, cheats and scoundrels— the kind of people who've bled this country dry.

The categories are Best Testimonial Trainwreck, Best Corruption Based Chutzpah, Most Improbable Forgetfulness, Best Sex Scandal, Local Scandal, and Overall Big Kahuna Scandal.

Who would you have picked? See? It's hard!

The winners got announced today by editor Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. 

The best part of being a judge for this contest was conferring with the other judges, particularly John Dean, "a gentleman and a scholar." He wrote me during our deliberations, "Bush and Cheney have done what no one believed possible— made Nixon look good."

Aside from our votes, we judges were asked for our "reasoning." It was hard to reason!— because after you've rolled the videotape on these bloated hypocrites' dossiers, you're ready for a bucket— not thoughtful discrimination.

If You Had to Pick the Next President Strictly on Sex...

Today, on my In Bed podcast, I begin the show with an evaluation of all the presidential candidates based ONLY on what we know about their sexual preferences and sexual politics— which true to our puritanical heritage, often have nothing to do with each other.

What are the contradictions between Obama posing Kennedyesque in swim trunks, and then applauding the endorsement of a "reformed homosexual" preacher?

Exactly how does Giuliani tell his new best friend Pat Robertson about his kinky side as a cross dresser? Why is Mitt Romney inextricably caught up in in our fantasies of Chloe Sevigny in Big Love?

Another aspect up for frivolous yet exhaustive scrutiny is the candidate's spouse. Who has more sex appeal: Bill Clinton, Jeri Thompson, or Elizabeth Kucinich?  I find it hard to resist Elizabeth's tongue piercing, but for phone sex, I don't know if you can beat Bill.

 

  Listen to an excerpt 

Listen to the whole show at Audible.com: LINK

Get the show free for a month: LINK

 

Finally, in my Try This at Home mailbag, a listener asks: my boyfriend is really difficult to arouse, but he tells me I'm the best relationship he's ever had. What gives?

Don't forget, you can send your confidential questions, feedback about the show, and requests for free show coupon cards to susie@audible.com. (Episode 319, November 23, 2007)

Photo of Demi Moore in The Scarlet Letter.

What Kind of Fool Do You Take Me For?

Despite my attempts at life's little enchantments, this week carried a deep, dirty, rotten disgrace in its wake.

I refer, of course, to the decision of the Democratic Party majority in Congress to give George Bush a hall pass and a pot of gold to sally forth into Stage Freakazoid of His Holy Crusade. "Y'all be careful now, W.!"

The "conditions" the Party laid down are as tough as mom's dentures. I'm sure the Iraqis'll respond to U.S. ultimatums like children at The Great Father's Knee. That's what the little brown people always do when we get upset, isn't it? Colonialism With Conditions!

I expect, expected— fucking-always-expect— nothing from the Democratic leadership. Can you sing, LBJ, LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

But the past few months, the Dems have been outraged about Iraq. They've been determined in their election promises, devoted to pointing out the criminally negligent, self-mutilating vainglory of it all.

I thought, "Huh! They're going to follow their constituents' wishes on this. They published the best arguments of anyone! They're going to bring the reality check to the table and stand there to see it gets paid in full. Yee-Ha!"

We got the Happy Meal coupon instead.

What does it mean when the Speaker of the House says the compromise she just struck is something she herself wouldn't vote for? That's pathetic.

It says that at today's 23% approval rating for Bush's war plan— and counting down—  the Bush Admin is still outmaneuvering the Democratic leadership. Who are the Dems playing to? Why should we bother to vote for a "President" in '08 at all?

What's left of the GOP is betting on the fantasy that they'll be better unified on horseshit than the Dems are drawn asunder on the same pile of dung. Both sides, in fact, are responding to corporate profits and lobbying strategies that have nothing to do with the public interest.

And, yeah, we know that, now.

So many people seem to get it, and are even mesmerized by the circle around the drain. But being led around by the nose is still very much in vogue. Voters have been played like marionettes on kneeslappers like "special gay rights!" and "immigration walls!"

Both houses, the Capulets and the Montagues, have given The War another pat on the back and a raise because they are beholden to, and blinded by, a different constituency than the one that voted them into office.

Who am I talking about? Quo Bene?

That's what I'd love to see spelled out in the daily papers of record. Talk about missing a set of teeth. They squander their space with dribble about how the Democrats are afraid of what they would "look like" if they aren't supportive of the troops getting their C-rations.

Look like? Are you kidding me? Who besides the gilded 1% is looking for anything, except an end to this immoral imperial charade? When are the Billion Dollar Dogs of Profiteering going to be put down?

One day Enron will be seen as a minor blip, a geologic footnote, in the glacier of greed that comprises the ruling class of this country. They will grind this world flat.

The people I see who are following the money are waaay on the outside— filmmakers like Robert Greenwald with Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers— that's mandatory viewing. You can start your "who benefits?" list right there.

Then there's Amy Goodman's crew on Democracy Now: Ya gotta love Kenneth STARR, of all people, defending Blackwater's war contracts.

The war profiteers cannot be altruistic or public-spirited. They can't be fulfilled. It's like asking a scorpion to give you a free ride. They can't be talked into a wind-down, a slowdown, or letting up on the gas. Their existence as a permanent arms economy can only survive by expansion.

Until we take away their toys, they will break them; they will break us. We have to stop paying for them, voting for them, working for them. It's a vision thing, as King George might say— to stop seeing that we share the slightest, tiniest, mutual interest.

Bush and his posse were voted in by ungilded people who thought he represented their economic trust. What does it mean for them to regret that mistake? What will we do now, when it's all too apparent we're bleeding out?

Several weeks ago, Andrew J. Bacevich, a retired Army colonel who served in Vietnam, wrote an editorial in the Boston Globe:

"Today, Iraq teeters on the brink of disintegration. The war's costs, already staggering, continue to mount. Violence triggered by the US invasion has killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. We cannot fully absolve ourselves of responsibility for those deaths."

This past Mother's Day, he lost his own son, by suicide bomber in Iraq. In despair, he cried:

"What kind of democracy is this? When the people do speak, and the people's voice is unambiguous – but nothing happens?"

Then the words that must have been the hardest...

"I've been  struggling...to try to understand my responsibility for my own son's death."

It's a question any American could ask, because we're losing our sons and daughters in every quarter. Our Constitution— an infant, really— is gasping for breath.

What kind of a democracy is this?  It's a cradle that begs to be set right.

Make Me Wanna Holler

"Why I Am Opposed to the War..." Martin Luther King

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies.

On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act.

One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just."

It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just."

This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love...

No, you can't take it with you:

And in case you haven't had every hair on your arm stand up lately:

And thanks to Ducky for making Mommy so proud. The song on the first video is my favorite Martin Gaye song, Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

White Moms on Dope

My guest this week on In Bed is Mike Males, the author of a recent Op-Ed titled This is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad, and several books on the way society demonizes and fears teenagers.

In Bed with Susie Bright 277:

Soccer Moms Gone Wild, with Mike Males

Listen to my whole interview with Mike: Link

In his Op-Ed, Males says that contrary to media stereotypes of drug-abusers, it's middle-aged, college-educated white people who have the highest rate of drug abuse today, with some of the most startling increases in the number of female addicts. Rush Limbaugh and his girlfriends are not the exception, they're the rule!

According to the CDC, the number of Americans dying from the abuse of illegal drugs has leaped by 400 percent in the last two decades, reaching a record 28,000 in 2004. The F.B.I. reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high of 1.8 million in 2005.

The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal agency that compiles statistics on hospital emergency cases caused by illicit drug abuse, says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004— a huge increase over the last quarter century.

Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends?

One reason is that today's drug abusers are simply the ''wrong'' group. As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse, points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on ''linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.''

Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.

Among Americans in their 40s and 50s, deaths from illicit-drug overdoses have risen by 800% since 1980, including 300% in the last decade. In 2004, American hospital emergency rooms treated 400,000 patients between the ages 35 and 64 for abusing heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, hallucinogens and ''club drugs'' like ecstasy.

Equally surprising, graying baby boomers have become America's fastest-growing crime scourge. The F.B.I. reports that last year the number of Americans over the age of 40 arrested for violent and property felonies rose to 420,000, up from 170,000 in 1980. Arrests for drug offenses among those over 40 rose to 360,000 last year, up from 22,000 in 1980. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 440,000 Americans ages 40 and older were incarcerated in 2005, triple the number in 1990.

...Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California's drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective policies.

These numbers blow my over-40 mind!

It also caused me to have a personal reflection. In the past couple years, among my own circle, the two people I'm closest to who've had an unpleasant brush with the law are both women in their mid-50s. One was busted for her third DUI. Another became addicted to Oxy after a surgery, then got caught scoring it illegally.

Neither of my friends are "Ma Barker"— they're the salt of the earth, wonderful, giving, educated, and really hard on themselves. All their loved ones were "shocked"— but now I think, why? Apparently, my girlfriends are right in the bullseye of the fastest-growing trend ever.

The more intriguing question is: what do my friends, and other middle-aged women have in common that makes them so vulnerable to substance abuse?  —Or the cascading law and order disasters that follow in its wake?

Of course, I am speaking anecdotally, but I am fascinated to see my life fitting the statistics. Sure, I have teen friends who've gotten in trouble too, but it was crap like shoplifting, graffiti, and underage-whatever. A nineteen year old friend of mine suffered the worst violence of last summer because he was held up at his minimum wage donut-shop job, at gunpoint, by someone who was no doubt a middle-aged drug addict. Lock up Pop! Time out for Mom! Grandma is going down!

I phoned Mike the instant I read his op-ed, because I recognized that the way teens are fetishized as drug fiends, they are similarly targeted as sexual monsters or victims. It's the same propaganda, and in the case of sexuality, once again, it's women in their late-childbearing-years who are leading out-of-wedlock births, not teenagers. 

Why does there have to be a teenage bogeyman or mewling kitten-victim in every tree of media fear-climbing? Mike's got the facts at his fingertips that really put the sting on this thing.

Finally, in my Try This at Home mailbag, I gave Mike the option to stay and listen to me answer a letter from a man who wonders if he can use a dildo as a depth finder. Gee, the things senior criminal justice researchers have to listen to!

Don't forget, you can request Susie's Girly Cards, or send confidential sex questions and feedback about the show to susie@audible.com. (Episode 277, January 12, 2007)

 

Beep, Beep! — A Little Food For Weekend Thought

La Frontera means the border, or the frontier, in Spanish. In our neighborhood, The "Club Frontera" used to be a bar with sawdust on the floor that catered to Mexican men. It was on lower Main Street in Watsonville, the heart of central-coastal California.

The Santa Cruz County line is a block away from Club Frontera at the Pajaro River. Monterey County is on the other side of the bridge. The river also divides Watsonville from its poorer sister, the unincorporated community of Pajaro.

The Club Frontera was closed down a couple of years ago, after years of notoriety. The Watsonville Police Department Headquarters is located on the far side of the club's parking lot, about a hundred yards away from the front door.

You can picture Captain Renault, from Casablanca, making the final raid: “I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on here, and prostitution, and heroin, and cocaine, and arms sales, and the fencing of stolen property!”

This story is by my friend Andy Griffin, the organic farmer whose brilliant newsletter about food, farming, ecology, and politics, is called the The Ladybug Letter.

 

On the other side of Club Frontera from the police station is El Pollero restaurant, a former drive-thru hamburger joint that now serves spit-roasted chicken. In Spanish El Pollero means “the chicken herder.” In street slang, a “pollero” is an ironic term for a smuggler who brings undocumented workers, or “pollo,” across the border— making the name of our chicken shack on lower Main a fowl-smelling pun.

Anyone walking down Main Street, seeing a Pollero next to a Frontera can hardly have any illusions about where our most important border is. It isn’t the dry riverbed that defines the county line. The real frontera lies eight hours to the south, and it divides our community everywhere we go.

But let’s change the channel from yesterday’s news and watch cartoons. Every Saturday morning at our house, Wile E. Coyote tries Acme-brand booby traps, Acme-brand dynamite, and Acme-brand H-bombs to sabotage the Roadrunner. And— Beep, beep!— every Saturday morning the Roadrunner escapes, leaving Wile E. to play the fool.

Wile E. is a Hollywood coyote. Real coyotes— the feral canines with dirty gray fur, bright yellow eyes, sharp teeth and street credibility— have to get their birds, or they won’t survive. Their range extends across mountains and deserts, from Chiapas to the Yukon.

There are human coyotes at home on the same range, so named for their cunning, their scavenging instincts, and their capacity to adapt to a harsh environment. In colonial Mexico, the Castilian grammar of the conquistadores imposed itself on the indigenous Nahuatl noun, coyotl, and a New World bastard-verb was born. The regular “ar” ending to coyotear, means to behave like a coyote. Yo coyoteo, tu coyoteas, el coyotea, etc. Such slinking behavior in a man is met with a mixture of disdain and admiration in Mexico. Coyotes are not heroes, but they are survivors.

Wile E.’s canine cousins have adapted to suburbia. They sip cool water at dawn from swimming pools on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Coyotes eat the cat food that’s been left out for Muffy, and they’ll eat Muffy, too, if they catch her, before they slip into the brush to sleep the daylight away. Suburban pet owners, who build spacious homes oblivious to their surrounding habitat, get outraged at this eruption of wilderness when coyotes stalk prey inside the city limits. But “crossing the line” is an abstraction to a coyote.

For the coyote’s human namesake, “going over the line” is a job. El coyote is the person who gets illegal immigrants under, over, or around the border. Pollero is a synonym for coyote. We all know how much a coyote enjoys a chicken dinner!  Right now the price a coyote charges is about $2000 for a one-way trip from Otay Mesa or Mexicali to San Jose— more for women with infants or children.

Coyotes come in all shapes. Some coyotes are diversified businessmen who smuggle drugs across the border along with their human cargoes. “You want some coke with your chicken?”

Some coyotes are milder in spirit and guide their customers across the desert the way a hen guides her chicks. I knew a coyote once, a marimacha, or Mexicana dyke, named "Little Pistols," or María Pistolitas. Her husband was serving a life sentence on the Mexican prison island Islas Marias, for growing opium poppies. Maria worked to support her family as a lay midwife and curandera when she wasn’t smuggling immigrants. María was a sweetheart in a brassy, wise-woman sort of way, always ready to prescribe herbs and massages.

During George Bush Senior’s administration, the U.S. Mexico border was so porous that the price a coyote could charge a chicken fell precipitously. Business got so bad that one coyote I knew, Tío Raul, had to quit the life. He got a job pushing a broom around the Wrigley’s Gum factory in Santa Cruz. Tio Raúl had house payments, car payments, a wife, and two expensive teenaged daughters to maintain.

Luckily, for all the hard-pressed coyotes, President Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton. President Clinton threw a bone to his critics on the right and started “Operation Gatekeeper,” which promised renewed Federal attention to the border situation.

“Gatekeeper” placed almost all active INS officers on the international frontier. By moving I.N.S agents to the deserts, well away from any employers who felt harassed by onerous federal regulations, Clinton honored the needs of the business lobby, while managing to look tough for the press and the public. Bill Clinton is a man who knows how to conjugate the verb coyotear. Tyson Chicken, one of the biggest poultry producers in the world, is based in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, and was one of his biggest political supporters. Bush Jr. knows the Tyson folks too.

Due to enhanced border enforcement, the cost of trespassing into the United States went up dramatically for the pollo. Darwinian logic meant that the marginal coyotes— the dumb, the unconnected, the unlucky— were hunted down by agents in lime-green four-wheel drive Broncos, and culled from the desert.

Smart coyotes were back in business. Borders move around, but there’s always a line to cross. What about Bush’s  new fence? It was always dead on arrival; the real coyotes would've found ways to build that fence with undocumented laborers.

The way I see it, year after year we see the same cartoon landscape scrolling in the background— while in the foreground a bald eagle tries to solve social problems with Acme-brand dynamite. The varmint gets away in every episode.  Beep, beep!—my "*". I can hear a coyote licking his chops right now, as he relishes another chicken dinner.

(c) by Andy Griffin, The Ladybug Letter. Photo of "Prima," Andy's new baby.