No, the talk has been more along the lines of "what is going on with this weather?" Because the past couple of winters have brought an atypical amount of snow to this city west of the Cascade Mountains. In fact, 2008 has seen the most snowfall to hit Eugene, Oregon, since 1996.

Here’s your faithful Street Team 08 Oregon rep with a short visual presentation of the latest strange winter to visit us.

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Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus’ General, Culture Kitchen, and OpEdNews.

OUR TALE BEGINS with a man who desperately seeks an answer to his deepest, heart-sprung questions, headed up by the quintessential and Googlicious How Do I Get Rid of the Mexicans? You see, our protagonist feels his very nation is under dire attack by the filthy mongrel hordes from the South, those who bark that most Arrogant and Sickening of Languages—Español, those who dare to settle into his beautiful nation, hellbent on storming the kitchens and fields and meatpacking plants and canning plants and steel factories or to otherwise seek to implement that most foul of Mexican behaviors: the trading of work for pay.

Let’s call our protagonist “Greebey.” Let’s call him “Greebey Vather.” Let’s pronounce that “Vay-thur.” Let’s make his middle initial “N” and then let’s give him two rags in his back pockets, one on each side. One is the confederate flag, which he never uses to blow his nose. The other is the one he uses to blow his nose. But he always carries both. No, make that confederate flag a stars N stripes. but with the circle of stars, not the rows. No, make it a Budweiser eagle bandanna, yeah, bleached from too many days in the sunlight falling upon his cracked dashboard, where it usually rests. Render Vather’s bandanna Made in China. We don’t need a label. Wait, make it a bleached-out watermark on the bandanna. Only Vather never looks close enough to see it.

Okay, so Greebey N. Vather, being an amateur culture-healer, has diagnosed the trouble with his nation. It’s not greed, it’s not war, it’s not ignoring the sick and the weak and the poor, no, it’s nothing like that. In fact, Vather has a name for it, and he calls it “Immigration-Stress Syndrome.” To tell you the truth, Vather is pretty proud of himself. After all, he comes up with the name after simmering on the couch in a chunky stew of flatus barely penetrable by the hyper-acidic rays of TV punditry and a well-aimed onslaught of advertisements that urge him endlessly to Please Check With His Physician if he suspects he is coming down with “Thoughty Head Syndrome.” (Which he scoffs at, of course.)

Vather has waited in agony for someone else to address the dire disaster that threatens the very existence of his nation, but nobody is picking up the slack. Vather hoped he would see some noticeable housecleaning results from Bicyclists Picketing in Affluent Areas, an anti-immigration-rights group of folks which was supposed to “force change faster,” by preaching in nicer and whiter parts of town but was surprised to note that their brave actions only resulted in a slight uptick in business at the local NeufChatel Luncheonette.

Our protagonist, himself, lives in Errol, New Hampshire (which is 2000 miles from the Mexican border), but the 3 out of 300 people who are Hispanic is still far too many for his liking. After all (at least in my screenplay), the English language has been a part of Vather’s fantabulous nation since the Framers shat America forth in a bloody ball of maize-peppered stool after seven days of parchment-smoking rituals in the aftermath of the Great Boston TeaBagging Party, and thus—it is a divinely-ordained language. In fact, Vather is often complimented on his love of all things English and how fiercely he protects the purity of the beloved language.

“What can I say?” He’ll proudly rhyme. “It’s my for-tay.” And then he’ll reach for his eagle-rag.

We watch our hero in a series of “Rocky Training Sequences” (minus the Rocky and plus a TV and bag of chips) as he reads the paper, or listens to the tube, and cheers on the efforts in some states to punish businesses that hire the Aliens. At one point, a neighbor of his observes that some of these businesses are simply outsourcing to Mexico now, or gradually going out of business entirely and thus hurting America’s economy, but Vather only gets a patriotic twinkle in his dusty, scar-colored eyes.

“Good!” He says, relishing a strawberry from the bunch he just bought, off-season, in the local supermarket-plex. He sucks his teeth earnestly and eagerly for a noisy moment, as if they are disappearing cinnamon candies he has just discovered jammed into his gums.

“To make this nation great, we need to rid ourselves of this scourge,” he muses between sucklings of his molars, and eerily, almost in exact tandem with the voice of Lou Dobbs (whose audio runs under all the scenes Vather is in like a burbling brook…if said burbling brook has a scummy green film on top of it, that is.) Dobbs will echo from Vather’s TV and through his empty home like the hectic rant of an empassioned but whiny preacher, bouncing off of the bare walls like angsty anti-mexican gnats.

But to Vather, Dobbs irritated voice is like the brass in an anthem. As we listen, Vather looks to the horizon with a deep reverence misting his eyes. “I simply understand what the Framers understood. That this great land is beset on all sides by savages. And we need to protect our American culture from them.” He looks up then, the fire of sunset begrudgingly illuminating his rheumy eyes. “Anyway, the only people who need to worry about the pressure on Illegals and those who hire them are those who have something to hide!”

Vather looks over suddenly at this reporter (Did I say “screenplay”? I’m reporting a screenplay, that is, the author travels through time, too, it’s all very Castenada-meets-Kar Wai-meets-Godard-trips-with-Burroughs-y-Gasset-while-Waiting-on-the-border-For-Fuentes) and whispers And I have something that will help us Clean the Scourge for once and all.

I follow Vather to the shed, where he furtively checks over all shoulders before reaching down to lift a tarp, which exposes to our view a small, shellacked and black box. It has colorful flowers painted across it in random and fluid patterns. He holds it out to me, his gnarled and yellowing nails suddenly almost touching my cheek, and I stagger back quickly. But then I compose myself, and step to it again, to get a bit of a closer look.

Vather continues to glance about us, as if in great fear of discovery.

“It’s…pretty?” I offer, wondering if I should mention the MADE IN CHINA sticker, probably once-white, but now blending in to the ebon tone rather well, undoubtedly from countless secret fondlings by Vather.

He pops the box open. And inside is what looks like a little grain of corn. And that grain of corn seems to be glowing, though nibbled off in very tiny chunks.

And that’s when Greebey N. Vather lays out the whole story for me. It seems that he can go back in time when he nibbles this piece of corn. He doesn’t know where it came from, he was walking behind someone one day and they dropped it. Greebey sort of lagged behind until the woman was out of sight, and then he scooped up what he thought was a piece of gold maybe, and kept it between his hot fingers until he got home, worrying it like a rosary bead in the hidden darkness of his lint-stuffed pocket.

Whetever the magical grain’s origin, Vather doesn’t care, except to note that he can go backward in time. The larger a chunk he swallows, the further back he goes. So he has decided, after four very small jumps which he used to calculate the ratio of size:span of time traveled, that he will go back far enough to make an important change in American history and see how it plays out. He imagines it will have a huge effect on today’s “INVASION OF ILLEGAL ALIENS.” In fact, by the time he is done thinking it out, he is sure of it.

How does he become sure? Well, Vather doesn’t read up on any history. He doesn’t research the Bracero program, or the railroads’ recruitment, he doesn’t investigate law, he doesn’t bone up on Polk and Slidell, or the history of America and Mexico, or America and Russia, or America and Japan, or America and China, or America and Africa. That wouldn’t fit in with Vather’s character.

Let’s give him the idea from TV. Let’s go back to his ubiquitous harmonizer, Lou Dobbs. And of course, we won’t actually call him “Lou Dobbs.” Let’s call him “Dimulous Vox,” or “Populous Nodds” or maybe “Peor del Mobbs.” [Clearly, I’ll have to sketch this part out, the details are not so much a Macguffin but rather an important element. As a placeholder, let’s just say he hatches a plan and decides on a particular juncture where he can make a crucial change. Puro Sci-Fi stuff, even room for a lot of comedy in how he comes up with this.] And we’ll need a catalyzing event, so let’s make it something like The Illegal Immigrant being named Texan of the Year. This would really set Greebey off.

Before Vather leaves his home in high spirits for his final, world-changing aventura, he hangs up a banner in his living room anticipating his own successful return. The banner spells out, in crudely-cut letters reminiscent of ransom-note typography: WELCOME TO A LAND WITHOUT HUMAN FILTH! GOOD JOB REMOVING THE SKURGE!!1!” (The “1” is actually cut out and glued in along with the regular punctuation. Touches like this will imbue the film with some kind of Coen Brothers feel, or so I tell myself, I could easily overreach here and end up with more of a Farrelly Brothers vibe…which would be interesting for such a topic.)

Cue surreal time-travel sound effects as Greebey eats the whole piece! Sequence of travel/experience like the Lizard King in the desert under the peyote sun! Flashes of Oliver Stone editing directed with a Michel Gondry flair and scored by Bernard Hermann!

And BOoOm, Vather is in the past.

Have you guessd the end by now? Do you grin anyway?

Vather lands at his Important Temporal and Historical Junction. Let’s start the clock, because he only has as long as his body retains the cornmatter to change history and thus rearrange his “real” time Present. If he does not make his changes by then, he reverts back to his time period, and all will be just as he left it. So of course, when Vather lands in the Past, he does not eat and at all costs, avoids using the toilet. [Good opportunities for humor here, awkward social situations, although, again the specter of the Farrelly Brothers lurks nearby.]

But Vather does make the change in time. He manages to interfere with a certain message being delivered on time by a seemingly insignificant person, a person never noted in history books, but whose small action made possible the crux that underpinned a series of events alllowing millions of immigrants coming to America. [research immigration history here for some plausible creative nonfiction type historically-rooted event, this is important to solidify narratively.]

And thus, the entirety of the present is shifted, Vather is successful!

…In a sense.

Because he doesn’t actually manage to stem, or slow, the tide of Mexicans, who, in the new (changed) Present reality, currently outnumber all other ethnicities in Mexerica, write most of the books, and make most of the movies.

Greebey was wrong about what his actions would mean, and what the course of the future would turn out to be, because, of course, he is blind to realities of cause and effect and contribution and consequence in the first place. [A major point of the film, clearly.]

The good part is that his house (originally built by “illegal” construction crews) remains where it always stood! However, inside the house—alone in the thick silence—is a dusty and yellowed banner that still awaits the return of a man…who (now) never existed in America.

The banner reads

WELCOME TO A LAND WITHOUT HUMAN FILTH! GOOD JOB REMOVING THE SKURGE!!1!

And may I say—with a friendly smile and delicious breakfast burrito especially prepared for you—welcome America, to an era where not only your voters, but your media makers will be increasingly of a mind to challenge what has long been a dominant framework of perception, uncontested, and unexplored, grown fat and malodorous and lazy and malignant in the absence of challenge and fresh air. Those Greebey N. Vathers of today will fight these changes, and new voices, for they are of a twilight that threatens to overshadow the good of the whole, the health of la gente, the dissemination of news and worldly views through any lens but their own. And they fear change, because they understand exactly what changes would benefit the rest of us, and what that would mean to the lock they have on so many powers today.

But dawn will rise, is rising, will continue to rise—with the brilliance and luminance and insistence and inexorability that powers the hearts of all people today who insist upon scraping away the hypocrisy which poisonously festers in the gap between the words in our anthems and the deeds of our nation; who need to hear stories not recited in a self-hypnotic and lulling tone by the well-oiled cash machine, or by the prison-camp overlords, or by the fearful, apathy-glazed mainstream media horde.

Can you feel it? It’s a new day breaking all across the land, and we really oughtta get out in the sun. Because we don’t just need more light, and we don’t just need more heat. We need lots of both, and at once. Ignorance and pain and rot bloom in those rooms kept gloomy sans la luz, and if we’re gonna make our way to rationality and humanity, we’ll need to burn down and away the fungal rot of much of yesterday’s hate.

¡Adelante!

treatment © 2007 XOLAGRAFIK Media

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus’ General, and Culture Kitchen.

RAND maintains “homegrown terrorism” will not be the result of jihadist sleeper cells. Rather, it will result from anti-globalists and radical environmentalists who ’challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.’ …

Further, RAND claims anti-globalists and radical environmentalists ’exist in much the same operational environment as al Qaida’ and pose ’a clear threat to private-sector corporate interests, especially large multinational business.’

—Truthout.org, The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act: A Tutorial in Orwellian Newspeak

So through these types of statements, we begin to see it all come together. The War of the future, already taking place now. Those who refuse to consider any ill effects upon the world and the animals and the poor and simply the common gente, a breed who refuses to let go of a philosophy of greed, despite the mounting consequences of such a failed paradigm vs. those of us concerned first and foremost with the weakest of us, the meekest of us, the poorest of us, and Mother Earth herself.

We already know the weapons that the State will use against the people who dare to question all the powers that are wreaking havoc upon our world. They will call us “socialists” and then “terrorists,” and they will lump free speech in with “treason” and Empathetic and Concerned Human with “Al Qaeda,” and they will spy on us using our own consumerist and increasingly networked goods, and then lie about it and nobody will stop them (because in this unnamed war taking place now, the Government is by necessity on the same side of the corporations) and even suggesting these kinds of actions should be actionable or halted is to be seen as anti-American (a word which will continue to be broadened and already includes those who simply want Peace between all humankind!), they will tase us and disappear us and the choice will be before us to either bow down and get with the New Brave World (even as it destroys the natural world), or to be seen as a “jihadist,” an “anti-american” or an “extremist.” Even though there really is nothing more extreme than choosing not to stand against the harm being done against the world and the people and the creatures and the environment today.

For now, it seems the monstrous (and growing bigger and more all-seeing and powerful every day) Google has chosen the wise tactic:

We are committed to preserving YouTube as an important platform for expression of all kinds, while also ensuring that the site remains a safe environment for our users. Balancing these interests raises very tough issues. In this case, our general policy against graphic violence led to the removal of videos documenting alleged human rights abuses because the context was not apparent. Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas - and if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message we will of course leave it on the site.

—Google/YouTube’s statement, according to The Skeptic

And so Wael Abbas’ YouTube account has been restored. For now. But really, it all depends upon exactly what he is saying, doesn’t it? Of course it does.

I do hope everyone is paying attention to the statements that come from RAND et al. They have been echoed by Gonzales and Rumsfeld and we have every reason to believe these people see it exactly this way. They are making the declaration of war, the ultimatum on belief, and the assault even on (rational) thinking.

Either way, there’s no more time to be pulling punches or using euphemism, unless we want to be fully unprepared. Because as I see it, sooner or later, we will all be forced on one side of this fight or the other. Truth…or comfort at the cost of everything else. Maybe there is another way to say it, but that’s how I see it. Some people I know think the Democrats will save us from such fates as we now teeter before, but I’m not counting on it. I think it must be “us” who must save us. But maybe that’s more socialist thinking, or anti-American talk. It’s hard to tell about such things anymore, in a day and age when being against torture is anti-American.

For now, I’ll be glad there are these means of speaking and sharing information and telling stories and waking each other up. These seem the types of things we wouldn’t, as a People, need to thank anyone else for. These seem like rituals that every culture and civilization have, and with good reason. It is so we do not forget, do not go blind, and do not become controlled and owned and abused by those more powerful, or fall prey to the worst of our own natures.

But this is where we do our talking in this age. Through this series of tubes is where we do so much of our storytelling and our speaking truth to power. And if that’s where many energetic and concerned people are reading, then it is good that we do. My thanks, as always, go to Wael Abbas, and to Brad Will, and to Aung San Suu Kyi, Nelson Mandela, Amy Goodman, Michael Moore, Al Gore, Helen Thomas and all the other storytellers and truth-seekers with whom I share esta planeta, and especially the ones who risk their own perch for the good of the Whole. You are a huge part of our survival as a planet and a People. Thank you, mil gracias, and keep the faith.

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus’ General, and Culture Kitchen.

For the first time, Washington D.C. has collected data on H.I.V. and found that in the nation’s capital, the “modern epidemic”—as the Washington Post calls it—is now primarily one affecting blacks.

The numbers most starkly illustrate HIV’s impact on the African American community. More than 80 percent of the 3,269 HIV cases identified between 2001 and 2006 were among black men, women and adolescents. Among women who tested positive, a rising percentage of local cases, nine of 10 were African American. […]

The District’s AIDS rate is the worst of any city in the country, nearly twice the rate in New York and more than four times the incidence in Detroit, and it has been climbing faster than that of many jurisdictions. […]

—Study Calls HIV in D.C. A ’Modern Epidemic’; More Than 80 Percent Of Recent Cases Were Among Black Residents

And big propz must go to the woman who dares try and change the world, as well as shout out the truth as she lives and sees it:

In the nation’s capital, a 24-year-old is helping to lead the fight against AIDS.

Nicole Styles is doing what she can to stop a major health-care crisis — an epidemic, even. This AIDS activist is stepping in where parents, educators and the government have failed, devoting her life to handing out condom kits and trying to persuade people to use them.

Styles is trying to save the lives of kids in the nation’s capital, home to the worst HIV/AIDS rate in the country. One in 20 D.C. residents are infected with HIV, and in some neighborhoods, that number is as high as one in 10.

Styles thinks that when these staggering numbers were announced, a state of emergency should have been declared. Instead, she and many others in D.C. suspect that the government’s seeming indifference is because 80 percent of those infected are black and most of the others are gay.

Styles believes that if the disease affected white heterosexuals at a rate of one in 20, the city and federal government would have more of a response.

’It would be all over the place. It wouldn’t be difficult to obtain information about HIV and AIDS,’she said. ’You wouldn’t have to have us standing on every corner trying to get the people, passing out stuff trying to let the community [know] about what’s really happening’

Styles’ anger and compassion motivated her to join the staff of Metro Teen AIDS, an activist group that offers free and confidential HIV testing and counseling services to youth.

—AIDS in DC, Turning Anger into Action

Before my mother became the Director of Public Health for an unnamed New York county, H.I.V. prevention (Infection Control) was her area. And it was her job to break this news to many people, too. I heard a lot about AIDS in this way, when I was younger.

When I think of Africa and how it has been exploited and divided and harmed for so long, I think too of the disgrace called the “US response to Hurricane Katrina.” And when Katrina happened, I couldn’t help but think of all the Bob Marley lyrics I grew up hearing every day of my young life, about blacks being crammed in slave ships, about people who work and live and die so that an economic giant like the U.S.A. can get its feet underneath it, and who are still living with so much hate and antagonism and resistance to their health. From many directions. Y también, I think of Hurricane Katrina, when I read about the lack of funding and attention given toward educating and helping the black community in the very capital of our nation.

There is no reason any one population—gays, blacks, Mexicans, Indians, Chinese, Koreans, Chileans, Cubans, women, children—should be bearing the brunt of a disease or disaster or a hardship while the rest escape to firm ground. This type of inequality is a direct result of believing in some mystical “Us” and “Them” that will keep these ills from our own doorstep. I do not believe in that divide. I feel all the pains and horrors that come for any of us can come for all of us. (If this were not so, you wouldn’t see sudden, unpredictable conversions among the GOP toward stem cell research, scuba outfits, etc.) And it hurts me and actually makes me furious to the point of getting teary to see how black people have been, since time immemorial, the group who bear the most brunt. From so many directions.

It should go without saying that we should all care about all of us. And further, that any HIV proliferation is a threat to all of us, everywhere. But the time has long past arrived for us all to stand and fight to make things better for those worse off than others. The poor, the gays, the hunted migrants, mujeres, blacks, the illiterate, the hungry, the voiceless. I do believe in working to thrive, and getting ahead, and succeeding. I made my bones up in this place, aqui, in the U.S.A.! But we must not hop on the first fast boat and flee far from the wreckage around us. We must look to save those in the deep tides, and we must stand with the most maligned and hunted of our species. In this way, and only in this way, can we hope to redeem our kind in the face of the deeds of the worst of us.

Don’t give up the fight!
—Bob Marley

Crossposted at The Unapologetic Mexican, Jesus’ General, and Culture Kitchen.