Chicanonautica: Otra Vez, The United States of Arizona

by Ernest Hogan

It was a weird, slow burn, festering away below the surface, and now it’s ready to burst open, unleashing a thick, sticky, toxic spray of poison all over the nation.

I consider one of my duties here to be La Bloga’s Arizona correspondent. I include politics in my beat, because whipping up paranoia about the Border and the Brown Menace is a perennial way to get elected here in the Grand Canyon State. And we’re seen as Norteamerica’s experimental laboratory for demented political ideas. Trump used the Border strategy to get into the White House, and other politicians across the land caught on.

There’s another, deadlier virus spreading. We are becoming the United States of Arizona. And it seems to be crossing borders. Another pandemic is coming.

This used to be a perverse kind of fun. And easy. All I had to do was report what was going on, and it was weird, funny, and I felt I was doing a needed public service.

Now it’s getting ugly, hideous, a bloody, pick and shovel self-defense job that I don’t dare quit.

As much as I hate to use an overused quote from Star Wars, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

In the old days the Republican hacks would start howling about it earlier. This time it was there, but not the main event. 

Then Trump got hit with the indictments and stumbled. Other predators, smelling blood in the water, moved into the murky power vacuum. 

The lawsuits over Arizona’s ex-governor Doug Ducey’s disastrous shipping container border wall have been dismissed, but the damage is still there. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s buoy barrier down the Rio Grande will stay in place thanks to a federal court. Then there’s Tom Horne, Superintendent of the Arizona Board of Education, doing his best to do away with bilingual education . . .

Meanwhile, more undocumented people are crossing border, triggering the usual hysteria, and giving me a flashback: A few elections ago (I have trouble sorting them out, and am disturbed that what was written long ago still rings true–things have only gotten worse) there was group of anti-immigrant speakers making the rounds at political rallies and getting lot of time on TV news. They had a token black, to prove that they weren’t racist. He ranted about how Mexicans were going to sneak across the Border, kill and eat Americans.

I wonder what he’s doing these days. Could he be running for office?

 

And while I don’t want to give election-denier Kari Lake any undue publicity as she keeps losing her lawsuits–I want her to become a bad joke and be forgotten, as she deserves–I can’t help noticing that she looks older in every photo I see of her. Politics does tend to cause rapid aging. You’d think an ex-cheerleader/news anchor would be doing something about it. If she doesn’t end up looking like a mummy soon, it could be because of an Elizabeth Bathory-type rejuvenation process.

Better watch out for reports of missing virgin’s blood . . .

And lately I’ve been having these visions of a convicted Trump back in the White House, wearing an ankle bracelet, issuing revenge by executive order.

So, stay tuned, gente, I’ll try to make it more coherent than this, but then maybe not. To misquote Star Trek, “I’m a sci-fi satirist, not a journalist.”

 

LAST MINUTE UPDATE: As I was getting ready to post this, the news about McCarthy ousting broke. ¡Chingao! It's worse than I thought . . .

Ernest Hogan’s Pancho Villa’s Flying Circus & Other Fictions is coming in 2024.