Speechless (because immigrants took my speech).

So, I saw this ad today on CNN. I don't even have any further commentary. I saw this fucking ad on CNN in the afternoon and that's crazy to me.

Home.

Theirs was always a diasporic consciousness of sorts. Their dispersal hadn't been forced per se, but for them existence itself had woven into it a vaguely haunting sense of wandering, of being truly at home nowhere despite putting down roots. It was all the more disconcerting when one considered that, materially, they did have quite comfortably settled homes. They had carried on the old traditions wherever they settled, had built churches and clubs, started businesses, founded societies and sports teams, even convinced local schools to teach the children in the language of their fathers and mothers. They had carved out a niche for themselves so perfect that it was now hardly recognizable as the space to which they had immigrated--it was an island of the old country in the new ocean, a space they'd made theirs, a space they'd made home.

Home was also the old, the real island in the real ocean, the windswept green on bulging hills, the cobblestones and whitewashed homes that had all moved on without them after they left. People often noted that the imitation of the old in the new country had become more authentically old than the now increasingly new old country.

No home was what it had once seemed, no home was comfortably home. And they, these wanderers, were never actually home, were never completely visiting. One foot was always on the platform. But the hills remained, veiled in chill mists so dense that they seemed to muffle the ocean's roar.

All video clips lifted from the vimeo page of Ruben Tavares, whose montages of Terceira turn me into a ball of nostalgic misty-eyed mush.

Ilha Terceira - 24 horas em Timelapse from Ruben Tavares on Vimeo.

Céu Nocturno from Ruben Tavares on Vimeo.

Twilight (Azores) from Ruben Tavares on Vimeo.

Bigots and brains.

Last week, Iowa psychiatrist and Republican Congressional candidate Pat Bertroche advocated tagging illegal immigrants with microchips.

This week psychologist and Christian crusader against the disease of homosexuality, George Rekers, got caught with a male prostitute. It's like clockwork with these family values guys.

In his own defense, Mr. Rekers told the popular gay blog Joe. My. God. that he was--like Jesus--hanging out with a sinner so as to convince him of the error of his ways and nurse him back to spiritual health. That doesn't exactly match the original story that the good doctor didn't know "Lucien" was even gay, that the young man was hired as a "travel assistant" to carry luggage, but I guess Rekers could have come to the realization of what had happened and then clicked into salvation mode.  I suppose that he might have initially missed the fact that rentboy.com is a website for finding "rentboys." And hey, maybe he thinks it's normal for a luggage carrier to advertise that he has a "perfectly built 8 inch cock (uncut)."

I'm sure this is just a big misunderstanding.

Notes on the State of Arizona.

Surprising no one by openly expanding its crusade to attack legal as well as illegal immigrants, Arizona will apparently be giving the boot to teachers with heavy accents and bad grammar. I look forward to seeing how Arizona decides which accents are heavy enough to qualify for job termination, which colloquialisms are "ungrammatical" enough, and how to enforce this without making it too obvious that they're just rounding up brown people.

On the other hand, the Phoenix Suns, or Los Suns de Phoenix, get an enthusiastic "hell yes" from this inconsequential peanut gallery inhabitant. Thank you, Robert Sarver. As much as I hate the use of Cinco de Mayo as an excuse for anything, any time your team wears these jerseys, I'm rooting for "Los Suns" against the bigotry of their own home state.

"If you wanna live here, learn it!"

If Tim James (see below) had been the governor of California in the mid-eighties to early nineties, I would never have had a ride home from school. So, from personal experience, I can think of at least one problem Alabama's fixin' to take on if it adopts measures that don't consider how and why people immigrate but instead punish those (legal as well as illegal) who are already here.



And then there's Iowa Congressional candidate Pat Bertroche, with this genius idea, which I'm pretty sure betrays a misunderstanding of how pet microchips work, but certainly betrays a lack of basic human decency:

I think we should catch 'em, we should document 'em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going. I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can't I microchip an illegal?

Oh, America. We just don't learn anything ever, do we?

all illustrations lifted from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org