it all began with davy crockett

I wouldn’t say that Rebel was full of crazy people, or not any crazier then in any other movie, it was just awkward and things didn’t seem to fit together. The oddest thing was that most of the teenagers were played by people in their mid twenties or older. I think we’ve discussed movies before, but I don’t remember what we said.

Oh of course you have a sister, what was I thinking? It’s just that you sound like an only child, but maybe the oldest son is close. So why is she so liberal?

Oh Davy Crockett, I thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, of course I had not been around that long. I had coonskin caps, and those albums, and the trading cards, and I watched all of the spinoffs on Disney. I maybe had three different 45s of the song because I was a kid and kept breaking them. I remember later Disney tried to do the same thing with Daniel Boone, but it never took off. Daniel Boone was someone we had heard about in school, so already he was boring, he was like your father’s Oldsmobile.

And he was more of a pioneer and pioneers were boring. They showed us all those scratchy movies about pioneers churning butter and making soap, and I’m all like doncha have anything where a guy’s sleeve catches on the door handle and he ends up going over the cliff?

But anyway some people think that whole Davy Crockett phenomenon was partly responsible for the sixties. Suddenly they were selling all this merchandise to kids, and by using that new fangled tv they could run commercials and appeal to them to buy more, and they followed, or promoted, or invented that whole youth culture thing which made us feel like we were somebody important and not just a bunch of kids waiting around to grow up. And then you add to that drugs, and the unpopular war, and the fact that there were so dang many of us, and boom.

Do you remember the time they killed that black guy at 59th and Kedzie with a hammer? I remember that was a big deal, but it was before I really started reading newspapers so everything I knew about it, I heard from someone else. But I googled around for it a year or two ago ‘fifty ninth and kedzie racial attack,’ and came across the story. It seems like that was the work of the Rebels also. Hum, googled ‘chicago cornell park shooting,’ and came up with nothing.

Maybe that’s the way the world is, just a bunch of countries, each one wanting to go their own way, and always fighting each other, and no police to go to to settle their hashes. What if we had a really strong UN? Sure we would give up some of our freedoms, but we already have, to the countries we belong to, but like I said people would always rather be oppressed by their own kind than by a bunch of strangers. I am thinking of the shooting down of that plane over Ukraine is kind of like innocent bystanders who get killed when some stoopid kid is shooting at a corner where some guys are wearing the wrong colored hats. We have gone so far beyond zip guns that maybe we need some blue helmeted guys to bust our heads.

It seems to me that most of this hatred over immigration is white people being pissed off about brown people getting into the country. It’s people who don’t like anybody who isn’t like them, and they get whipped up into a fury and it’s mostly to harvest their votes, because we ain’t shipping them back and there is no fence high enough to keep them out. In the cities where people are jammed together there are more incidents than in the country, but there are more people. If you examine tolerance, there is much more tolerance in the cities than in emptier spaces.

Isn’t one of our national principles the equality of all men, so maybe we ought to take people who don’t feel like that and ship them out of the country, maybe on a jet plane to Ukraine. I know that’s extreme, but I am trying to provoke for over the weekend. I agree that there are concerns about people coming willy nilly into the country, but I believe a lot of this anti immigration stuff is really racism (didn’t you want to deport anybody who even had a Mexican sounding name?), pretending to be concerned with something more abstract and antiseptic.

As for central America. A lot of them are coming here, but more are staying. And they don’t want us, and we don’t want them.