I’ve gotten several private emails from others unhappy about the invidious comparisons between illegal immigrants and, well, burglars, kidnappers, filthy birds, animals, and the like.

That sort of gross distortion brings to mind this video.

I’m not sure how I got on the distribution list of people I know who are upset about illegal immigration, but there I am, frequently getting misinformed screeds against illegals.

Here’s the first of two I recently received (and please do read it):

Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration.

Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders, might make it harder to sneak into this country and, once here, to stay indefinitely. Let me see if I correctly understand the thinking behind these protests.

Let’s say I break into your house.
Let’s say that when you discover me in your house, you insist that I leave.
But I say, “No! I like it here. It’s better than my house. I’ve made all the beds and washed the dishes and did the laundry and swept the floors. I’ve
done all the things you don’t like to do. I’m hard-working and honest (except for when I broke into your house).”

According to the protesters:
You are Required to let me stay in your house
You are Required to feed me
You are Required to add me to your family’s insurance plan
You are Required to Educate my kids
You are Required to Provide other benefits to me & to my family
(my husband will do all of your yard work because
he is also hard-working and honest, except for that
breaking in part).

If you try to call the police or force me out, I will call my friends who will picket your house carrying signs that proclaim my RIGHT to be there.

It’s only fair, after all, because you have a nicer house than I do, and I’m just trying to better myself. I’m a hard-working and honest, person, except for well, you know, I did break into your house.

And what a deal it is for me!!!
I live in your house, contributing only a fraction of the cost of my keep, and there is nothing you can do about it without being accused of cold, uncaring, selfish, prejudiced, and bigoted behavior.

Oh yeah, I DEMAND that you learn MY LANGUAGE!!! so you can communicate with me.

Why can’t people see how ridiculous this is?! Only in America if you agree, pass it on (in English ).
Share it if you see the value of it.

If not blow it off………
along with your future Social Security
funds, and a lot of other things.

If, like me, you receive lots of variations on this, you’ll note the consistent symptomatology:

1. Nameless opponents — in this case, “certain people.” Me, I’m always suspicious of “certain people” who use the phrase “certain people.”
2. Bad metaphor. No, breaking into a house and then refusing to leave is not like slipping across the border. The former is a home invasion, and police take it very seriously; if they get a clear shot at someone who takes hostages, they take it. They have not been known to shoot women, children, and men who cross the border, legally or not.
3. The supposed threat to Social Security — which I will address in a moment.
4. The “demand” that English speakers learn Spanish. In actuality, of its own accord, it goes the other way. Here are the facts: 1/3 of Latinos in the U.S. are Spanish-dominant, yes; but that means that 2/3 AREN’T — half are English-dominant, and half are fully bilingual. For second and third generation Spanish speakers, English becomes dominant.
5. Misrepresentations and outright lies, such as these: “Recently large demonstrations have taken place across the country protesting the fact that Congress is finally addressing the issue of illegal immigration. Certain people are angry that the US might protect its own borders….” No one protested that Congress was addressing illegal immigration — they were protesting what they took to be proposed measures. From what I understand, almost everyone wants something done, they just don’t know what. As for being angry that “the US might protect its own borders,” again, I haven’t heard of anyone being angry about protecting the borders. I want the borders and the insides protected from all sorts of things, as long as we can retain some sanity about it.

But my real beef with this email is that the wrong people are being targeted. Why go after the iron filings drawn to the magnet, when the magnet is larger and easier to locate? Here was my response:

Let’s try this a different way.

Let’s say you want your house cleaned and painted and your lawn mowed. And you don’t want to pay $20/an hour. So nobody wants to do it. So you and the rest of the neighborhood invite people from far away to come do it for $5/an hour. But then you complain that there aren’t enough $20/an hour jobs to go around, and you try to wall off the neighborhood. Even though you go right on offering $5/ an hour to everybody who somehow gets over the wall.

Now who’s to blame?

I sent that to the entire distribution list and never received a reply.

This next one deals with the perceived threat to Social Security presented by illegal aliens. It helpfully includes a petition so that everyone involved can keep spreading misinformation and forwarding it around the entire internet.

SOCIAL SECURITY CHANGES

It does not matter if you personally like or dislike Bush. You need to sign this petition and flood his e-mail box with e-mails that tell him that, even if the House passes this bill, he needs to veto it. It is already impossible to live on Social Security alone. If the government gives benefits to ‘illegal’ aliens who have never contributed, where does that leave those of us who have paid into Social Security all our working lives?

As stated below, the Senate voted this week to allow ‘illegal’ aliens access to Social Security benefits.
Attached is an opportunity to sign a petition that requires citizenship for eligibility to that social service.

Instructions are below. If you don’t forward the petition and just stop it, we will lose all these names.

If you do not want to sign it, please just forward it to everyone you know.

Thank you!

To add your name, click on ‘forward’. Address it to all of your email correspondents, add your name to the list and send it on.

When the petition hits 1,000, send it to comment@whitehouse.gov

PETITION for President Bush:

Dear Mr President:
We, the undersigned, protest the bill that the Senate voted on recently which would allow illegal aliens to access our Social Security. We demand that you and all Congressional representatives require citizenship as a pre-requisite for social services in the United States.

We further demand that there not be any amnesty given to illegals, NO free services, no funding, no payments to and for illegal immigrants.

We are fed up with the lack of action about this matter and are tired of paying for services to illegals.

There were just under 1000 names on the one I received. Some of them were names of people I know. I understand the seeming appeal of the argument, but it requires believing the facts presented (which I rarely do), and the conclusions drawn (which I almost never do). Here was my response:

According to Snopes.com, this thing has been floating around the internet since 2006. I can’t find any record of Congress (or even “the House”) passing this bill, which would of course require Senate passage as well. Moreover, if there were such a bill, I’m sure it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country and we would have heard of it. Rush Limbaugh would be banking further millions off this topic. Instead, the email furthers the perception that illegals are flooding our borders and stealing our jobs. Although of course we need immigration reform and no one should encourage illegal immigration — including every single one of us who indirectly is supporting illegal immigration, whether directly by unknowingly hiring illegals or indirectly by eating crops picked by illegals who are supported by an economic system that depends upon them — illegals are a net plus for the economy, as every single economic study has shown. We need to welcome these people into the system so that entitlement programs — like Social Security, ironically — can be shored up by the income derived by their children. I say that because, in case no one has noticed, in general well-off white people like probably most of us on this email list are not having enough babies to replace ourselves. Our economic well-being rests in the hands of those little ones with brown faces.

Lee

Again, I replied to the entire distribution list. In this case, I did receive one response:

Hi Lee,
Interesting perspective. It shows what happens when folks don’t have all the facts rights.
Take care.”

No, I’m not in favor of illegal immigration. I’m in favor of recognizing that we’ve got a very large labor force already here, and we in essence invited them here. We can try to keep them as a permanent underclass, keeping their kids out of school and forcing their uninsured into clinics and hospitals, or we can come up with sensible solutions that makes a better system for everyone. Either way, they’re probably not leaving. And the day they stop coming will be the day you know the economy is so bad that even George W. Bush has noticed. I vote for fixing the system in a way that makes the most sense.

Primarily, though, I always vote for using your common sense to sift baseless importunity from logic.

With reference to my previous post:

My wife left for work, but here’s the note she left for me to find when I came home: “Corned beef & cabbage in pot. Happy St. Paddy’s Day!”

I’ll have to check with Alanis Morissette to see if that’s ironic or just coincidental.

In a similar vein, it now occurs to me that there has been just one Irish superhero I can think of — Banshee, of the X-Men. And he was killed in action.

I’ve never cared for or about musicals. This may be a bias picked up from my father, who tended toward the literal and couldn’t figure out why a guy in a movie would break out into a song while getting drenched in the process. (“Hey, dummy — get outta the rain!”) It’s surprising to say the least that I’m seeing three musicals this month: “1776” (which I already saw, at Actors Co-Op, and loved), “Sweeney Todd” (seen last Friday night at the Ahmanson. in a not-good production), and, this Friday night, “The Dead” at Open Fist in Hollywood. I saw “The Dead” about five years ago at, again, the Ahmanson, and although my seats were somewhere up on the surface of the moon, I was completely drawn in to this musicalization of the story by James Joyce; it was utterly moving without being sentimental. (Treacly sentiment being one of those things that tend to keep me away from musicals.) I hear that production by Open Fist is good, and I’m greatly looking forward to it. But three musicals in one month, and all by choice? That’s unprecedented.

And actually, it winds up being FOUR, if you count this one:

Just because I didn’t blog yesterday or today doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about what to blog about. So here are the things I thought about blogging about that I didn’t blog about:

1. That it now occurs to me that counting students, thesis students, workshop members, private dramaturgy clients, and me, I’m knee-deep in 19 different new plays — and exactly one of them is by me.
2. That I’m reading three books — and not at the moment writing either of the two I’m working on.
3. That “John Adams” on HBO leaves untouched the great question: How someone like Paul Giamatti gets someone like Laura Linney. And then leaves her behind for years at a time.
4. That yes, I can do a baked dijon flounder at home and have it come out well — but it will never be the baked dijon flounder at Smith’s Clam Bar in Somers Point, New Jersey.
5. That while Eliot Spitzer is a hypocrite who needed to go, I have to wonder again how many violent crimes could be prevented and how many roads and bridges and schools rebuilt and able-bodied productive non-violent people released from prison to help feed the economy if we legalized prostitution and decriminalized marijuana and taxed them both.
6. That Wizard World was in Los Angeles this weekend and I didn’t go because Comic-Con comes but once a year and Wizard World ain’t it.
7. That the Fed bailed out Bear Stearns, and it was those “free marketers” who cheered. In a free market, failing businesses fail. We had NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard); now we have NIMBA (Not In My Bank Account). By the way, the Fed funds that backed up Bear Stearns came from the Treasury — which means they were tax money. Which means you and I bailed out Bear Stearns. And yet we never got any of those windfall profits. This seems like something potentially more worthy of a federal investigation than call-girl rings.

I’m sure more will follow as I think about it.

Just today I was complaining again about the one unfortunate constant in David Mamet’s otherwise often quite marvelous dramas: the secretly scheming woman. We see it in “Speed the Plow,” we see it in “Heist,” we see it in “Oleanna,” we see it in “The Verdict,” we see it in “The Edge,” we see it again and again; when it’s unclear who the villain is, look to the woman in the cast. Those men may be crooks, but somehow they have better morals than those women whose intention is to emasculate them.

Then this afternoon I came across this piece in the Village Voice, in which Mr. Mamet’s other, less-visible, fault reappears: that of setting up false targets so he can easily knock them down. In this case, he equates liberalism with being brain-dead and attacks liberals for arguments I don’t hear them making.

(And you will note that I use “them” as the pronoun for liberals, rather than “us.” Please don’t think I dislike Mamet’s thin argument because my own group is being attacked. It isn’t. But I do wonder at how negative the connotations of “liberal” have become, when once there was a fine tradition of liberal humanism that cut across the political spectrum on these shores. Where once liberals were strong and proud standard-bearers of the improvability of the human condition, now they are cast as appeasers to tyrants and abettors of the disenchanted and ungrateful. In other words, they seem weak — which may be why the famously macho Mamet has jumped ship.)

Mostly when I listen to liberals I don’t hear a nostalgia for Che Guevara. What I hear is concern over a loss of civil liberties (an issue I would think both conservative and liberal and an issue, therefore, unreservedly patriotic and “American”), a bemoaning of the misconduct and malpractice of government (Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), and a great economic unease as enormous stockpiles of wealth are slushed over to an often incompetent few presiding over the ruin of major corporations while hundreds of thousands suffer from their daily mismanagement. If those complaints are liberal, then statistically we are all liberal. To me, a believer in free markets and friendly relations, someone who chokes up over the founding notions behind this nation and wishes we would get back to them, these complaints are commonsensical.

When liberals attack Rush Limbaugh, whom Mamet almost seems to embrace in this strange essay, surely they recognize Limbaugh as the opportunistic showman he is. (Let us always remember that the cowardly Limbaugh is hiding behind that microphone in his broadcast booth every day; if you were one of the few who saw his short-lived television show and his actual confrontations with a live audience, you will never forget the terror in his eyes and the timidity in his voice.) No, what irks leftists and, well, me about Limbaugh is rather what he represents: the dumbing-down of the dialogue and the debasement of the platform. As incredible as this may seem, many people actually listen to Rush Limbaugh and think he makes sense. Worse, the tenor of how he says what he says feeds an indignation that is misdirected against the sufferers rather than the perpetrators. And that, too, is what Mamet’s essay at times seems to do.

If David Mamet found himself caught up in groupthink and extricated himself, I’m delighted. We should celebrate that; it seems like one of our founding principles. But if he has left behind one groupthink to surrender to another, he hasn’t gone anywhere new.

Yes, that is a bear hanging on for dear life. (Thank God for the internet, where you truly can see everything.) For the full story on the bear and his rescue, click here.

From reading the news, you might say Clinton. But as John Dickerson explains on Slate, it was Obama.

I got a subscription invoice today from Fast Company. Here’s their address, on their invoice:  7 World Trade Center, New York, NY.

No, not the problem of finding a parking spot — as long as you’re willing to pay twenty bucks, you can always find a parking spot in LA.

No, I mean the problem of those tight parking slips — so fashionable and in-demand during our brief fling with econo cars in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and so impossible in the present reality of SUVs, pick-up trucks, and, in Parking Structure X at USC, DeLoreans. Just try parking between two cars in, again Parking Structure X, and then actually getting out of your car without having to shed a layer of skin.

Ah, but with this simple improvement we could all do it easily. (And then USC could fit in twice as many spaces.)