Hispanic Fanatic

With all the conniptions about Kavanaugh and the horrible injustices facing rich, white, straight men and the fact that the president is more or less a felonious tax cheat, there is another issue that we all seem to have forgotten about.

Yes, I’m talking about the fact that“in shelters from Kansas to New York, hundreds of migrant children have been roused in the middle of the night in recent weeks and loaded onto buses … for a cross-country journey to their new home: a barren tent city on a sprawling patch of desert in West Texas.”

This is the continuation of the Trump Administration’s nightmarish zero-tolerance approach to border enforcement, which as you recall, led to kids being ripped out of their parents’ arms, Americans becoming horrified at our government’s inhumane behavior, and conservatives shrugging and saying, “Eh, what can you do?”

Even though U.S. courts ordered the administration to reunite immigrant families, the White House missed the deadline, which is essentially just another grotesque fuck-up in a long line of staggering incompetence. Now, with even more kids showing up unaccompanied the border, “the federal government struggles to find room for more than 13,000 detained migrant children— the largest population ever — whose numbers have increased more than fivefold since last year.”

In these tent cities — where there is no education and access to legal services is limited — the average length of time that migrant kids have spent “in custody has nearly doubled … from 34 days to 59 days.”Studies have down that “the longer that children remain in custody, the more likely they are to become anxious or depressed, which can lead to violent outbursts.”

And of course, yanking children out of bed in the middle of the night “without providing enough time to prepare them emotionally or to say goodbye to friends could compound trauma that many are already struggling with.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “There must be a good reason why the Trump Administration hasn’t reunited these families and/or developed a halfway decent plan for taking care of these kids.”

Well, the joke is on you — and me and all Americans and every immigrant child in this morass of madness.

Because the truth is that the administration never had a plan for how to deal with this crisis of its own making. Furthermore, the Department of Homeland Security “was not ready to carry out the Trump Administration’s family separation policy, and some of the government’s practices made the problem worse.”

As such, the White House has basically admitted, “Oh shit, we didn’t expect Americans to actually want us to get those kids back to their parents. Our bad.”

Clearly, the president is completely indifferent to the plight of Latinos, immigrants, children, and most especially, Latino immigrant children. This sociopathic blasé attitude toward human suffering is one of the chief characteristics of the Trump Administration. The other is bumbling ineptitude. Put them together, and you have an inevitable dynamo clusterfuck.

In addition, it is only now that the administration is starting to catch on to the fact that destroying families and terrorizing children actually costs money. So the president has “diverted nearly $10 millionin funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

As critics (i.e., sane and/or decent human beings) point out, the administration is paying “for this horrific program by taking away from the ability to respond to damage from this year’s upcoming and potentially devastating hurricane season” even as “American citizens in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are still suffering from FEMA’s inadequate recovery efforts.”

In total, the Department of Homeland Security has “transferred $169 million from other agencies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the detention and removal of migrants this year.” Documents show that much of the money “was taken from the response and recovery, preparedness and protection and mission support operations budgets, which are used to prepare for emergencies.”

To keep things in perspective, “the Trump Administration would rather separate families and detain and deport parents [than] prepare for hurricanes.”

If one tried, it might be possible to come up with a more costly, delusional, self-destructive, brutalizing system.

But I doubt it.

Fortunately, the United States has survived the insidious plot of liberals to instigate a second civil war, and we all enjoyed Independence Day without bloodshed — well, without any more bloodshed than usual, because after all, we are Americans here.

In any case, everybody is talking about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Latina who defeated a 10-term Democrat in the primary election for a House seat in New York.She was a bartender a year ago, but now she’s headed to Congress.

Ocasio-Cortezis young, educated, female, and of course, Hispanic. As we all know, none of those four traits line up well with the GOP. So put them all together, and it’s possible that Republicans will burst into flames if they enter the same room as her.

Now, we heard a lot about voters in New York wanting a representative who “looks a lot more like the constituents in the very diverse district” than the “56-year-old white man” who has been in Congress forever.

That’s true, of course, which seems to bother people if we’re talking about Latinos or black people. After all, ethnic minorities are supposed to shun “identity politics.” But white evangelicals, for example, can offer record support to loudmouthed moron who shares none of their values, and it certainly can’t have anything to do with their shared race — nope.

Regardless, demographics were an important factor in Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, which is all fine and good. Butkeep in mind that Ocasio-Cortez also won in neighborhoods that were not heavily Latino, implying that her progressive ideas won over lots of people who don’t have a z in their names.

One could argue that in addition to proving the electoral potential of Latinas, her win “proves that people are ready to move away from out-of-touch, establishment Democrats.”

But of course, they wouldn’t be establishment Democrats if they weren’t hand wringing nonstop. We’re hearing from many liberals that electing bona fide progressives is impossible, and candidates like Ocasio-Cortez will turn off independent voters. Their thinking is that it’s better to play it safe and go with moderate, establishment candidates because that has so worked so well…

No really — that is their thinking.

Those of us who are progressive might mention that moderate Democrats have jack-shit to show for their timidity, and giving the people more Hillary Clinton clones is the essence of head-in-the-sand denial and the surest path to irrelevance.

Much of this attitude comes from the skittish nature of the Democratic Party, combined with its incredible talent for fucking things up and losing elections that it should win in a damn landslide.

But most it is because the Democratic Party remains enamored of the white working class — even though the WWC has made it perfectly clear that it is all in on Trump. Moderate Democrats keep insisting — despite mountains of statistical data and acres of anecdotal evidence — that if they avoid saying the word “liberal,” long enough, millions of Trump voters will suddenly abandon their hatred of Latinos and Muslims and immigrants in favor of… what exactly… expanding Medicare?

It’s interesting to note that Republicans don’t concern themselves with appealing to moderates, and they keep winning elections, despite the fact that most of America hates their agenda. Yes, conservatives can nominate a lunatic right-wing child molester and still almost win. Clearly, they play to their base, and they freely insult anyone who doesn’t agree with them, while Democrats flail pathetically and shriek, “Why don’t you like us? Pretty please?”

And speaking of agenda items, keep in mind that most of Ocasio-Cortez’s supposedly radical philosophy consists of ideas that most Americans approve of.

Still, it hasn’t stopped conservatives for attacking her for being a socialist (that’s Democratic Socialist to you) and for wanting to give all our money to gay terrorist undocumented immigrants and for, I don’t know, living in a house or something. Who can tell anymore with all the insanity from the Republican Party?

The bottom line is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be the future of the Democratic Party.

Well, it’s either her or 78-year-old Nancy Pelosi.

Hey, I know who I’m betting on.

Remember back when liberals were widely known as bleeding hearts and crybabies and hypersensitive wimps who would, if they could, create a Constitutional amendment that forbade anyone from getting their feelings hurt?

Yeah, those days are long gone. Because according to many conservatives, modern liberals are nothing but a bunch of heartless Antifa thugs who will crush your skull if you even mumble the words “free market.”

So liberals aren’t relying on emotions anymore, but you know who is? That’s right — Republicans. Much to our national shock, the GOP has become the party of feelings.

No, I don’t mean soft, useless feelings like empathy and compassion. I mean the manly, hardcore, non-cuck emotions like anger and contempt and hatred. They are very much in touch with those feelings.

This move to prioritizing emotions over thoughts has been prevalent in the Republican Party for at least a decade. Recall that George W. Bush, the loveable war criminal, famously led with his gut and eschewed scientific analysis or hard data in favor of whatever appealed to his intuition.

Yes, that’s how we got the Iraq War and truthiness and the idea that climate change was open to debate. Good times…

In any case, the current GOP has doubled down on the use of feelings over facts. During the presidential election, we heard that it didn’t matter if crime was down. All that mattered was that people felt crime was up. It didn’t matter that the economy had improved substantially under Obama. Conservatives felt that it hadn’t.

And now, during the reign of the most id-driven, unthinking rage-aholic in presidential history, we see the full effect of this approach.

We have an America that is not just illogical. It’s anti-logical.

I’m not just talking about conservative hostility toward higher education, scientific inquiry, and the very concept of facts. All that is proof enough of GOP’s preference for knee-jerk reaction over careful analysis.

No, I’m talking about our glorious leader himself. All rational Republicans should see that Trump has “every quality they described as a deal breaker under Obama” and withdraw their support immediately. But while there is “virtually no personality defect that conservatives accused Obama of possessing that Trump himself does not actually possess,” more than two-thirds of Republicans still back him.

And the reason is simple: the GOP, as a whole, feels like Trump is doing a great job, despite the fact that the man has startlingly few accomplishments. They feel it in their right-wing bones.

But of course, that leads us to the latest Republican triumph: the passage of massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

This panacea of conservative thought, this epitome of GOP dreams, is and has always been trickle-down economics writ large. There is no evidence, of course, that giving more money to rich people stimulates the economy. Republicans just feel like it should, and so now we’re going to do it, despite the fact that the vast majority of America thinks this is a terrible idea.

Of course, Republicans have a secondary objective (again, one based on pure emotion), which “is to screw over Democrats.” The GOP tax plan “will almost exclusively hurt residents of high-tax blue states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California.”

This is the just the latest, most egregious example of what has become the bottom layer of the GOP’s pyramid of principles. It is clear that conservatism “as practiced by most Republicans is an ideology built on one single principle: pissing off the liberals.” And this motivation is based on the feeing, the gut-level revulsion that “liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals… is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.”

In such an environment, it doesn’t matter that most economists — including conservative ones — agree that the Republican tax plan will not have any beneficial effects on the economy.

It doesn’t matter that the CBO has calculated that the plan will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt, which was anathema to a political party (long gone) that billed itself as brimming over with “deficit hawks.” Instead, we have GOP leaders — not working-class Republican voters, but full-time leaders of the conservative movement — who look at these facts, glance at these numbers, and dismiss “the findings as an accounting gimmick.”

It is not possible to have a true debate with people who, when confronted with overwhelming statistics, verifiable facts, or irrefutable evidence about clear truths, will simply set their jaws and proclaim, “No, I don’t believe it,” just because that’s the way they feel.

The only proper response to such people is to say, “Well, fuck your feelings.”

It may be apocryphal. But supposedly an unnamed New York publishing executive was once asked why there were so few books by Hispanic authors, or novels featuring Latino characters.

His response was a blasé “Hispanics don’t read.”

This is indeed bad news, as apparently none of you Hispanic readers are literate enough to even comprehend this article. And I’m not literate enough to write it, which is quite the paradox.

In any case, that publishing exec was clearly not familiar with Latin America’s rich literary tradition, exemplified by the late Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the greatest writer of all time (let’s not debate this). He also didn’t know that one Latin American country, Cuba, has the highest literacy rate in the world.

But closer to home, why hadn’t this exec heard of the brilliant Junot Díaz or the groundbreaking Sandra Cisneros? Or did he believe only white people were reading those authors?

For whatever reason, our anonymous publishing executive refused to believe that the largest ethnic minority in America was interested in books. And in this refusal came justification for the continued blackballing of Latino authors.

“There are several factors contributing to the paucity of published books written by Latinos,” says Marcela Landres, an editorial consultant who publishes the award-winning e-zine Latinidad and co-founded the Comadres and Compadres Writers Conference.

“Primarily, we need more Latinos on the inside working in key positions, such as agents, publicists, sales reps, bookstore owners, and especially as acquisitions editors,” she says.

Landres adds that Hispanic culture itself is another barrier.

“Latinos immigrated to the U.S. so their kids could live the American Dream, which is defined by financial security,” Landres says. “Writing generally does not pay well, so our parents understandably pressure us to choose more sensible careers. In order to be successful as artists, Latinos need to respect our parents but perhaps not obey them.”

As any Hispanic can tell you, disobeying your parents is a tall order. But that is another story.

In any case, some Latino advocates believe that the big publishing houses have hoodwinked us into buying their mainstream books, giving them little impetus to change the formula.

Of course, one strategy to force change is to bypass the big publishing houses altogether. That’s what I did with my novel Barrio Imbroglio.

After some nibbles of interest from the majors, I got the picture that my black comedy tale — about a reluctant detective named Hernandez — didn’t fit in with the preconceived notions about Hispanic literature. Yes, I had the word “barrio” right there in the title, but where were all the undocumented immigrants and magic realism and metaphors using avocados? It was a little too different. So I’ve done what more and more authors — Latino and otherwise — are doing, and publishing directly to Amazon.

But this end run has its drawbacks.

“There are few Latino self-publishing success stories,” says Landres. “I have yet to see literary writers, and/or writers who take years to produce a single manuscript, whose self-published books have sold well. If you write genre and have a bunch of books ready to go, the odds are in your favor. If you’re a literary writer who spends years polishing a single manuscript, not so much.”

In addition to the self-publishing crapshoot, there is the unpleasant fact that — like it or not — the NYC houses still have the most influence on what people read. And they are not packing the midlist with Hispanic authors.

Now, this isn’t just a matter of fairness, nor is it even all about artistic integrity and the myth of meritocracy. A more fundamental reason becomes clear when one considers that “Latino children seldom see themselves in books.” Education experts say, “the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation.”

Basically, there are only so many tales of brave and adventurous white people that Hispanic kids can read. At some point, they disconnect.

And if that is the future we want — a self-fulfilling prophecy where Hispanics truly don’t read — then we should just preserve the status quo.