Feeling Native

For days I've mulled over a New York Times story about the town of Fremont, Neb., population 25,000, which finds itself in a raw divide over immigration. What must it feel like to experience the fading away of the town you've known forever into merely a pimple on the globe's fanny?

At the core of all the alleged immigration anxiety that has prompted an unenforceable law in Arizona, self-anointed "Minutemen" in Herndon, Va., and ripples of xenophobia in countless little towns like Fremont, where suddenly the descendants of immigrants oppose immigration, lie not merely some Angloes hankering for their pre-Civil Rights white sheets, much less any real knowledge of immigration demographics, policy or law.

At heart, this is about being a former something, in Fremont's case a mid-19th century railroad and farming town, that has now been absorbed into a more cosmopolitan world, courtesy of urban sprawl, globalization and the Internet.

Fremont is now only an exurb of Omaha, which is "big city" as it gets in Nebraska — been there. Herndon, whose "bustling downtown" you can pass in less time than it takes to read this sentence, had even less significance before its notoriety.

As for Arizona — what can you say about a state that doesn't even observe daylight saving time? — it's been downhill since the alliances between the Pueblos and the Navajos, long before Europeans set foot in the area.

Bewildering, isn't it, to dwell in country music's homeland (or a wannabe facsimile) — with whispered-about wife-swapping, divorce-prone barroom flirting and unmentionable inbred farmland fornication — to awaken with the world at your doorstep and all your wailing misunderstood.

Nothing would seem to resemble the complaint of a hateful Arizona kicker than that of a bewildered Afghan mountaineer (or Mexican farmer or Navajo tribesman or Pueblo villager): "Where do these people come from and what do they think they're doing in my country?"

Watch out, folks, history's multilingual, multicultural bulldozer is coming!

Elect Alvin Green?

Like most folks, I know almost nothing about Alvin Green, the nominated South Carolina Democratic Party candidate for U.S. Senate. He's a 32-year-old military veteran who has neither campaigned nor raised money, other than the blatantly anti-democratic $10,400 candidacy filing fee. Green, who is black, won a primary in a state that has not elected an African-American in living memory.

Green apparently has said nothing and seems a bit confused about his candidacy, let alone his platform -- a blank slate so far. Some say he won the primary because his was the top name on the ballot.

The Democratic Party bosses are squirming, of course. But I wonder what it would be like to have in the Senate an ordinary citizen, even a perplexed one. If this is a Republican dirty trick, as some are suggesting, let's have more of them.


What if the people conducted the people's business in Congress, instead of expensively tailored and coiffed slick mouthpieces of the wealthy and corporations?

Democracy, a novel idea.

Warning to Whitey

There's a lot of anger brewing about a black man in the White House being left holding the bag by a bunch of white creeps in the oil business, Wall Street and the insurance industry. Don't say I didn't warn you.