Surviving the Stupid

I have recently given up one of my fantasies (not the threesome with Winona Ryder and Kelly MacDonald). I have given up my dream of living without having to deal with incredibly stupid people.

It is a noble dream. It’s one I know is shared by many good people. We all enter that quest to be free from the stupid, shiftless and insane, but such a place does not exist. It is a curse of the human condition that we are subject to the grotesque imperfections of other human beings. That these imperfections seem to become more extreme and grotesque as probably more evidence of our own maturing wisdom than a larger decline in the population’s brains, though that is probably falling fast.

We yearn to reach a level of life where we can avoid having to be nice to people who are jerks to us, but no matter who you are or how successful you become, no one can ever avoid this.

For example, ask most people who the most powerful person in the world is and they’re like to tell you it’s the President of the United States. Even the President of the United States has to spend a large percentage of his time being nice to stupid people or people who are being boorish and rude. People say rude things at campaign stops, political donors expect to be thanked repeatedly; Congressmen and Senators want to get their photo taken with you even after they don’t vote for your budget, and foreign leaders make insulting spectacles of themselves at photo-ops. We’d like to think that if we were President we’d have the guts to tell everyone, “Fuck you, I’m the President, bitch,” but we wouldn’t. We can’t even tell off our boss when they do something stupid and fucked up; we need our jobs.

And all of life is just like that. We’ll never be as free as we want to be. Unless you live off the land as a hermit in the wilderness, you will have to deal with assholes and idiots that you have to be nice to at some point. And I’d imagine that in the wilderness you have to deal with asshole bears and mosquitoes and so forth.

We all dream about being able to spit in the asshole’s drink, put bananas in the tailpipe of their car, or manage some kind of stealth technology that will visit much-deserved misery on our tormentors and leave us unscathed. That also, is a dream. There are some fine pranks that are worthwhile—the Upper Decker, for instance—but these revenge fantasies carry big risks for potentially little reward.

But really, you can shelve those fantasies for the most part. Maintaining a stoic dignity will be a better revenge than anything you can think up. Deny them the small victory they scrape together by being a pest and affecting the lives of others, and you rob them of the perverse negative pleasures that make their pathetic existence more bearable.

Living among the stupid is one of the curses of being an intelligent, decent human being. It is a universal curse we all share, it’s all a matter of how we deal with this and navigate the obstacles it puts in our path.

It will be tempting at time to give in, to go along to get along and embrace stupidity and play to ignorance. Don’t. Be willing to be alone in the world. Having your eyes open means you won’t like much of what you see, but being smart and in the know is its own reward, sometimes it’s only reward.

Fear and Self Affirming Blame in Boston

The cacophony of conflicting information adds self-inflicted insult to the injury of the bombing of the Boston Marathon on Monday. There’s a suspect now, we are told, but no arrest yet.

In the face of horrific random violence, people want to cling to whatever shred of certainty they have. If we can confirm our worldview in the face of such a terrible and unpredictable event, it will give us some miniscule piece of mind perhaps. We may be relatively helpless in the face of terror, but at least we’ll be right about who’s bombing us now.

Therefore we saw many people predicting government conspiracies, right-wing fringe groups, and Islamic terrorists. The Internet was alight with conspiracy theories before the debris settled on Boston’s Boylston Street.

Personally, I doubled down on Muslims being the perpetrator(s). Muslims can be counted on to blow shit up with a mind to take out lots of innocent people. Also, the same day as the bombing, Al Qaeda executed a series of bomb attacks in Iraq that killed 61 people. Also, the mailing of ricin to political leaders could be part of the same coordinated terror effort, with Al Qaeda trying to relive its September 2001 attacks.

Maybe I’ll eat crow. Maybe it will be a lone wolf just wanted to get their jollies killing people.

Either way, we’re going to shake this off and get back to business like champs. Let’s bring the bomber or bombers to swift justice and learn whatever lessons we can from it to prevent another bombing. Let the people of Boston overcome this horror quickly so we can go back to hating them again.

The Great Immigration Scam

The same kind of myopic subservience to special interests that brought us the credit crisis and other gems now brings us a host of proposals to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants.

The media have refused to look at the situation critically and have helped push the amnesty plan on everyone. To oppose it is to be branded a racist troglodyte of the lowest order. But the truth will set you free, and the truth is an amnesty plan will be bad for everyone but the wealthiest among us. 

When I moved back to New York after several years away, I had a job as an immigration inspector at JFK airport. It was the job that enabled me to move back, and I worked at JFK for about two years. We were trained at a federal law enforcement training center like law enforcement officers. We were given badges and guns, even bullet-proof vests. But many of us, particularly those of us who were sent to work at airports as opposed to land borders, were more like glorified clerks than real law enforcement officers.

Here's an illustration of our immigration system at work: A passenger from India stood before me with a regular tourist visa. "How long do you plan to visit the United States?" I asked. 

"Well maybe two weeks, but you will give me six months," was her reply. Now, unless you are very, very wealthy, you cannot afford to go on vacation halfway around the world for six months. Most well-off Americans can't afford that, and this woman was a middle-class Indian at best. If she was going to stay for six months, there was little doubt she'd be working here illegally. 

We were under strict orders to give every regular tourist or business visa six months no matter what, because that was the maximum allowed under law. Back when more inspectors were giving people two weeks in the country when the person said they were only staying for two weeks, federal offices would be flooded with people working here illegally asking for their time extended for some bullshit excuse or another. To avoid this bureaucratic flood, the answer simply became to give everyone more time here. They could go home to visit every six months to keep up appearances and not technically overstay their visas, and they could go on living and working here illegally so long as they didn't get caught. 

The government knew exactly what was going on, but instead of doing something to solve the problem, they just set policies in place so that no one had to. It is pretty disheartening to see people day after day skirt and break the laws you are supposed to uphold.

Not every part of my experience working for the immigration service was a frustrating disappointment. I saw many people coming into the U.S. who exemplified the best parts of our immigration tradition. I met hard-working people who were proud to be coming to America. I met people who had endured great human rights abuses. I met people who would rather be fry cooks in the U.S. than engineers in their native countries.

But every American with eyes knows that our current immigration system is failing at its function of bringing in people who will be productive citizens and keeping out those that won't. There is not a well-funded lobbying effort among disaffected Americans seeking any real reforms. The U.S. government is allowing unprecedented amount of people into the country, and long ago gave up on the policies that made past generations of immigrants a success. 

Our tradition of immigration worked because it was well managed. Immigrants who came to this country were able to assimilate because we had a system in place that demanded they do so, and selected who was more likely to succeed in the U.S. We are now bringing in large numbers of people less likely to assimilate, and making no demand that they do so. This is a recipe for failure, and both major political parties have embraced this policy of failure. 

Allowing in millions of uneducated people who don't speak English is not good for the country, and it's not racist to say so. We already have too many immigrants, legal and illegal, to assimilate reasonably well. Enacting any kind of amnesty plan will only make this problem worse in the future. A reasonable immigration policy means many good people wouldn't be able to come to the United States, but being a responsible adult means sometimes saying "no" to good people.

But large numbers of unskilled, uneducated workers help create a glut of labor that keeps wages artificially low, and that pleases the moneyed interests that control our political leaders. That is one of the reasons why the current amnesty push has so much bipartisan support. It also puts on a path to citizenship millions of nonwhites, who will presumably all vote Democratic, creating a permanent demographic majority. This scares Republicans enough to try to jump on the bandwagon so as not to be branded as racists—even Rand Paul has sold out.

In fact—and even Paul Krugman agrees— lower wages for blue collar work will have a disproportionate effect on blacks and Hispanics. Where is your disparate impact theory now, Democrats? 

This is the country's last chance to put a stop to short-sighted policies that have screwed over the working and middle classes for decades, and try to turn things around. If immigration amnesty goes through, generations from now our descendants will ask us why we let it happen.