El Zorro sent some information to El Gringo Viejo a few hours ago. Most of the matter referenced an ancient set of events wholly pertinent only to our own personal orbit. But then, he included a couple of observations that tugged at, if not the heart-strings, at least at the gall-bladder-strings. They are gut-feelings that a lot of Texans have. A dumbo like Governor Perry has them, but he hath not the grey-matter to explain his gut-feelings, and gut-instincts.
Perry's notion that folks should feel something for a person who was brought to Texas as a child being treated as an "illegal alien" was badly explained. It killed him in the Republican Presidential Primaries. It was badly explained because he had failed to formulate a reasonable answer, a reasonable position, and a reasonable defense of his position. He needed to put into thirty-second sets of phrases something about the thousands of Texas high schoolers and collegiates, back in the 1930s through the 1960s, who would trundle down to Saltillo and San Miguel de Allende/Guanajuato, and Oaxaca and Puebla/Cholula and Guadalajara/Chapala/Zapopan/Tequila during the summer and pick up transferable credits, room and board with a Mexican family, and 9 to 12 hours of foreign language, history, and/or anthropology and archaeology. These Texas students paid regular tuition, and several Mexican State University systems had reciprocal agreements with the Republic of Texas that permitted their residents to matriculate in Texas public colleges and universities if the Mexican student had the grades and standard pre-requisite studies.
The Governor could have turned the entire illegal immigration issue into a strong suit simply by saying that Texans have a much deeper understanding of who is coming in to contribute and who is coming in to be a parasite and who is coming in to forward criminal intents. He could have pointed out that when we really had border problems, especially during and shortly after the worst parts of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 - 1917, we really did have significant to huge deployments of National Guard and Regular Army mounted cavalry and mounted infantry along the Texas frontier with Mexico. There were times that there were as many as 150,000 effectives serving in those counties adjacent to the Rio Grande. These deployments stretched between Fort Leaton and Fort Hancock in the Texas Big Bend country, down through Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Brackettville, Laredo, Zapata, Rio Grande City, McAllen/Mission/Hidalgo, Relampago, Blue Town, Santa Maria, El Olmo, and Brownsville.
These places were connected by telephone, telegraph, heliograph, Iron Horse, and another odd invention called an aero plane. From a period right around the war with Spain through and including World War II, this part of the American Republic was defended by heavy, dusty, jingly-jangly patrols of cavalry, 50 cal. water cooled machine guns drawn, along with their ammunition by well-matched teams of mules. The rifle of issue and of respect by line soldier and officer alike was the Craig and Jorgenson 30 -40, and the soldiers patrolled with their issue .45 Army Colt semi-automatic, of Philippine Huk War fame.
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| Craig (Krag) and Jorganson 30 - 40 carbine, made in Springfield, Massachussets during the 1890s |
As has been stated before, El Gringo Viejo's father served in this operation and was in the United States Army 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment Headquarters Squadron, based in Fort Brown, Texas and in service throughout that above-described part of Texas.
Then, as now, most of the populace...what little there was by to-day's measure....almost always wanted the Cavalry around. In the areas described, the period from 1890 through about 1935 ranged from wild and wooly to "you need to keep your eyes peeled". The danger was not always disorganised units of "revolucionarios" that degenerated into bandits, because during the 1920s, for instance, and into the early part of the Great Depression there were plenty of bootleggers and other vermin. Al Capone even came to the Lower Rio Grande Valley to arrange for deliveries from bootleggers of various types of liquors. Anarchists from Italy and Spain and places in South America filtered through the border in significant numbers, along with Fifth Column communist moles, and later German NAZI infiltrators, spies, and saboteurs. Counterfeiters of both coin and bank and bond notes passed false money of poor to excellent quality, especially through South Texas .
But....Governor Good Hair did not "come through". He mumbled because he had Yankee-fied, moderate mumble-coaches who speak straight from the focus groups whose combined IQs sometimes approach double digits. "Duh, you know it's a thing about, you know,all that stuff and everything, you know. And besides, you know, the rich just keep on gettin' richer and the poor just keep on gettin' poorer and everything, you know. You know?"
A politician formats his own speech and speaking to match the dribble of inarticulate people who actually believe what is coming at them from the television and newspaper Old Media. A true Conservative statesman tells folks the truth, gives them a vision, and sets them free to set up the Magic Taco Stand that glows in the dark and generates 50,000 dollars a week in sales within the first year of operation. Heck, it only took 5 people in the family working 80 hours/week each, while going to school full time. (That, by the way, was the typical Mexican immigrant type during the 1930s through the 1960s. And then the Vietnamese, Korean, Indian and such since that time. Little wonder we are sliding backwards while waiting for Obama to "give" us "healthcare" and "security".)
We, the supposedly hard-nosed, rightwing, bigoted fag-bashing, hate-filled Klanners, are much more complicated than the leftwingers hope we are. We think in concepts, while they think in tactics. We point up to the good, into the land of hope, improvement, and fulfillment, and they point down into the grit and dispair of the inner city that they have produced and for which they blame, somehow, us.
BUT NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE POINT TO BE MADE:
El Zorro contemplated on the article about "Instant Buyer's Remorse, Anyone?".
Remember, he is a grizzled old Veteran, an arch-conservative, arch-constitutionalist, totally skilled blue collar type who can change in less than a second into a buttoned down white-collar executive type without taking an extra breath and with a perfect Windsor knot, to boot. And what he sends us are these....contemplations....a piece of prosaic poetry... that puts the reader behind his eyes....and the eyes of many, many rightwing Texans. We are much more complicated than the Hollywood people will ever understand. And the mainstream media people will never understand.....ghastly "Willie Nelsonisms" that Dan Rather tried to employ so as to sound like a real live "native Texan"...gag
.....Your insight to the “Hispanic race" is very accurate.
When I happen to run into a Spanish speaking individual,
“…little dark people with brown eyes and black hair”,
and respond to a greeting in Spanish
it changes a frown to a smile.
.....I think people of those origins, legal or not,
appreciate it when an obvious “gringo” does not talk loudly in English
to communicate and has taken the time to learn their language
.....especially in North Texas where they are, at times,
seen as no more than stoop labor.
.....GW did at least attempt to speak the language,
never mind he slaughtered it,
but then he slaughtered English as well.
.....It would seem that pandering to any distinctive group,
..... ethnic, religious, sex, etc. specifically is a losing strategy.
.....after all, “We are everybody”.
.....Again, I dream of secession by Texas from this Union of states and the merger of some sort between Texas and Mexico. Can you imagine the resources brought together? We could be the most powerful, productive, and civil country in the world living under a constitution similar to the one of the Framers sans the degradation that has been perpetrated by the Supreme Court (Congress and Presidents not withstanding).
Z
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El Zorro's last paragraph has been left in its original format. This is the stuff high-school seniors mull over during early morning stay-over conversations....and then later have in college, in the student union cafeteria, talking to buddies. And then again during conventions of various Colleges within various Universities, while the professors are busy trying to impress each other with the numbers of published articles, and then in the bars and restaurants, in the barbecues with friends during those special summer afternoons and evenings....and while night fishing in the Laguna Madre.
Terms such as "merger", in this writer's opinion, would raise howls of protests among some Texans, while others would be intrigued by the thought, at least on an academic level. Texas could be free-standing as a Republic, and we would be better off for it. We could commit to something like a Special Relation with Mexico, and an assembly of commonwealth inter-relationships with other States of the United States it would be a formidable arrangement. Texas and Mexico as an alliance would equal Germany, in terms of economic production. That would be 4th in the world.
Consider that Mexico has the world's 10th or 11th largest economy at this writing, and then consider that Texas, alone, has an economy that is the equivalent of Mexico's. Consider that New York and California are essentially in free-fall, and all the economic road signs for them point to Greece, and their populations are degenerating into parasitic societies.
Negatives are obvious. Mexico has a long haul, still, to parity with Texas. Mexico does dumboe things like the United States in electing a dumboe for President. But the good part of the nation is resolved to fight against their own decay, as we do in Texas. As the United States moves towards organic law and Balkanization, Mexico stumbles towards common and natural law, and...perish the thought....old-style Americanization. Most Americans, even the ones who go to Cancun and Playa del Carmen, etc. for vacations...cannot comprehend the progress Mexico has made in the last 10 years especially, and what a hub of commercial, industrial, and agricultural activity it has suddenly developed into.
At the HEBs in Mexico...in my little city of Cd. Victoria, when I go to pay out at my grocery store, I do not have to wait in line behind some slob buying things with food stamps or a Lone Star Card, things that I could never hope to afford since I am part of the "1%".
So, yes...we think ...what if. Texans do think like that. And even when we say, ''...Aw..we're just a'joshin' you all a bit...." , we really are being serious. It's better to go our own way, and deepen our friendships with people whom we have fought, with whom we have been friends, done business, and generally developed a deep and wide relationship, than to cast ourselves further into the breach of collapse of a country whose Supreme Court cannot even determine the obvious un-constitutionality of a law so flawed, that we had to vote for it before we could read it.
Thank you all for your kind attention and time.
El Gringo Viejo
