Clarification

Friends, we've been overwhelmed by the response to our suggestion (found here) that we embrace and infest neoconservative frames and destabilize them from the inside. We ask that you consider this move not as politics stricu sensu (in Lenin's sense of what people do to one another), but rather as a Preface to Politics: this is what Walter Lippmann called it in 1913, while he was still more or less a Wobbly-sympathizing Socialist and before he became a fluffer for Goldwaterites.

More on this later.

For now, you'll recall that our suggestion was to counter the Republican's "Fight them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them on Main Street, U.S.A." frame by pointing out the tacit admission of what we already know to be the case: that neither Republicans nor Democrats really want genuine immigration reform.

Why? For the same reason that Woody Guthrie wrote "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (Deportee)": Because there's a whole bunch of fields to be worked, meat to be slaughtered, and lawns to be mowed in this great land of ours, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper to employ people who are scared of being arrested, pay taxes but don't collect benefits, and don't strike for human working conditions. And that's as true for embarassing Clinton powerbroker Zoe Baird as it is for deluded psychopath Tom Tancredo. (Full disclosure: We once cleaned the basement of Ms. Baird and her husband, Yale law prof. Paul Gewirtz. They paid us under the table, though the working conditions were OSHA-compatible. Lemonade was served.)

Yes, despite what you may have heard, there is a strong progressive argument for meaningful documentation of workers. For the moment, we will spare you our critique of the progressives, and keep to ourselves the anarchist conviction that it is borders and states themselves that cause the problems. You've had enough for one day.