The Braindead Megaphone

THE GREAT DIVIDER

STAND BACK, MR. DOBBS, LET ME HANDLE THIS

Once upon a time, there was a wealthy country. Just to the south was a poor country. Between them ran a border. People from the poor country were always sneaking over, trying to partake of the wealth of the wealthy country. The people in the wealthy country resented this. Or some did. Some seemed fine with it, and even helped them once they got here. Some said it was a crisis and a big wall was needed. Others said: What crisis? It’s been going on for years, plus they work so cheap, you want to pay nine bucks for a freaking quart of strawberries? The national media seized on the story and, as always, screwed it up: reduced it to pithy sound bites, politicized it, and injected it with faux urgency, until, lo, the nation was confused.

Then, a man, a Writer — me, actually — decided to venture forth, to find some answers. Was it a crisis? Was all this excitement justified? Might terrorists someday come in across the border? Was the border really rife with drug-related crime? I went boldly, driving from Brownsville, Texas, to San Diego, California, armed with the ancient tools: objectivity, open-mindedness, a laptop, a rented minivan — a Chrysler Town and Country, to be exact, with electronic everything, including rear and sliding side doors. So as our story unfolds, please imagine these doors periodically sliding/flying open, in the middle of epic Southwestern landscapes, for no reason at all, or simply because I’ve tried to change the radio station.

GO TO JAIL, AFTER EIGHT TIMES, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL

In the temporary detention center at the Laredo North Border Patrol Station, a Mexican kid slumps in a chair at a processing desk. He’s going to jail for at least three months, because this is the eighth time he’s been caught illegally entering the United States, and the system’s patience has finally been exhausted.

Border Patrol Agent One runs a hand shyly over his new haircut, which is nearly a buzz.

“That, see, I don’t understand that haircut,” says Agent Two, wearing a huge cowboy hat.

“At least he’s got hair,” says Agent Three, and Agent Two blushes, acknowledging it: Yes, yes, it’s true. Under this hat, I’m bald.

I point to my own head.

We all laugh at my hairline.

Then I look over at the kid. He’s sitting there expressionless, a small cat among large dogs. And now he’s got to endure this balding talk, this nervous braying laughter, before he can get to the next enjoyable step (being processed), and on to the part where he gets sent off to a foreign jail.

My heart goes out to him.

Sort of.

Because empathy depends on how you’ve spent your day. I’ve just spent mine driving around in a “marked caged unit” with Agent Three, aka Dan Garibay: visiting the muddy clearings where illegal aliens change into dry clothes after they cross, inspecting fence-cuts, driving past safe houses, hearing agents talk about tracking groups of illegals for eleven straight hours. I’ve learned that it’s now more profitable to traffic in humans than in drugs; that MS-13, a Salvadoran gang, is in a death struggle with the more traditional Mexican Mafia; that Border Patrol agents in Laredo are routinely shadowed by spies from the smuggling cartels who, in turn, are shadowed by a newly formed countersurveillance unit.

My relation to this Mexican kid, then, is something like that of a plumber’s apprentice to a leak.

Dan’s third-generation Mexican American, a funny, reasonable guy who seems to be constantly considering and reconsidering the moral implications of his job. He’s got nothing against illegal aliens, understands why they do what they do, has compassionate feelings toward them, and seems committed to catching them in a way that keeps them safe and leaves their dignity intact. But the law is the law, and why should those who break the law be privileged over those who’ve played by the rules?

So I find myself thinking, re this silent (sullen? unrepentant?) kid, this member of Wascals Who Insist on Trying to Elude My New Friend Dan: Dude, what did you expect? Seven times? Who doesn’t learn after seven times? Do you value your freedom so lightly? Do you have a wife, kids? Do you realize you are now going to miss the next three months of their—

Then, imagining that he has kids, who look like little Mexican versions of my kids back when they were toddlers, I (finally) experience a little heart-pang as I flash on what I’d be thinking if I were him: Laugh it up, you balding bastards, I’m dying here, can’t you tell I’m a decent person, oh Jesus, please let me go, just this one last time, they’re so cute and will never be this age again, please please, I’ve made a terrible mistake.

And what will you do if we let you go? I ask him in my mind. Will you try to get in here again? Next time, you could be looking at five years.

He hesitates, averts his eyes.

Seriously? I say. My God, is it worth it? Are things really that bad where you live?

And he just looks at me, as if to say: Would I keep trying if it didn’t make sense to keep trying, if the possible reward didn’t justify possibly getting caught? Do I look stupid?

He doesn’t look stupid. He looks handsome and sad and ashamed.

But mostly what he looks is: busted.

Busted, and waiting to pay the price.

HUSTLING FOR SCHOOLBOOKS

I cross the bridge into Nuevo Laredo (“the most dangerous city in North America,” according to Dan) with an African American long-haul truck driver from Kentucky who’s wearing a cowboy hat and a shirt with a flag sewn on the back. For thirteen years now, whenever he drives this route, he’s parked on the U.S. side and saved a few bucks by getting a cheap hotel on the Mexican side. He’s divorced, but his wife’s a good lady: She’s kept him on her insurance, she’s a nurse, a good nurse, not a slut like most nurses, who like to fuck the young doctors in the rooms where they keep the towels. Do I know about this? Am I aware of this phenomenon?

In the most dangerous city in North America, a guy’s getting his shoes shined with an air of 1950s satisfaction, a row of old people are fingering their pants legs on a bench, a toddler’s doing a happy skipping dance along the lip of a fountain.

Not so bad, I think, a town like any other—

Do I want a girl? A boy? A boy from Boy’s Town?

A young guy’s fallen in beside me: Hector.

“No, man, I’m married,” I say. “Happily married.”

“Isn’t it the case!” he says. “When a man goes with another woman, the wife will give him such a…how is it called?”

He mimes slapping himself.

“Slap,” I say.

“Your woman will gave you such a slop,” he says, shaking his head at the memory of the last time his wife gave him a slop.

Hector advises me: Stay in the shopping area. Do not err to the left or right of the bridge. Avoid the police. Two gangs are fighting for the town, each with its own cops. The cops see you have money, they’ll plant drugs on you, take your money, possibly kill you.

Times are hard, he tells me, fewer tourists are coming all the time. His daughter just started first grade, but they haven’t been able to afford the books yet. He didn’t see his family last night, not having the five bucks necessary for the bus ticket to León.

I give him ten bucks.

He accepts with surprise, gratitude, some disappointment maybe: It’s too little money, too early in the night.

He tells me nostalgically about the first time he sneaked into the United States, with his uncle, in 1989, in a little boat. His dream is to go over again soon and join his brother in New Orleans, making fifteen dollars an hour doing post-Katrina work. He knows about the location of the new checkpoint, on Highway 83, which I visited with Dan earlier today, and how to circumvent it: Get dropped off before the checkpoint, walk a couple of miles around it, get picked up on the other side.

“Not easy,” I say.

“Yes, easy,” he says.

And even easier if he had an American to help him. Do I have a car? Is my car parked in Laredo? If I drive him through the checkpoint, they won’t even stop us.

Ha, ha, ha! I think. Hi, Dan! I can explain!

A muscular scowling guy, face heavily tattooed, strolls past, with henchmen. Hector, distracted/alarmed, trips on an exposed pipe.

“He doesn’t like me,” he says. “Because I am with you, in his area.”

His area? I think. The street comes alive with creepiness. This is the town that killed its own police chief, on his first day in Office, for pledging to end the drug trade.

“I should probably head back,” I say.

“I think so,” says Hector.

Soon the bridge is in sight. Suddenly, he’s nervous, abashed.

Maybe I could give him a little something?

I remind him of the ten dollars.

“That was for my children,” he says. “I am asking now for me. So I can buy a hot dog.”

Over the next few seconds I (1) am annoyed at his nerve, (2) castigate myself for being so tight-sphinctered over — what is it, two bucks? — and (3) hand over the money, smiling warmly to hide the fact that (1) and (2) ever occurred to me.

Hector steps away, buys a hot dog from a vendor, disappears down a side street, raising the hot dog in gratitude.

I cross the bridge.

Easy for me, I think. Impossible for you.

Back in the United States, the facades are nicer, the traffic lighter. My nation appears in that moment as a very clean, anxiety-clenched fist, in the grip of which I feel comfortable and happy, and like myself again.

THE ALL-AMERICAN MEXICAN CITY, OR THE ALL-MEXICAN AMERICAN CITY, WHATEVER

Maybe you’ve heard some variant of the following:

I have nothing against [Mexicans/immigrants/these people], but nowadays you go to [NAME OF CITY] and all you hear is Spanish. It’s as if [these people/the Mexicans/ the foreigners] expect [me/us Americans] to [speak Spanish/adapt to THEIR culture/kowtow to THEM!], whereas the burden ought to be on [them/the newcomers/the Mexicans] to ASSIMILATE, right? Someday soon you’re going to find whole American cities full of people speaking only Spanish!

Note to speaker of the above: such a city already exists. Welcome to the Friday-night party that is Laredo.

At Shirley Field, Laredo Martin High is kicking the crap out of Carrizo Springs High before a huge hometown crowd that is virtually all Hispanic and dressed in school-color red. The majorettes conclude their bit, march crisply into the stands, per instructions, with swift precise turns, trying not to crack up. A Mexican American princess (UP UP AND AWAY! reads her T-shirt) searches the crowd, rendered confident and in love with the world by virtue of her beauty, assisted in her search by a heavier, less elated girl.

Show of hands, I think: Anybody here can’t afford schoolbooks? Ha ha, no way, the crowd roars in my mind, are you joking? We have SUVs and PlayStations and plenty to eat, we roam the earth expecting respect and receiving it, for we are the American Middle Class, and we shall live out the full measure of our days amidst happiness and plenty.

I leave the game early, have dinner at Taco Palenque, a kind of Taco Bell on glamour pills, tonight inexplicably overrun by gorgeous Mexican American women in tight designer jeans, with glittered eyelids and balletic hairstyles à la Princess Leia. As has been the case all night, only Spanish is being spoken, unless English is needed, in which case English is delivered: gladly, genially, and unaccented.

Tonight, America seems like a happy miracle, a Land o’ Plenty where a new ethnicity is being created, an ethnicity that transcends the Anglo/Hispanic distinction, and the primary mascot of this ethnicity is Affluence, accompanied by its beautiful sidekicks Civility, Humor, Kindness, and Relative Absence of Fear. Tonight, America seems like the for-centuries-dreamed-of rescuer of the Little Guy, the place that takes a guy like Hector and puts some pounds on him, sets him on his feet, puts a spring in his step, and ends, forever, his flinching hustle for two-dollar hot dogs.

But first he has to get here.

AMONG THE MENNONITES

The east Texas countryside rolls by: ranches, ranches, elaborate memorials for car-accident-killed Mexican American boys, woven into barbed-wire fences, featuring silk roses and, in at least one case, the small plastic figure of a professional wrestler. It’s been unusually rainy, and treetops jut eerily up from a temporary lake, in which it seems hobbits should be fishing from little bark boats.

In Roma, the World Birding Center overlooks a small Mexican village, from which I can hear the ringing of someone’s old-fashioned phone.

I’m driving from Laredo to Brownsville to meet with some Mennonites who work with the Mexican American poor in the Rio Grande Valley. Many of the poor are, presumably, undocumented immigrants. I’m feeling a little funny about meeting these Mennonites, because I’m not sure I agree with what they do. If there’s a law, and they, even inadvertently, help the undocumented circumvent the law, doesn’t this just encourage further lawbreaking, which, in turn, reinforces this system of law-circumvention, which, in turn, strengthens the illegal smuggling cartels, thus ratcheting up the cycle of high profits, violence, and chaos that Dan Garibay described?

Egads, I think, I am become Lou Dobbs.

Later that afternoon, I’m standing in a circle of pretty young women, Teach for America workers, at a Mennonite church social in San Juan. It’s muddy and sunny, the music’s about to start, across the two-lane is a tract-house neighborhood à la Spielberg, nearby is a movable free-range-chicken shed and an organic garden and a donkey named Pierre, rescued from a neglectful owner by the pastor of the church, John Garland.

John looks more like a guitarist in an indie-rock band than he does a pastor, and his wife, Abby, looks more like the beautiful vocalist in that band than she does a high-school teacher/pastor’s wife. John has started a model organic farm here at the church. The idea is to help underprivileged workers access the “intellectual capital” of their work; immigrants are often expert organic farmers who, if they happen to be undocumented, get stuck working for other people, underpaid, or cheated of their pay.

Around them, John and Abby have gathered a group of similarly well-educated, young, politically engaged volunteers working with the poor in small towns across the Rio Grande Valley.

What have they seen?

You name it: blond Spanish-only speakers; mothers who call the school to say they’ve been deported but will be sneaking back in time for parent-teacher conferences; families in which the kids speak only English and the parents speak only Spanish; families in which the parents speak English but the kids — recent arrivals — can’t; kids who came over illegally as babies and are now fully acculturated American teenagers — excellent straight-A students who, because they’re undocumented, can’t get financial aid for college, which means, given their family economics, no college for them at all.

So what do they do?

“They go to work,” Abby says.

John has told me that although their mission involves “reaching out to those in need”—some of whom, in this area especially, may indeed be undocumented — they don’t have a clue if people have documents or not. Still, remembering my Lou Dobbs moment, I ask John and Abby if they ever have doubts about working with the undocumented, since technically it’s against the law.

John looks at me thoughtfully from behind his glasses.

“Absolutely,” he says. “Just the other day, these two guys walked up here and said, ‘Hey, man, we just crossed the river, we’re really thirsty, we need some water.’ And I looked them over and said: ‘Sorry, friend, you’ll have to take it up the road.’”

Abby nods.

So this is interesting. They are, yes, Christians, and yet they understand that the law forbids—

Then they both crack up.

“Yeah, see that big cross on the front of the church?” says Abby. “That’s actually what it means: Take it up the road.”

“The thing is, when you read the Bible?” John says. “One thing it’s not is wishy-washy about our responsibility toward people in need. Yes, there’s the law, and we should respect it, but there’s also a higher law.”

In Abby’s opinion, the problem with this immigration debate is the level of abstraction at which it’s conducted. If you talk about undocumented workers or illegal aliens, it’s easy to make mistakes. Whereas if you say: This is Valerie, Valerie is my student, whom I love, then whatever you do will make sense, coming, as it does, from the heart, with a real person in mind.

A STORY TOO SAD TO INVENT

Because of the way Lupe Aguilar’s past has been described to me, I expect him to be mean and wiry and street-scarred, but no: He’s white-haired, gentle, and articulate, with a quality of patient abiding that makes me instantly crave his approval. After church, at the head of a long familial table in a Mexican restaurant, he tells me he used to: (1) run wild (his wife’s sitting across the table, and her eyebrows go up, indicating: Oh yes he did), (2) shepherd groups of recently arrived Mexicans into a hotel room, take his fee, then rat them out to the Border Patrol, (3) own bars, party, and fight (a guy he offended once put three slugs in his back). Then he experienced a religious conversion and is now a Mennonite pastor who shelters the homeless — in his house, in trailers behind his house, in the kitchen of his church (as we enter, a smiling, timid family just arrived from Veracruz rises as one, exclaims mucho gusto as one, sits as one), or in the church itself (in the Sunday-school rooms, in the sanctuary, beside the altar), with a disregard for his personal space that I find impossible to imagine. Would I let strangers sleep in my home, at my work, would I let a constant flow of Unknown Quantities stream past my kids?

No, I would not.

And this isn’t just my paranoia; Lupe says people he’s helped have stolen from him (he’s lost three cars this way), insulted him, made indecent proposals to his wife and daughters. He’s not a big favorite of the neighbors, either, some of whom consider him a lawbreaker. But he feels doing this work is his duty. Once, back in his early days as a Christian, a young Mennonite volunteer overheard him use the word wetback and referred him to Matthew 25:40 (“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me”). Reading this, Lupe says, he was “changed forever.” His goal in life is now “to be humble and meek like Jesus,” and you see this desire working through him, in the things he does and the way he attempts to deflect credit (“Jesus is the doer!”).

To illustrate the way the current system of illegality creates secrecy and chaos, which in turn brings down worlds of shit, mostly on the poor, he tells me the following story:

Once upon a time, a young couple left Mexico and came north. Trying to avoid the Border Patrol, they crossed the river in a remote area, where they were set upon by “border bandits” who stole their shoes and money and raped the woman in front of the man. She became pregnant. Having become Christians, and after much soul-searching, the couple decided to keep the baby. But the woman’s water broke at five months, and the baby died ten minutes after its birth. The couple couldn’t afford a coffin, so Lupe called in a favor from a funeral director; the funeral home allowed a brief (twenty-minute) ceremony and donated a small cardboard box for the burial. The Mennonites acquired a small plot from the county and drove out in their own cars to bury the baby. At the grave, Lupe had to pry the dead baby out of the grieving mother’s arms. The woman was a mess but, being undocumented, was too afraid to seek psychological help. In her heart, she blamed the man for not defending her, blamed herself for not being able to carry the baby to full-term, blamed God for not helping them. The man, for his part, couldn’t make peace with the way he’d failed to protect her. In the end, the pain proved too much, and the couple separated.

The end.

“WHAT DO WE WANT? DEPORT THEM NOW!”

Let’s meet the Rodriguezes, who came from a Very Poor Central American Country and now live in Somewhere, Texas.

The Rodriguez males are legal, the females not. Mr. Rodriguez came illegally but has since gotten his paperwork in order; their baby son was born here and so is a citizen — but the wife and daughters remain undocumented.

I visit them in their home, which Mr. Rodriguez built, by hand, out of cinder blocks, over the past five years, when not working his first job (laying tile), his second (factory watchman), or his third (growing their food in a backyard garden). The gray cinder blocks, arched doorways, and poured-concrete floor give the house the feeling of a medieval castle, had the king driven masonry nails into the cinder block in order to hang some framed family photos.

To get here, Mr. R. worked his way north through Mexico for two years, doing construction, learning local dialects along the way to avoid getting busted by Mexican immigration. He’s a big guy, hearty and happy, somebody you’d see beaming down from a Diego Rivera mural, but his time on the road seems to have spooked him. He saw people shaken down, unfairly arrested, robbed, murdered. He saw “lots of lifeless bodies” along the road.

“The real horror,” he says, “was in Mexico.”

For two years, his wife didn’t hear from him.

How did she feel during this silence?

She suddenly looks physically sick, says she doesn’t like to think of that time, when she was sure he was dead. She was trying to keep the farm going, baking pan dulce in a mud oven he’d built, a hundred small loaves at a time. Twice a week, she’d walk into town, tray on her head, and in this way supported a family of five.

Then came the earthquake.

It ruptured the walls of their adobe house, and she moved herself and the children into a shed she built of three sheets of government-supplied sheet metal, which was just big enough for a bed and a table, and unbearably hot in the daytime.

Then, one day, a letter came from America. He’d crossed on an inner tube, in a group, with coyote help, and lived briefly in a safe house that he left as soon as he found it was also being used in the drug trade.

“Wow,” I say, “how did you feel when you first saw his handwriting—”

“Muy contenta, she says, with a smile so spontaneous and uncontrived you’d think their two-year separation had just that instant ended.

They don’t have insurance, she says, but then again, they never get sick: All their food is fresh, from their garden, she breast-fed the babies, they get good milk and cheese from their goats. In the past, she’s tried government-sponsored health-care programs, but she felt kind of ashamed accepting government aid and probably won’t be doing it again.

“It’s nice remembering these things,” he says, “now that we are all here together. But also it’s sad, because I remember those left behind on the road.”

“What’s your dream?” I ask. “You know, your eventual dream for your—”

“I have arrived at my dream already,” he says.

The oldest daughter brings in some vegetables from their garden — okra, big fat peppers. Is she, the daughter, in school?

“I’m a junior,” she says in perfect English.

Her passion is math. She wants to be a math teacher. I mention that my daughter’s in the throes of quadratic equations.

“Oh,” she says shyly. “I love those.”

“You love quadratic equations,” I say.

“I love them,” she says.

If this isn’t the essential American story, I don’t know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.

Did he get it?

Yes, he did, God bless him.

LET US REDUCE OUR ENEMIES, SO WE CAN MOCK THEM MORE EASILY

The Minuteman Project is kicking off Operation Sovereignty, their “largest operation to date,” with a rally on a narrow strip-mall berm in Laredo. It’s a rally in the modern-American style: participants few, Media many.

The Minutemen angrily shout, “What do we want? Deport them now!”

Members of the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste angrily shout, “Hey ho, hey ho, racist Minutemen got to go!”

A jaunty Mexican American, in wraparound sunglasses, wearing a serape, waving a Mexican flag, angrily shouts, “Who picks your potatoes? Who builds your houses?”

A Minuteman angrily shouts, re the Mexican Flag Guy, “He told me to get out of his CITY! This is my COUNTRY, man!”

Everyone’s pissed, oppositional, less empathetic and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives. The Media rushes around, sticking their cameras into the face of whoever’s behaving most badly at the moment.

A bespectacled little dude in a huge cowboy hat says he’s running for Congress in Austin.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

“Bad,” he says. “I don’t have any money.”

Does he have a position on the immigration issue? He does: Borders make a country, and we need a better border, namely, a wall.

But how do you do that, just, you know, physically?

Simple. Alter the border. Cede land to Mexico until the border is a long, straight line. Then run your wall from here to California.

I imagine that ugly map, beautiful border-curves of the Rio Grande made computer-straight.

I step over for a word with the Mexican Flag Guy. Because of my appearance (white, baseball-capped, middle-aged), he mistakes me for a Minuteman until, to prove I’m not a Minuteman, I disparage the Minutemen. We’re walking by a light pole, the base of which is exposed, a Possible Tripping Hazard. He points it out, saying that had I been a Minuteman, he would’ve let me fall on my ass.

Nearby, three Minutewomen stand in the midday sun with a sign: Mexico’s a Bad Neighbor.

The Mexican Flag Guy taunts them: “It’s hot in that sun, isn’t it? That’s what you like about us, right? We don’t burn, baby!”

Which is kind of weird, since two of the Minutewomen are Hispanic, presumptive fellow nonburners.

Here’s the story of how one of these women, Lupe Moreno, became a Minutewoman:

As a teenager, her son had a car accident and ended up partially paralyzed. In the next hospital bed was an illegal who’d broken his arm coming over the wall. Once treated, he ran away. After Lupe’s son was released, she started getting nagging letters from the hospital, demanding the hundred-dollar copay. She found this infuriating: This illegal gets thousands of dollars of treatment free, and they’re nagging her? To make matters worse, her son needed a wheelchair but could only have one free for the first week of his stay. Through her work in social services, Lupe was aware of a special program through which, had her son been illegal, he could have gotten a wheelchair free and kept it indefinitely.

“You mean ‘undocumented,’” I say.

“I call them illegals,” she says, “because that’s what they are.”

GENTLE DIGNIFIED MAN 1, MINUTEMEN 0

A cluster of Minutemen are shouting across the berm-defining shrub at a sixtysomething Mexican American in a VIETNAM baseball cap: If he DID fight for this country, as implied by his cap, why isn’t he willing to fight for it NOW, by protecting it from illegal in VADers?

He fires back: “I was fighting for this country when you were in Pampers, brother!”

This country kicked the black man around for hundreds of years, he shouts, and now that the black man has finally stood up for himself, the country’s looking for someone new to kick, and its eyes have fallen on the brown man, but the brown man built this country, always working cheap, and is not about to become the whipping boy, no sir, not at this late stage of the game.

The uncontrived passion in his voice is shutting the Minutemen down, but then the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste people start inadvertently drowning him out with their (“RACIST MINUTEMEN GOT TO—”) bullhorns.

A certain Writer, behaving unprofessionally, sneaks over, tells the bullhorn guys to hold off: This Vietnam guy is really kicking ass.

A Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste guy rushes a bullhorn to the Vietnam guy, and soon the Minutemen, discouraged, have drifted away to a distant part of the berm.

“We’re farmers, you know?” a friend of the Vietnam guy tells me. “Born and raised here in Laredo. We’ve worked hard all our lives. All of this, all this anger, all this aggression…” And he waves his hand wearily at what’s left of the rally. “What I think is, we’re here on this earth to take care of one another.”

IN WHICH I AM CHOKED

I get a few minutes with Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.

What I want to ask is, Why are you guys so mad about everything? Why so scared? Where’s the love?

Instead I say, “I’ve read that you’re a Christian. What’s the relation of this Minuteman ethic to your Christianity?”

“Charity is good,” he says. “Benevolence is good. But charity begins at home. And their home is Mexico.”

Gilchrist is a likable guy in his fifties who reminds me of the actor who played the mayor in Jaws. He speaks in meandering Stengelese paragraphs; your mind struggles to summarize them, but they will not yield. Strong passions, about something or other, keep emitting forth from him, in a sideways manner that makes you keep listening, in the same way that seeing a beginner skater fly by carrying a stack of dishes might make you keep watching. He’s always saying things like “I’ve got him in my crosshairs!” or “He’s OK for now, he hasn’t crossed me yet, he’s making all the right noises!” or (of the late Steve Irwin): “He was probably one of these open-border cranks, but I give him a pass — I liked his show,” or (of an African American Minuteman in Los Angeles, with admiring glee): “That guy just burned an effigy of Osama bin Laden — in front of a mosque!”

Gilchrist can be seen on YouTube, saying, of a crowd of chanting protesters at Ground Zero, “This is not the first time I’ve faced Satan…. This will not be the last time,” but in person he’s gentlemanly, timid almost. This is communicated via something in his listening posture: leaning slightly forward, a kind of wincing going on around the eyes.

After the rally, the Minutepeople convoy out to Eagle Pass, where the Op will begin in earnest. We stop at a convenience store to fuel up. Trying to engage Gilchrist, I roll down the van window, jocularly tell him smoking’s a nasty habit.

“Well,” he says, “I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink much…and I’ve recently given up ATTEMPTED MURDER!”

At the words attempted murder, putting a mock-crazy expression on his face, he reaches in through the van window and fake-throttles me around the neck.

I have no problem with this. I’m from Chicago. Chicago males often bond via fake kicks to the groin. So I feel I’m getting off easy.

Although I also think: (1) Wow, that was a pretty energetic fake-choke, and (2) Has this guy not undergone media training?

We drive two hours into the country, looking for illegals along the way — in particular, it would seem, for illegals too deaf or stupid to hide when they hear a twelve-car convoy approaching.

NO, TELL ME WHAT YOU REALLY THINK

Here are some facts about Minutepeople, or at least the eight I had dinner with that night, at Skillet’s Restaurant in Eagle Pass, Texas:

Minutepeople are fun. You can’t insult them. They’re willing to entertain any point of view. They like to debate. They look stern at first, do a lot of scowling, but behind their eyes, once you get them talking, there’s a hurt, docile quality, possibly related to past wrongs done them, a quality I associate with the thunked-as-kids: Long ago the world turned on them in some unexpected and unpleasant way, and they are, not unreasonably, expecting that it could happen again at any moment. The Barney-Fifish quality of their bluster recedes immediately upon challenge, and they go soft, and you somehow magically become Dad.

I announce myself as an Eastern Liberal, and am thereafter treated like a minicelebrity or lab specimen, a living example of a rare species they’ve heretofore only heard about on Fox. Paradoxically, my opinions seem to matter to them. They’re oddly deferential. They listen. When I argue that, despite our gun laws, Manhattan is safer than Houston, or assert that, yes, there are working-class people in New York City, they take me on faith, adjust their arguments accordingly, and seem happy for the correction, because it means I was taking their argument seriously in the first place.

I ask if Minutemen ever bring guns on their Ops.

“We all have guns,” someone says.

“We all have guns here,” says someone else.

“This is Texas,” says a third someone. “Totally legal.”

Their guns, in fact, are influencing their choice of hotels: They have to be able to bring their weapons inside.

“The thing about people from New York?” says Shannon, founder of the Texas Minutemen, who has been smiling at me in passing all day in a way that manages to be suspicious, deferential, and welcoming all at once. “Is they’re rude.”

“It’s the way they talk to you,” someone else says.

Has he, Shannon, ever been to New York?

“Haw haw! Yeah, right!” says Shannon. “Like I’m going to that crazy place without my guns.”

They honestly don’t go anywhere they can’t bring their guns?

Nope. The world is too insane. It would be irresponsible to put themselves at that kind of risk.

Chicago?

Haw.

Boston?

Please.

How about Mexico? Have they ever been over there?

The most enthusiastic guffaws yet. Am I kidding? The cartels, they say, have a bounty out on them: twenty-five grand for any Minuteman. And for Shannon: fifty grand.

“Shannon’s a star,” someone says.

Being called a star seems to rev Shannon up. He takes the floor, presents a discourse that might be entitled: “My Thoughts on Bitches.”

He has a friend who once lived with two lesbians and slept with them both, together and separately. However, problems developed when this friend, unwisely, “started hitting one harder than the other.” Shannon has to admit it: Girlwise, the only thing he really likes? Is dominating them.

There was this one gal, for example, who kept being uncooperative. Finally, she, kind of uncooperatively, more or less cooperated. To celebrate his victory, he stole her bra, then hung it from his car antenna. There’s nothing like it, he says, like dominating them. Then he emits a phrase so crude, so poetically dense — it combines images of (1) a small furry beast and (2) two swinging-down thingies — that I want to get out my notebook and ask him to repeat it, but I chicken out, and the exact wording is lost forever, but suffice to say: What made that particular furry beast/swinging thingy combo so delightful to Shannon was that, although towering over Shannon, it had consented to be dominated by him.

Ah, but that’s all in the past, he sighs. Of late he’s gotten “some sane wisdom.” He knows what he looks like. These days if a woman says she finds him attractive, he just asks how much it’s going to cost him. Or he looks behind him to determine who she’s really talking to.

This makes me sad. Under the bluster, he seems like a nice guy, a gentle guy, even, a doting husband waiting to happen, possibly, capable of loving and being loved in return. If only he could just—

Wait, wait, I think, why are you being such a sucker? Did he or did he not just say the things he just said? Stop trying so hard to be Johnny Compassion. Why is he talking such rude shit?

I turn to Lesley, the lone Minutewoman at the table.

“Is this guy a misogynist or what?” I say. “You don’t find this offensive?”

“I’m not easily intimidated,” she says, laughing. “Do I look like I’m easily intimidated?”

Some National Guardsmen come in and sit nearby, and this gets us on the subject of Iraq. Brian, a smart, articulate Minuteman, originally from Massachusetts, who has traveled all over the world — Brazil, Japan, India — says Fallujah should have been leveled. He sends this out like a blustering trial balloon. Is he nuts? I ask. How many women and children would that have required killing? Well, he says, that happens once, it doesn’t happen again. Hello? I say. Are you really saying that? Little kids, old ladies? Well, he says, you order them out first. Come on, I say, think about New Orleans. People in Fallujah are much poorer than that, how do they “get out”? What do they do, rent cars? Call taxis? Could you give that order? I don’t think you could, and I don’t think you would.

He looks chastened and does a remarkable thing, given that he’s arguing with a Liberal, in front of his people: He reverses position.

“You’re right,” he says. “I wouldn’t, no.”

Through it all, our Mexican American waitress, resembling a pretty Delhi street waif courtesy of her thick mascara, comes and goes, being spoken gently to by Shannon and the others, in the courteous quasi-military tones favored by the Minutepeople.

LOST PATROL THAT CAN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT FAILS TO FIND ASS WITH BOTH HANDS

Next morning we “go out on recon,” meaning we walk around the ranch we’ll be guarding later tonight.

An upbeat guy named Curtis, president of U.S. Border Watch, leads us Media around, pointing out evidence of illegals (a tamped-down human-size nest in some reeds, a fence-cut, some garbage) and marking several “possible deployment spots” using bits of a cow skull he’s found: The white bone will be visible later in the moonlight. An irrigation ditch running parallel to the border is a plus; the sound of the illegals wading the ditch will serve as a kind of early-warning system.

We walk the fence line. The neighboring rancher isn’t on board, so the Op will be confined to about a three-hundred-yard stretch of this ranch.

“We’re in a real rat race here,” Curtis says on his cell, as we start back to the cars. “The Media’s pounding us.”

We Media look around, puzzled. We’re not pounding anybody. We’re just walking quietly behind Curtis, having our little Media thoughts.

We take a shortcut back through a grove of mesquite. Shannon says this reminds him of a forest near the Knights of Pythias home where he was sent to live during his parents’ divorce. Soon it becomes clear we’re lost. The cars can’t be more than a hundred yards away, but we don’t seem to be getting any closer. Curtis suggests somebody send a radio message to base camp, i.e., the cars, see if somebody can honk a horn or something.

Radio contact proves problematic.

From the front of the group, some grumbling: Ahead is a creek. There’s much concern, shouted optimization instructions, extended hands, some awkward scrambling up the opposite muddy slope, good-humored postcrossing comparisons of soaked pants legs, Media and Minute-persons united as one.

Then the group bunches up. Again, a surprise: There’s a barbed-wire fence ahead, literally five feet from the lip of the creek, and as the front of the group struggles through the fence (coats snagging on barbed wire, on mesquite branches, raindrops plopping off trees), a cry goes up: Jeez, another fence!

Besides this one?

Yes, yes, a whole other fence.

We are, like, caught between these two improbably close-together, nonparallel fences, in a forest no cow could ever enter. How odd. What a perverse rancher.

“Makes you kind of respect the illegals,” a Minute-person says sweetly.

Suddenly: shouts of consternation from the front of the group, which has freed itself from the two-fence trap, only to find—

“What you got?” Curtis shouts.

It appears there is a second creek, which may even qualify as a small, deep river, beyond this second fence, which is proving even stouter and more gnarly than the first. Jesus, where the hell are we? Who designed this freaking ranch, Escher?

“I thought all y’all media were supposed to be neutral,” smirks Shannon. “Not so neutral now, are you?”

This is so nutty as to be hilarious.

“We’re being neutral,” I say. “By not making fun of you.”

“Attention all units!” Curtis cries out, to those of us still on this side of River Two. “If you have not crossed the ravine yet, do not cross! I repeat, do not cross!”

I can see the headline now, if anyone escapes to write it: “Minutemen Die of Starvation in Tiny Thicket, Comically Close to Own Cars.”

A photographer with bad knees goes down, is lifted to his feet by Brian, the guy who last night advocated the annihilation of Fallujah, whose face, as he goes to the photographer’s aid, is transformed by a look of sudden radiant concern.

In time, as in a beautiful dream, we arrive back at the cars. Is our leadership crushed, humiliated, bitterly angry, ordering us not to tell anyone? On the contrary. Our leaders are cheerful, triumphant, hyped with victory, as if this Getting Lost never happened, or maybe as if, having been closely involved with embarrassing debacles all their lives, they have learned an excellent coping strategy: deny, smile, move on.

Through my mind runs the phrase: Shows Good Spirit.

WITH GUNS IT IS NOT SO FUNNY

At dusk, the same Good-Spirited crew that nearly met its doom in the Land of Infinite Fences arrives back at the ranch, heavily armed. We Media are kind of shocked into silence at the extent of the armament. Every Minuteman’s got at least a shotgun, a rifle, or a machine-gun-looking semiautomatic weapon. My Team Leader, Art (a fearsome biker-looking dude, six-one, 250, shaved-headed, bearded, tattooed, who is, in fact, a biker but is also a troubleshooter for a fiber-optic network and a member of Mensa), has, in addition to his semiautomatic: a.45 down each pants leg, a long, jagged knife he calls his “Arkansas toothpick,” and a two-shot Derringer designed to fire shotgun shells.

I tell him that because I’m a Liberal and he’s so large, I expect that, if there’s trouble, he will carry me to safety.

He gives me a look I would describe as: the ornery-eye-twinkle-of-possible-friendship, reminding me of my childhood friend K., who was equally happy explicating The Art of War or driving his head through a wall.

Darkness falls; the moon comes up. Our Team advances into the brush. Through a kind of willful mass hypnosis, aided by all this wishful costuming, things suddenly go very Vietnam, and a tense, watchful quiet falls over the group.

It’s scary — partly because we’re making it scary and partly because (1) real illegals really do cross here, led by real members of the real smuggling cartels, and (2) these are real guns.

Suddenly, weirdly, I find my eyes tearing up: How many times, through the long centuries of life on earth, has one group of men sneaked armed into the woods, hoping to surprise a second group not expecting them? And where has this gotten us? I feel sad for whomever we might catch (some little family even now timidly approaching in the dark?) and sad for the Minutemen, plodding forward like ghosts doomed to hunt That Which Causes Them Anxiety through all eternity.

We spread out in the dark, three teams of three Minutepeople each, about a hundred yards between each group.

This is the total extent of Operation Sovereignty: nine guys, four Media, along a few hundred yards of border, on one small ranch, in the huge state of Texas.

A tiny patch of Catcher in a thousand miles of Rye.

OUR TEAM MAY SURPRISE YOU

Our Team takes up its position: in some long grass, besieged by bugs. I wish we could sit over there, on that less buggish dirt road, but Art has positioned us here, and something in me is cheerfully rising to the faux-military discipline.

Soon the sky is crossed with parallel rivers of low milky stars.

Scott’s from Houston, the founder of the Texas Militia. He’s just out here getting some experience points, he says. This is his first Op, he can only stay a week; what with work (graphic design) and his Militia stuff (four membership applications at home waiting to be processed), he’s superbusy. Plus, of course, he’s got RenFaire coming up—

“RenFaire?” I say.

“Renaissance Faire,” he says.

“Do you…You do that?” I say.

He does. He does the whole deal. He’s got a twelve-hundred-dollar suit of leather armor, does an English accent but, no, has not developed a role-play, seeing as how he is merely a Playtron, and Playtrons are not paid to interact with patrons, i.e., Mundanes.

Our third Team Member, Lance, so far known to me only as an angry, frustrated voice piping up now and then to express a sense that everything is all fucked up and being orchestrated by sinister forces from far away, is sitting under a tree. I join him there, out of the moonlight, in what, in daytime, would be shade.

He recently married a Russian woman he met online, he says. For many years, he says, he was a—

The next bit is unintelligible. Or impossible. I ask him to repeat.

No, I’ve heard right: For many years he was a dancer with the Houston Ballet.

“Of course, you wouldn’t know it to look at me now,” he says.

He and his wife appeared on a Ricki Lake segment on Russian mail-order brides. He didn’t do what so many guys seeking Russian brides do, he says, i.e., go to a mass meet-and-greet in some St. Petersburg hotel; his wife is from a small town, and he went there to meet her, and they really connected, from the heart. She’s a great lady, and they’re so happy together, she’s just — he shakes his head, not quite believing his good fortune.

When he talks about his wife, the paranoiac quality of his political discourse drops away, and he becomes relaxed and confident. He owns a construction company but is thinking of doing something different with his life, making some investments. He’s thinking, in fact, of buying the RenFaire in Houston.

I’m a little confused. Does he know…Does he know that Scott also is involved with RenFaire?

“Sure, that’s how we met,” he says. “Scott’s in the Torturers’ Guild.”

We wait and wait for some Mexicans to blunder over the border and plop into the irrigation ditch.

But nobody comes.

NEARLY THE DEATH OF SOME GUY NAMED CARL

Waiting implies an eventual end to waiting, which produces dramatic structure.

Somebody radios: Team Two, a car is approaching your position.

A car is indeed approaching. Art’s whispering on the radio: Is it one of ours? Is it? Anybody read me?

No answer.

“You Media, take cover around the corner,” he says. The corner is, like, behind those trees, ten feet away.

I take cover by walking over, standing there, feeling a little stupid.

Scott drops to one knee, raises his shotgun. Lance goes down on his belly, sights down the barrel of his semiautomatic. Our Team suddenly looks like a Baghdad checkpoint.

I’m thinking: Hold on now, isn’t this probably a rancher, a lost rancher, a lost tipsy guest of a rancher?

The car — a white Oldsmobile — appears, slowly, slowly, just the way a drug smuggler or cartel pickup car would.

It seems to pause as it passes.

Somebody hisses: He just — Did he just drop something? Lance and Scott rush forward to have a look at the dropped thing. What is it? Drugs? A bag of, uh, narcotics?

Negative, it’s just a plastic bag they hadn’t noticed before.

A call comes from Team One, down the line: The vehicle was Carl. This makes us, Team Two, very angry. That stupid Carl! Why the hell didn’t Carl radio? Who is Carl, anyway? How many Ops has he done? Scott barks: “Carl better pull head out of rear, or next time he’s going to get his car filled with lead!”

“No, no,” Art says. “No free fire permitted, don’t get all—”

The Minutemen cannot detain an illegal. They cannot harass. All they can do is call the Border Patrol. So why the guns? They don’t, they say, want to be overrun by the cartel. Has a Minuteman ever been shot, or shot at, by the cartel? No. But conceptualizing the cartel dudes as Scarfacian monsters, the Minutemen come out armed to meet them in the night and thereby rev themselves up, and yet there’s no training — Art is the most experienced Minuteman on our Team (Lance and Scott are both first-timers).

So, a prediction: Eventually, somebody’s going to get shot. It may be a Minuteman, it may be a cartel dude, it may be some little kid standing scared at the back of a group of migrants — but eventually, I tell Art, all this tension and drama is going to lead to something tragic.

“You don’t come into my house, man,” Art says.

“This isn’t your house,” I say.

“Oh, it sure is,” he says. “This is my country.”

“Your house is your house,” I say. “This is some dude’s ranch.”

IF ONLY THERE WERE MICROWAVE POPCORN

Boredom sets in. Our Team talks.

Boy, do we.

At times, they’re so Right and I’m so Left, we agree. I say I don’t like big agribusiness. They agree. We agree that NAFTA stinks, but for different reasons: I say it disadvantages the small Mexican farmer; they say it presages a European Union — style mega-nation. They, like me, are not fans of President Bush (who called the Minutemen “vigilantes”), but they, like me, do like Jon Stewart.

They do not like: George Soros; La Raza; signs in Spanish; the term Hispanic; the term African American (“I’m not an Irish-American, I’m an AMERICAN”); the federal government (which, they claim, routinely provides the Mexican government info on the time and place of their Ops); the fact that the Mexican Flag Guy at the rally was holding the Mexican flag higher than the American flag; being compelled to accommodate anyone, in any way (“I don’t mind being compassionate,” says Art, “but I don’t want you to force me to be compassionate”); and the dull conformity of the American masses (“Most people are sheep,” says Art. “They’re sheeple. The guys you meet out here? Are at least trying to get out of the sheepskins.”).

A civil war’s coming within the next four years, they say: The warring parties will include the police and the government/corporate coalition and the Mexicans and the people like them, the non-sheeples, for whom the government is, even as we speak, preparing secret concentration camps.

We go on and on, because we’re bored and because, turns out, we all belong to the same species: the American Male Opinionated Chatterbox.

Around midnight a tough-looking guy with a bandage across his nose, a former Air Force sergeant everyone’s been, not surprisingly, referring to as Sarge, comes stomping over. “What is this?” he barks. “A prayer meeting?”

The Team freezes, suddenly identified as: Yappy Fems Who Talk Too Much.

“We’re talking too quiet for God to hear us,” says Lance.

“God always hears us, man,” says Art solemnly.

Sarge stomps off, spends the rest of the night sitting by the irrigation ditch like a bitter mystic. We continue to enthusiastically surmise, theorize, construct alternative governmental models, occasionally crack up; we start at a respectful whisper and gradually modulate up to kegger-level roaring. If there were any Mexicans in the vicinity that night, I expect they mistook us for a New Age sleepover, went down the road a few ranches, and crossed there.

HAVING STEMMED THE TIDE OF INVADING ILLEGALS, WE RETIRE FOR THE EVENING

We’re tired. Art’s face, earlier lean and savage, begins to kind of melt, increasing in affability and weariness, until finally he makes the call: Knees and legs are going here, maybe we should live to fight another day, tomorrow let’s remember the lawn chairs.

We quit at three, slog back to the cars.

“Ready to debrief, sir!” shouts our sole black Minuteman, Booker, who then shines his flashlight on Brian, who’s got a tricked-out AR-15 with a SureFire sighting module. Booker’s tongue drops out of his mouth, and he starts moaning and thrashing his head around.

“Dude, what are you doing?” says Brian.

“I just had an orgasm,” says Booker.

Curtis gathers us around.

All in all, he feels, it went well. He was impressed with the professionalism exhibited here tonight. These media people didn’t see a single white racist KKK person out here tonight, he doesn’t believe.

“That’s right,” says Booker. “They haven’t hung me up yet!”

WELL, NOT ALL OF US RETIRE

I can’t find a room in Eagle Pass, so just start driving. I make it nearly to Del Rio, start falling asleep at the wheel, then park the minivan in a white-stone quarry, get out to pee.

Mounted on a pile of drill pipe is the severed head of a buck.

Around the head, five does pay tribute.

At the sound of my many electronic doors flying/ sliding open at once, the mounted head grows a body, then disappears up a steep cliff, followed by its worshipful does.

It occurs to me I’m too tired to be driving.

I sleep a few hours, drive west all morning. I pass a vulture feeding on a baby deer, then another vulture feeding on a second baby deer, then a third vulture feeding on a small unrecognizable thing, decide to discontinue the noting of vulture sightings.

Then it’s Big Bend National Park, like a Pecos Bill cartoon. Cacti, dust devils, a couple of mules preparing to fuck, the horizon a kind of Model Showroom for Used Mountains: Here’s something kind of Gibraltar, if you like that; a huge cleft chin; a classic butte; a Tibetan hooked-nose cliff; four in a row we just got in from Peru (see how they’re covered with green near their peaks?); a flattop; a Rushmorish one with faces in it, but not the faces of anybody famous.

Above the Used Mountains appear three Muppet-looking clouds, the size you imagine God to be when you’re a kid and imagine God has size.

The countryside is so big, so gorgeous, that it outs human ideas for what they are: inventions, projections, approximations, delusions. In the face of all this Size, action seems pathetic and comic, and fearful, preemptive action seems most pathetic and comic of all.

I find I’ve been made sad by Minuteman dread. They take a fact and make the worst of it. This beautiful world, all this magnificence, seems to inspire in them only a fear that the beautiful world will be taken away. I liked them, I had a good time with them, but it feels good to be away from them, out in all this open space, where anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.

A PLACE WHERE WHAT IS TRUE IS AT THE VERY LEAST BEING MADE A LITTLE BETTER

In the old days, the border crossing at Rio Grande Village was considered a Category B, or “historical,” crossing. Mexicans from Boquillas would cross by rowboat to shop at the little American grocery, and it was considered part of “the Big Bend experience” for American tourists to cross into Boquillas and spend the day there.

But a few months after September 11, a TV helicopter shot some footage of a couple of guys wading across, and Boquillas was identified as an example of Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome. On May 10, 2002, the crossing was closed, as were those at two nearby villages, Paso Lajitas and Santa Elena.

The effect of these closings has been the slow death of the villages. Boquillas has shrunk from 250 to 90 people. The store, denied its Mexican shoppers, has lost 40 percent of its business. Paso Lajitas is made up mostly of people too old to relocate and who have to drive eleven miles on a terrible dirt road to get their drinking water. Santa Elena is now down to just three families.

I hear about this from Cynta de Narvaez, a former Manhattan debutante, Studio 54 vet, crew chief for the French hot-air balloon team, and river guide, as we sit on her porch in Terlingua.

Imagine a map, Cynta says. Color drug activity purple. Before the closures, you would have seen a few blips. Now the entire fucking border is purple. Stop watering half a plant; parasites move into the dry half, it dies.

The Terlingua hippies used to take their town band, Los Pinche Gringos (the Freaking Gringos), over to Paso Lajitas on weekend nights for a binational all-ages hoedown: grandmothers dancing with nine-year-old boys, fathers dancing with babies in their arms. But this is now a five-hour trip for the Americans; they can still cross at Lajitas but legally have to come back in via the Customs Station at Ojinaga.

So no more dance parties.

“This was a bicultural community before they closed the border,” she says. “The people over there aren’t numbers, they have names and faces. We’ve danced together, reached for onions in the store at the same time.”

But the hippies struck back.

So far they’ve sent a solar-powered water pump and two wind-powered generators across to Boquillas, begun facilitating a craft-importing business for the Boquillans, bought a solar water pump for Paso Lajitas, and are working on one for San Vincente, which, in the meantime, is being served by a Terlingua-provided reverse-osmosis water filter.

“At least they know we haven’t forgotten them,” Cynta says. “And they know we’re not our government. Love thy neighbor, right? Not only does it give you the warm fuzzies, you get to live in the world without worrying.”

Cynta’s been sick, with Lyme disease. Her adrenals are all but gone. She recently, briefly, lost the use of her arms.

But she’s feeling pretty good today.

The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.

Which is right?

Neither.

Both.

Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.

I’M READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP, MR. YOAKAM

In certain places, the border possesses a lovely kid’s-book geometry. For example: Per my map, there should be an exact spot where the border stops being the Rio Grande and starts being a fence.

And there is. It’s behind a brick works near El Paso.

Standing in the shade of a big tree are two round, middle-aged Mexican guys.

“Dónde está Mexico?” I say.

“Aquí,” one answers.

We introduce ourselves, reaching across the border, which is just: a monument and a stripe on the concrete.

Yellow Shirt/White Hat is Jesse. Red Shirt/Black Hat is Tomás.

“So,” I say, stepping across, “this is Mexico?”

“Yes,” says Tomás.

“And this is the U.S.,” I say, returning to my native land.

“Yes, yes,” says Jesse, stepping into the U.S. “Mexico now, now U.S.”

We step giddily back and forth; straddle the line so we’re in both countries simultaneously; stand on the line, declaring ourselves to be nowhere at all.

Using my arms and baby Spanish, I ask: Why don’t the people, the Mexican people, come from there (I gesture to Mexico) to here (I make a grand sweep encompassing all of America and the grand opportunities contained therein).

“Problems with the migras,” says Jesse.

“I don’t see them,” says Tomás. “But they see me.”

We agree that Mexico and America have been good friends forever. We agree that, historically, the rich man has, forever, been stamping on — we all simultaneously perform the same gesture: stepping one foot each down on some imagined Poor Man. I snag three bottled waters from the van, and we drink to our shared respect for the worker; them in their country, me in mine. Occasionally, a foot, absentmindedly kicking at a pebble, will wander out of its own nation, or one of us will briefly emigrate to keep the sun out of his eyes.

As I pull out, a Border Patrol truck’s blocking the road. The agent looks like Dwight Yoakam. Technically, he tells me, I’ve broken the law.

“You, uh…you saw me go back and forth?” I say.

“I saw you standing in Mexico,” he says. “What I could do — and of course, I’m not going to DO this — is take you to Juárez and have you cross there. No biggie. But just so you know.”

This, we agree, is the beauty of the United States: Here we stand, the Law and the Lawbreaker, joking about the fact that he’s busted me, comfortable in the knowledge that he’s not going to shake me down, as would most assuredly happen if this was, say, Juárez, where he says some drunken cops recently shot at a journalist who’d taken a photo of them getting wasted, then beat the crap out of him.

“Although how much have you got?” he says. “Ha ha!”

“How did you know I was even down there?” I say.

“Camera,” he says, nodding up in the direction of the sky.

I LOVE YOU, I DO, BUT NOT IN THAT WAY

I leave Texas, drive across New Mexico, Arizona, and California, and see no sign of a crisis, no sign of an overloaded system at the point of breakdown, no crime, no discourtesy even.

Which, of course, does not mean that crises, overload, crime, and discourtesy do not exist.

It just means I didn’t see them.

Everywhere I go, the next town ahead is said to be the really dangerous town, the one that justifies all the cartel fears and border paranoia, the town where the real shit goes down. Ditto for Mexicali.

I walk across the border at Calitex, and find, on the exterior wall of a strip bar, an inadvertent poem:

25 Beauty Full

Girls on Scene

Continuously dancing from 3 p.m.

Promotion.

On Buckets of Beer and Bottes

Of liquor

No cover

Charge.

But mostly, of course, Mexicali is just a town, waking up on a quiet Saturday morning: A gangly teen guy comes out of a changing room in too-baggy jeans, waits for the Judgment of Mom; a guy holds his toddler in a gentle headlock, kissing kissing kissing her repeatedly on the neck, which fails to stop her wailing; three slouching, hotted-out teenage girls loll on a bench, watching the street with eager who-might-love-me attentiveness; pigeons troop across the sunlit grass of a park like an overfed gray army. Whatever scams, corruptions, or cartel-related high jinks went down last night, all is well in the park this morning, with the bad boys still in bed.

It’s a town like an American town, like the American town just across the river, in fact, if you drained half the money out and let it sit awhile. See it in fast motion: Stores close, streets go dirty, entropy increases, dark moneymaking schemes multiply, people’s dreams begin to be of leaving.

This may be the one clear truth of the so-called border issue: Put a poor country next to a rich one and watch which way the traffic flows. Add impediments, the traffic endeavors to flow around them. Eliminate disparity, the traffic stops.

If Mexico were as rich as we are, we’d only be getting their tourists.

I have lunch, flirt with some local grandmothers, undercut my flirting by crotching myself on the corner of a table as I leave.

Outside, a pregnant woman displaying much cleavage, selling Chiclets on behalf of a “home for poor women,” asks if I am sleeping in Mexicali tonight. It’s hot and I’m tired and my mind is playing tricks and I suddenly see her as she would be if, instead of a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, she were a Calitex soccer mom: The school does not properly emphasize reading; their vacation plans are proving difficult; she really hopes her daughter will stick with the cello.

But she’s not a soccer mom, she’s a Mexicali Chiclet-selling probable prostitute, and in spite of the far-along state of her pregnancy, asks, several more times, with increasing urgency, where I’ll be sleeping tonight, and only finally believes me when I say: America, for sure, honestly.