One of my best buddies in college graduated in the ROTC program and was stationed in California as a pilot for several years. When he decided it was time to do something else, he moved his family to Mesa, AZ, and became a real estate agent selling houses in the new boom suburb of Phoenix. A few years later, he decided he wanted another change and he moved to Arkansas, where he and his family have lived ever since. I went to visit them in Mesa a few times and I always considered the area to be a fun place where everything was new and nearby Superstition Mountain added lovely beauty to the landscape. It would be many years before I would come to understand why my friends left Mesa, but one of those reasons could have had something to do with the surrounding Republican mindset. You see, my friend came from the town where Mississippi Burning was set, where Ronald Reagan announced his Presidential run, a town mentioned numerous times in Paradigm Shift. I think my friends had long ago had quite enough of the hatred borne of racial prejudice.
Long before it was The Palin Matrix, my latest book was going to be about the housing bubble and its devastating effect on the U.S. economy. In case you did not know, Mesa, Arizona, was at the very core of the booming housing market from about 1980 to 2006, alongside a few boomtowns such as Las Vegas. I have never read this anywhere, but I have always held the supposition that the Republican stronghold in Arizona probably long ago broke the backs of the many unions in the state, including those young men, and occasionally women, who build new housing developments. It used to be that the roofers were the bottom-feeding slaves in the hot sun of home building, and there was a hierarchy going up to the general contractors who seemed to spend an enormous amount of time driving around in their pickup trucks and yapping on their cell phones. Once upon a time in America, all those skilled professions between these two extremes were members of unions that kept their members' wages at respectable levels. I bet that over the past couple of decades, first the roofers lost control of their union wages, the hammer, nail, and concrete workers followed suit, and it wasn't long before the whole damn house was built by non-union labor. I can just hear the Republican minds clicking, how can we push wages even lower so the Masters of Cell Phones and Pickup Trucks can make even more profit, and the big-shot builder corporations can roll in massive amounts of dough without even picking up a hammer? I know! I know! We'll look the other way when our subcontractors begin hiring illegal immigrants! Cue Jon Lovitz: Yeah, that's the ticket!
Obviously I do not think it has ever been a coincidence that the state maddest about illegal immigration has been Arizona. I also think, as described above, that the Republicans probably did it to themselves. Of course, like Sarah Palin, they will never admit to any culpability whatsoever. They whine and scream how they have been victimized by the newly arrived Hispanic population, but I can assure you that they are as anti-union as ever. Show me a place where they are hollering the loudest about illegal immigration and I'll show you where the dirt-poor immigrants have a shot at a job with at least halfway decent wages and working conditions.
Everything I have read about the infamous new Tucson assassin indicates that he has been a follower of Glenn Beck, aka Chipmunk. I do not think he is a specific fan of Palin, although he probably does not hate her guts, either. Chipmunk obviously had the boy all riled up about the price of gold in the New World Order, any Democratic support of immigrants whatsoever probably pushed him over the edge, and he just had to shoot somebody over it. Of course he was aiming deliberately at a Democrat. Why he had to take out a harmless little girl, I shall never know. Yes, he is a nut; yes, he is an a-hole; no, I would not execute him. Throw him in the clink for life without parole, fine, but I have always been against the death penalty.
Sarah Palin has bought it this time. I was still quite concerned for our nation, even after the tragedy of last Saturday, but the latest video presentation from the Wicked Witch of Wasilla has left me breathing a sigh of relief. Remember Rick Sanchez? He used to work for CNN. Sarah' s going to make a lot of powerful people with big money mad with her latest anti-Semitic comment. Up to some relative point, you can get away with bad-mouthing liberals, hippies, Communists, atheists, African-Americans, and Hispanics in this country, but don't mess around with that concept called anti-Semitism. If you dare to do that publicly, Ruh-roh! Somebody with a very big stick is going to whup up on yo ass!
The Palin Matrix is actually something a lot bigger than Sarah Palin. The phrase represents the selling out of America by its own media. Our citizens need to find an effective way to combat the Paradigm Shift and put our nation back on the right track. The hate-mongering must stop. The lying must stop. We must realize how fully the right wing owns all the major media and the degree to which they are utilizing this media to brainwash the many low-information voters. We have to face the simple human condition that the right wing have been using bully tactics to bluff everybody who opposes them into a wimpy level of submission. Before we can ever progress beyond this partisan madness, we must step up and punch the bully in the nose. Bullies have no interest in intellectual discussion or debate. Why do we keep acting as if they do? We must step up to the plate and swing that big bat! Every intelligent American should read The Progressive Left Strikes Back! It's our turn at bat.
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