The Braindead Megaphone

by George Saunders

  The end.

  “WHAT DO WE WANT? DEPORT THEM NOW!”

  Let’s meet the Rodriguezes, who came from a Very Poor Central American Country and now live in Somewhere, Texas.

  The Rodriguez males are legal, the females not. Mr. Rodriguez came illegally but has since gotten his paperwork in order; their baby son was born here and so is a citizen—but the wife and daughters remain undocumented.

  I visit them in their home, which Mr. Rodriguez built, by hand, out of cinder blocks, over the past five years, when not working his first job (laying tile), his second (factory watchman), or his third (growing their food in a backyard garden). The gray cinder blocks, arched doorways, and poured-concrete floor give the house the feeling of a medieval castle, had the king driven masonry nails into the cinder block in order to hang some framed family photos.

  To get here, Mr. R. worked his way north through Mexico for two years, doing construction, learning local dialects along the way to avoid getting busted by Mexican immigration. He’s a big guy, hearty and happy, somebody you’d see beaming down from a Diego Rivera mural, but his time on the road seems to have spooked him. He saw people shaken down, unfairly arrested, robbed, murdered. He saw “lots of lifeless bodies” along the road.

  “The real horror,” he says, “was in Mexico.”

  For two years, his wife didn’t hear from him.

  How did she feel during this silence?

  She suddenly looks physically sick, says she doesn’t like to think of that time, when she was sure he was dead. She was trying to keep the farm going, baking pan dulce in a mud oven he’d built, a hundred small loaves at a time. Twice a week, she’d walk into town, tray on her head, and in this way supported a family of five.

  Then came the earthquake.

  It ruptured the walls of their adobe house, and she moved herself and the children into a shed she built of three sheets of government-supplied sheet metal, which was just big enough for a bed and a table, and unbearably hot in the daytime.

  Then, one day, a letter came from America. He’d crossed on an inner tube, in a group, with coyote help, and lived briefly in a safe house that he left as soon as he found it was also being used in the drug trade.

  “Wow,” I say, “how did you feel when you first saw his handwriting—”

  “Muy contenta, she says, with a smile so spontaneous and uncontrived you’d think their two-year separation had just that instant ended.

  They don’t have insurance, she says, but then again, they never get sick: All their food is fresh, from their garden, she breast-fed the babies, they get good milk and cheese from their goats. In the past, she’s tried government-sponsored health-care programs, but she felt kind of ashamed accepting government aid and probably won’t be doing it again.

  “It’s nice remembering these things,” he says, “now that we are all here together. But also it’s sad, because I remember those left behind on the road.”

  “What’s your dream?” I ask. “You know, your eventual dream for your—”

  “I have arrived at my dream already,” he says.

  The oldest daughter brings in some vegetables from their garden—okra, big fat peppers. Is she, the daughter, in school?

  “I’m a junior,” she says in perfect English.

  Her passion is math. She wants to be a math teacher. I mention that my daughter’s in the throes of quadratic equations.

  “Oh,” she says shyly. “I love those.”

  “You love quadratic equations,” I say.

  “I love them,” she says.

  If this isn’t the essential American story, I don’t know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.

  Did he get it?

  Yes, he did, God bless him.

  LET US REDUCE OUR ENEMIES, SO WE CAN MOCK THEM MORE EASILY

  The Minuteman Project is kicking off Operation Sovereignty, their “largest operation to date,” with a rally on a narrow strip-mall berm in Laredo. It’s a rally in the modern-American style: participants few, Media many.

  The Minutemen angrily shout, “What do we want? Deport them now!”

  Members of the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste angrily shout, “Hey ho, hey ho, racist Minutemen got to go!”

  A jaunty Mexican American, in wraparound sunglasses, wearing a serape, waving a Mexican flag, angrily shouts, “Who picks your potatoes? Who builds your houses?”

  A Minuteman angrily shouts, re the Mexican Flag Guy, “He told me to get out of his CITY! This is my COUNTRY, man!”

  Everyone’s pissed, oppositional, less empathetic and articulate and well-mannered than they would be at any other moment in their actual lives. The Media rushes around, sticking their cameras into the face of whoever’s behaving most badly at the moment.

  A bespectacled little dude in a huge cowboy hat says he’s running for Congress in Austin.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  “Bad,” he says. “I don’t have any money.”

  Does he have a position on the immigration issue? He does: Borders make a country, and we need a better border, namely, a wall.

  But how do you do that, just, you know, physically?

  Simple. Alter the border. Cede land to Mexico until the border is a long, straight line. Then run your wall from here to California.

  I imagine that ugly map, beautiful border-curves of the Rio Grande made computer-straight.

  I step over for a word with the Mexican Flag Guy. Because of my appearance (white, baseball-capped, middle-aged), he mistakes me for a Minuteman until, to prove I’m not a Minuteman, I disparage the Minutemen. We’re walking by a light pole, the base of which is exposed, a Possible Tripping Hazard. He points it out, saying that had I been a Minuteman, he would’ve let me fall on my ass.

  Nearby, three Minutewomen stand in the midday sun with a sign: Mexico’s a Bad Neighbor.

  The Mexican Flag Guy taunts them: “It’s hot in that sun, isn’t it? That’s what you like about us, right? We don’t burn, baby!”

  Which is kind of weird, since two of the Minutewomen are Hispanic, presumptive fellow nonburners.

  Here’s the story of how one of these women, Lupe Moreno, became a Minutewoman:

  As a teenager, her son had a car accident and ended up partially paralyzed. In the next hospital bed was an illegal who’d broken his arm coming over the wall. Once treated, he ran away. After Lupe’s son was released, she started getting nagging letters from the hospital, demanding the hundred-dollar copay. She found this infuriating: This illegal gets thousands of dollars of treatment free, and they’re nagging her? To make matters worse, her son needed a wheelchair but could only have one free for the first week of his stay. Through her work in social services, Lupe was aware of a special program through which, had her son been illegal, he could have gotten a wheelchair free and kept it indefinitely.

  “You mean ‘undocumented,’” I say.

  “I call them illegals,” she says, “because that’s what they are.”

  GENTLE DIGNIFIED MAN 1, MINUTEMEN 0

  A cluster of Minutemen are shouting across the berm-defining shrub at a sixtysomething Mexican American in a VIETNAM baseball cap: If he DID fight for this country, as implied by his cap, why isn’t he willing to fight for it NOW, by protecting it from illegal in VADers?

  He fires back: “I was fighting for this country when you were in Pampers, brother!”

  This country kicked the black man around for hundreds of years, he shouts, and now that the black man has finally stood up for himself, the country’s looking for someone new to kick, and its eyes have fallen on the brown man, but the brown man built this country, always working cheap, and is not about to become the whipping boy, no sir, not at this late stage of the game.

  The uncontrived passion in his voice is shutting
the Minutemen down, but then the Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste people start inadvertently drowning him out with their (“RACIST MINUTEMEN GOT TO—”) bullhorns.

  A certain Writer, behaving unprofessionally, sneaks over, tells the bullhorn guys to hold off: This Vietnam guy is really kicking ass.

  A Unión de Trabajadores del Suroeste guy rushes a bullhorn to the Vietnam guy, and soon the Minutemen, discouraged, have drifted away to a distant part of the berm.

  “We’re farmers, you know?” a friend of the Vietnam guy tells me. “Born and raised here in Laredo. We’ve worked hard all our lives. All of this, all this anger, all this aggression…” And he waves his hand wearily at what’s left of the rally. “What I think is, we’re here on this earth to take care of one another.”

  IN WHICH I AM CHOKED

  I get a few minutes with Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project.

  What I want to ask is, Why are you guys so mad about everything? Why so scared? Where’s the love?

  Instead I say, “I’ve read that you’re a Christian. What’s the relation of this Minuteman ethic to your Christianity?”

  “Charity is good,” he says. “Benevolence is good. But charity begins at home. And their home is Mexico.”

  Gilchrist is a likable guy in his fifties who reminds me of the actor who played the mayor in Jaws. He speaks in meandering Stengelese paragraphs; your mind struggles to summarize them, but they will not yield. Strong passions, about something or other, keep emitting forth from him, in a sideways manner that makes you keep listening, in the same way that seeing a beginner skater fly by carrying a stack of dishes might make you keep watching. He’s always saying things like “I’ve got him in my crosshairs!” or “He’s OK for now, he hasn’t crossed me yet, he’s making all the right noises!” or (of the late Steve Irwin): “He was probably one of these open-border cranks, but I give him a pass—I liked his show,” or (of an African American Minuteman in Los Angeles, with admiring glee): “That guy just burned an effigy of Osama bin Laden—in front of a mosque!”

  Gilchrist can be seen on YouTube, saying, of a crowd of chanting protesters at Ground Zero, “This is not the first time I’ve faced Satan…. This will not be the last time,” but in person he’s gentlemanly, timid almost. This is communicated via something in his listening posture: leaning slightly forward, a kind of wincing going on around the eyes.

  After the rally, the Minutepeople convoy out to Eagle Pass, where the Op will begin in earnest. We stop at a convenience store to fuel up. Trying to engage Gilchrist, I roll down the van window, jocularly tell him smoking’s a nasty habit.

  “Well,” he says, “I don’t do drugs, I don’t drink much…and I’ve recently given up ATTEMPTED MURDER!”

  At the words attempted murder, putting a mock-crazy expression on his face, he reaches in through the van window and fake-throttles me around the neck.

  I have no problem with this. I’m from Chicago. Chicago males often bond via fake kicks to the groin. So I feel I’m getting off easy.

  Although I also think: (1) Wow, that was a pretty energetic fake-choke, and (2) Has this guy not undergone media training?

  We drive two hours into the country, looking for illegals along the way—in particular, it would seem, for illegals too deaf or stupid to hide when they hear a twelve-car convoy approaching.

  NO, TELL ME WHAT YOU REALLY THINK

  Here are some facts about Minutepeople, or at least the eight I had dinner with that night, at Skillet’s Restaurant in Eagle Pass, Texas:

  Minutepeople are fun. You can’t insult them. They’re willing to entertain any point of view. They like to debate. They look stern at first, do a lot of scowling, but behind their eyes, once you get them talking, there’s a hurt, docile quality, possibly related to past wrongs done them, a quality I associate with the thunked-as-kids: Long ago the world turned on them in some unexpected and unpleasant way, and they are, not unreasonably, expecting that it could happen again at any moment. The Barney-Fifish quality of their bluster recedes immediately upon challenge, and they go soft, and you somehow magically become Dad.

  I announce myself as an Eastern Liberal, and am thereafter treated like a minicelebrity or lab specimen, a living example of a rare species they’ve heretofore only heard about on Fox. Paradoxically, my opinions seem to matter to them. They’re oddly deferential. They listen. When I argue that, despite our gun laws, Manhattan is safer than Houston, or assert that, yes, there are working-class people in New York City, they take me on faith, adjust their arguments accordingly, and seem happy for the correction, because it means I was taking their argument seriously in the first place.

  I ask if Minutemen ever bring guns on their Ops.

  “We all have guns,” someone says.

  “We all have guns here,” says someone else.

  “This is Texas,” says a third someone. “Totally legal.”

  Their guns, in fact, are influencing their choice of hotels: They have to be able to bring their weapons inside.

  “The thing about people from New York?” says Shannon, founder of the Texas Minutemen, who has been smiling at me in passing all day in a way that manages to be suspicious, deferential, and welcoming all at once. “Is they’re rude.”

  “It’s the way they talk to you,” someone else says.

  Has he, Shannon, ever been to New York?

  “Haw haw! Yeah, right!” says Shannon. “Like I’m going to that crazy place without my guns.”

  They honestly don’t go anywhere they can’t bring their guns?

  Nope. The world is too insane. It would be irresponsible to put themselves at that kind of risk.

  Chicago?

  Haw.

  Boston?

  Please.

  How about Mexico? Have they ever been over there?

  The most enthusiastic guffaws yet. Am I kidding? The cartels, they say, have a bounty out on them: twenty-five grand for any Minuteman. And for Shannon: fifty grand.

  “Shannon’s a star,” someone says.

  Being called a star seems to rev Shannon up. He takes the floor, presents a discourse that might be entitled: “My Thoughts on Bitches.”

  He has a friend who once lived with two lesbians and slept with them both, together and separately. However, problems developed when this friend, unwisely, “started hitting one harder than the other.” Shannon has to admit it: Girlwise, the only thing he really likes? Is dominating them.

  There was this one gal, for example, who kept being uncooperative. Finally, she, kind of uncooperatively, more or less cooperated. To celebrate his victory, he stole her bra, then hung it from his car antenna. There’s nothing like it, he says, like dominating them. Then he emits a phrase so crude, so poetically dense—it combines images of (1) a small furry beast and (2) two swinging-down thingies—that I want to get out my notebook and ask him to repeat it, but I chicken out, and the exact wording is lost forever, but suffice to say: What made that particular furry beast/swinging thingy combo so delightful to Shannon was that, although towering over Shannon, it had consented to be dominated by him.

  Ah, but that’s all in the past, he sighs. Of late he’s gotten “some sane wisdom.” He knows what he looks like. These days if a woman says she finds him attractive, he just asks how much it’s going to cost him. Or he looks behind him to determine who she’s really talking to.

  This makes me sad. Under the bluster, he seems like a nice guy, a gentle guy, even, a doting husband waiting to happen, possibly, capable of loving and being loved in return. If only he could just—

  Wait, wait, I think, why are you being such a sucker? Did he or did he not just say the things he just said? Stop trying so hard to be Johnny Compassion. Why is he talking such rude shit?

  I turn to Lesley, the lone Minutewoman at the table.

  “Is this guy a misogynist or what?” I say. “You don’t find this offensive?”

  “I’m not easily intimidated,” she says, laughing. “Do I look like I’m easily intimi
dated?”

  Some National Guardsmen come in and sit nearby, and this gets us on the subject of Iraq. Brian, a smart, articulate Minuteman, originally from Massachusetts, who has traveled all over the world—Brazil, Japan, India—says Fallujah should have been leveled. He sends this out like a blustering trial balloon. Is he nuts? I ask. How many women and children would that have required killing? Well, he says, that happens once, it doesn’t happen again. Hello? I say. Are you really saying that? Little kids, old ladies? Well, he says, you order them out first. Come on, I say, think about New Orleans. People in Fallujah are much poorer than that, how do they “get out”? What do they do, rent cars? Call taxis? Could you give that order? I don’t think you could, and I don’t think you would.

  He looks chastened and does a remarkable thing, given that he’s arguing with a Liberal, in front of his people: He reverses position.

  “You’re right,” he says. “I wouldn’t, no.”

  Through it all, our Mexican American waitress, resembling a pretty Delhi street waif courtesy of her thick mascara, comes and goes, being spoken gently to by Shannon and the others, in the courteous quasi-military tones favored by the Minutepeople.

  LOST PATROL THAT CAN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT FAILS TO FIND ASS WITH BOTH HANDS

  Next morning we “go out on recon,” meaning we walk around the ranch we’ll be guarding later tonight.

  An upbeat guy named Curtis, president of U.S. Border Watch, leads us Media around, pointing out evidence of illegals (a tamped-down human-size nest in some reeds, a fence-cut, some garbage) and marking several “possible deployment spots” using bits of a cow skull he’s found: The white bone will be visible later in the moonlight. An irrigation ditch running parallel to the border is a plus; the sound of the illegals wading the ditch will serve as a kind of early-warning system.