Markie Posts

So, it’s official. We’re building a gigantic fence making the legal, yet invisible, U.S.-Mexican border much more tangible.

The whole idea just irks me, since well, we ARE a nation conceived, built, and ran by immigrants, or children of immigrants, or third, fourth, fifth generation Scotch, Welsh, Russian, Peruvian, Korean, Samoan, Armenian, Haitian, whatever, I mean, how many Mr. Sitting Bulls or Ms. Dances with Wolves do you meet outside of a dive bar or a casino or a Sherman Alexie novel?

The one aspect of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that I find endlessly entertaining is that I think I heard of NPR yesterday that we are actually building a 700 mile chain-linked fence. Heh, okay, but won’t that stretch infringe upon some national parks, or residential neighborhoods, or wild life preserves? And if not, come on, like Mexicans don’t know how to climb a fucking fence. What are we going to do to ensure that this actual fence actually keeps Mexicans on their side of the Rio Grande? Create more check points? Use satellites? Place spikes at the top of it? Line it with AK-47s? Make it electrical? (Oh man, that would make for a superb reality show - “When Fences Attack!”).

Desperate people do have a tendency to be ingenious; if Cubans can figure out how to make a raft out of truck-



-then the ancestors of the Aztecs can figure out how to climb a fence.

The erection just seems like the embodiment of an insult against a wonderful country that’s done nothing but bring us the awesomeness that is burritos, stellar bud, tequila, and the Latin Kings.

In conclusion, I’d like to top off this tangent with a bit of irony, in the opposite corner of this country, we’ve got this big ole’ statue at the mouth of the Hudson River with an inscription that reads:

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."