You may remember Roger Kimball, the New Criterion editor who also hangs his opera hat at Pajamas Media, where he offers a bracing splash of that effete snobbery and Perelmanesque wordplay so beloved by the angry, heavily armed, conspiracy-prone crackers who crowd the root cellars of the right blogosphere. The last time we dropped in, he was flexing his rarefied lit-crit faculties by comparing President Obama to Emmanuel Goldstein from Orwell’s 1984, but Roger’s not one of those purblind Brahmins who fixates solely on Mrs. Astor’s 400, and today he adjusts his bow-tie, inhales a pinch of snuff, and delicately sneezes in the general direction of America’s caramel-colored servant class.
Further thoughts about immigration, ‘racism,’ and political correctness (a lesson in common sense)
Yesterday, I was cabbing up Park Avenue in New York.
There’s something strangely familiar about this sentence, and at first I wondered if Roger might be alluding to the early Dr. Seuss classic, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. But after pondering it for a moment or two, I realized he was actually quoting from a book written during Geisel’s later, more bitter period, The Scab In The Cab
Somewhere just north of Grand Central, I noticed a crowd of people with placards milling about on the sidewalk. The word “Racism” figured prominently on the signs and I caught a snatch or two of oratory: “The message is,” said this urban Demosthenes, “if you’re an illegal alien, you’re not welcome.” Was this an ’enry ’iggins moment? Was the crowd going to ejaculate “By George, I think he’s got it”?
Or was it a thought experiment to determine what the Jeeves stories would have been like if Bertie Wooster was, as the French say, un dickhead formidable?
Not a chance. I was by now motoring past this cheery scene of citizens (but were they citizens?) exercising their Constitutionally protected right to make a public nuisance of themselves.
Were they indeed a restive knot of unlanded bolsheviks who savored of the tar brush, or were they simply ignes fatui of a type frequently summoned by a laggardly bean after a late night with the lads at the Drones Club?
But it was clear that the assembled multitude shared the speaker’s indignation at the fact that if you were in this country illegally you were not welcome.
Unless you were engaged by a gentleman farmer to harvest his crops, or perhaps employed by one of our larger purveyors of industrial foodstuffs to hose chicken blood into the open drains of a poultry slaughterhouse. In which case — Bienvenue!
You and I, untrained in the higher hermeneutics of politically correct grievance mongering, might think that because someone was in the country illegally, therefore he would by definition be “unwelcome.”
There’s a reason the Welcome mat is traditionally laid at the front doorstep, and not the tradesman’s entrance.
Q., that is to say, E.D.
F., that is to say, U.
The bit about being illegal veritably entails the bit about being unwelcome. Or so I would have thought.
Then a tawny fellow shoved a 10 pound bag of sphagnum moss into my arms and told me to pot my own damn Liebeszauber tea roses.
But that simplistic line of argumentation is apparently not to the taste of the many righteous souls, including Attorney General Eric Holder, who have seized upon Arizona’s decision to protect its long border with Mexico and enforce the immigration laws. Most of us, I submit, would regard Arizona’s new law — a law, by the way, whose chief burden is to affirm that henceforth it will enforce the laws that already apply to immigration — most of us, I say, would regard that law as a salutary exercise in that most uncommon virtue, common sense.
Roger makes a good point; although his tone does raise the question of whether state law also makes it illegal to impersonate Ernest Thesiger.
“To a new world of gods and monsters! And overbred douchebags!”