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Find out more about Wilfredo: Wilfredo Rodriguez’s work has appeared in The San Juan City Magazine, The Lowell Sun, SU Latino and various online publications. As a radio show host at WERW, he tackled important issues that plagued immigrant communities while sharing unique world music. He was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but decided to move to the mainland US in 2001 to pursue a college degree. He'll work to give a voice to a new generation of immigrants and to those enduring communities that have lost their voice. |
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It's inevitable. Any political debate in the United States eventually boils down to two positions. Each political party will proclaim its monopoly on the truth and its minions will fight the real battles 'on the ground.' Ignorant buffoons will yap about something they know nothing about and act on their stupidity. Some become criminals (or illegal immigrant lovers) and others become paramilitary pawns (Minutemen buddies). Eventually, everyone chooses a side (or a side is chosen for them) with the unfortunate side effect of making the problem worse.
Take for example last year's Fox News catfight between Geraldo Rivera and Bill O'Reilly. It all started with the tragic story of a young girl losing her life because of a drunk driver. O'Reilly covered the incident because the driver was an illegal alien and asked the resident Hispanic for an opinion. In comes Geraldo Rivera with his passionate bravado disagreeing with Bill from the start and stopping short of calling him a xenophobe (or racist moron). The video of the exchange landed on YouTube, driving me to analyze a few of the comments with my attentive reader, you.
'Notice how the Hispanic Jew uses his chicanery to obscure the issue,' said an astute viewer. What we have here is the good old fashioned chicanery argument. It has been used by many to describe Jews, Hispanics, Gypsies, and trolls. It usually helps to demonize the group and eventually discredit anything they say because everything is full of trickery and formal logic. It sure worked with the trolls, they never really bounced back. This kind of comment helps us reach a middle ground and moves along our search for a reasonable solution to the problem at hand... not! (like Borat would say).
'If you want to know exactly why the US economy is failing then look to all the banks who give illegal aliens car and home loans. These people have no intention of paying these loans off and in most cases drive the cars back into Mexico as an act of thievery,' commented another informed viewer. I don't know from which dumbass economist he got his numbers but this sure sounds like a scapegoat argument. It's like blaming the new kid in high school for the principal's decision to cancel prom because of persistent and rampant drug use on school property by students and staff. That's just bad logic. You might as well blame the building or the drug, as long as it's anyone but yourself.
Nothing compares to Bill O'Reilly's points in the segment. He represents the crown jewels of scapegoat-ism, faulty logic and downright bigotry. 'Americans have a right to protection from irresponsible people. That's why the government was created,' the great Papa-Bear (as Stephen Colbert calls him) said in his show before the exchange with Geraldo. In his reasoning, our government has failed to protect us because the guy wasn't deported earlier. The fact that he had more than one drunk driving conviction was irrelevant. He was dangerously illegal. If he was a hillbilly from New York City like O'Reilly, his story wouldn't have mattered and Mr. Ramos would be free to drive through a wall drunk and coked up. He could get his DWI in peace and be represented by a TV lawyer (even if he killed a busload of cute and innocent children).
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Rooting for Geraldo Rivera was hard, but it happened. He started with a perfectly logical argument: 'I think that we are talking about drunk driving, and there were 347 drunk-driving fatalities in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the year 2005. I think this might be the first drunk-driving story we've done from Virginia. And the only reason its news on the Factor is because the driver was an illegal alien, what if his name was Bubba? What if his name was Buddy?' By the time O'Reilly started to scream, 'he doesn't have a right to be in this country!' and just after he babbled 'you want open border anarchy,' I feared for poor Geraldo's life. The daring Hispanic-Jew used the proverbial allusion to history and eventually said it was a sin to use the tragedy as a cheap political trick. I would call it disgusting and horrible, but we'll go for sin this time. Eventually they all bowed to the Fair and Balanced god of Fox News and pretty much nothing was accomplished. Bill said his viewers would agree with him and Geraldo said his viewers would agree with him.
The video, my dear friends, exemplifies the dumbed down, irrationally emotional debate in America. One debater becomes an angry whiner that doesn't love America while the other becomes a Nazi loving racist. In real life such an exchange would turn to violence and the tensions would grow worse. The whites blame the browns, the browns blame the blacks, the blacks blame the whites, the whites blame the yellows, the greens arrive, and oh no, it's hard to keep track of all the hate! Eventually the problem becomes so pervasive that we either deal with it when it's too late or begin to see it as commonplace. We never solve the problem and everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
The bottom line is that nothing changes and everything only gets worse. That puts me somewhere between the ass that doesn't love America and the illegal alien. If the America you're talking about hates immigrants and wants to close borders, then maybe I don't really love it. I grew up with the Ellis Island Stories and the cute Disney cartoon with the immigrant mouse. I want that America back, not the child labor America or the segregation America, but the land of opportunity America open to everyone. Did we already forget?
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