Wow. Oookay. So, let me see if I got that right, head bike bitch Danny Smith, media darling, president of the invisible minions and droves. You are protesting because patriots’ jobs are being taken by “illegals,” but no patriots can show up at your rallies because…they’re working?

Holy guano on a stick, Batman! Dude's braindead. C'mon Danny boy, come up with a better argument than that. My six-year-old son could come up with a better argument than that, without looking up from his Nintendo DS, in English and Spanish.

Anyway, to the point: The bizarre bikers' bazaar was related to the fact that on January 1, 2008, the New Year was rung in here in my adopted home state with the enactment of the nation’s most punitive law aimed at undocumented workers, a cause celeb for those Nativists (read: dumbasses) among us who seem to think asking a half million workers (and $29 billion in the state economy) to disappear all at once, even though there are not nearly enough “legal” workers to replace them, and even though the companies that employ them would rather move to another state than pay more wages, is a good thing.

Interestingly, even though there are hundreds, if not thousands, of “stories” on the Internet and elsewhere, heralding the “fact” that “illegals” are leaving Arizona in droves (ah, there's that word again, whipping the Nativist scumbags into a slimy sort of xenophobic ecstasy) there is absolutely no proof that that whatsoever.

A recent piece in the Arizona Republic – the lead story on A1, no less – trumpeted the “fact” that “illegals” were streaming back to Mexico to stay. A full read of the piece revealed the only source for this determination to have been interviews at the border with Mexican nationals returning home for the holidays, all of whom claimed not to be coming back. Uhm, hmm. Okay. Let’s see. Imagine you’re in the US illegally, and some reporter dude comes up to you at the border, in Mexico, and says he’s from the Phoenix paper, and wants to know your name, and whether or not you’re coming back after Three Kings’ Day. A photographer snaps endless shots of you and your kids. Do you say yes? (Cue the Homer Simpson “Doh!”; fade to black.)

The Legal Arizona Worker’s Act, dubbed “the employer sanctions law” by the mainstream press, is meant to make it impossible for businesses in Arizona to “knowingly or intentionally” hire undocumented workers. If they do, they risk having their business license revoked. They also risk hefty fines. The new law requires all employers here to check the legal status of their workers through something called E-Verify, a free Homeland Security computer program that, like so many other Bush-era missteps, seems to be riddled with fundamental problems and confusion. Word on the street is that it's almost as effective, focused and intelligent as having people take their shoes off at the airport.

So, now, here we are, past January 1, and I’m wondering: How useful will the employer sanctions law (ie: piece of paper) actually be in achieving its primary goal? In my opinion, not very effective at all.

For starters, the law is supposedly going to be enforced only by Arizona’s 15 county attorneys. Yep. You heard me right. Fifteen people, versus...a half million. And most of those half a million people reside really in only one county. Which means the task will fall to one man.

One busy man.

You might have heard of him. Maricopa County Attorney Andrew P. Thomas. You know, the one who spent most of his recent time battling the genuine groundswell movement to recall him – for "Disobeying and violating the United States Constitution and abuse of power,” no less. He's a busy man. He's busy kissing the pinky ring and puckered sphincter of Sheriff Joe Arpaio (who recently said being compared to the KKK was an honor). He's busy dealing with the fallout of having authorized the wrongful (and humiliating for Thomas) arrest of the publisher and editor of the Phoenix New Times for their having exercised good journalism that make Thomas and Arpaio look bad. He's real busy getting bitch-slapped by the bar association. So, you got Thomas, essentially a flaccid douchebag in a nice suit, against hundreds of thousands of workers.

Eso.

I like to think I'm a good mom; I often tell my son not to believe what he sees on TV. I usually refer to Pokemon. But lately, I've referred to the news. Especially in Phoenix. Especially about Phoenix. And Arizona.

You see, even with all the media chest-beating (and Lou Dobbs’ very personal, oh dear Lord – how do I say this delicately? – meat-beating) about “illegals,” it seems that the general public simply cannot be whipped into the frenzy of fear and loathing our media brokers would like. Nah. The general public is essentially ambivalent about the whole thing. Then again, ambivalence might very well be the national pastime, anymore, right up there with Britney-bashing and Resurrecting the Osmonds.

This all shows, to me anyhow, the enormous extent to which the entire “issue” (read: non-issue) of “illegal immigration” is a recent fabrication of the US corporate media (and political) machine – in a nation which has slipped, under George W. Bush, from having one of the freest presses in the world to having the 48th-freest.

Well, in the best-case scenario, that's what it is - manipulation on the part of the corporate media machine. In the worst-case scenario, there are thousands of paid American operatives (probably outsourced to India, but whatever) whose sole job it is to try to weave anxiety and hatred toward "illegals" into the fabric of our national consciousness. Who knows? I would not be surprised to learn that there is a hive of them somewhere, trolling the 'net for any tidbit, swarming over and peckering the whole thing with comments designed to make editors and other semi-conscious media creatures believe there is a groundswell beneath us, of people fed up with "illegals" taking jobs from Americans. I mean, they show up everywhere, with their comments. As if, right? As if this kind of person reads. C'mon.

And why, praytell, might such a scapegoating frenzy be desired? Oh, geez. You really have to ask? Take your pick of issues those in power would rather not have any of us pay attention to. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The tanking economy. The dollar's continued state of erectile dysfunction, inspired by Chairman Mao's naughty little striptease. The loss of a free press. The enormous gap between rich and poor, and the way it keeps getting bigger. The deficit. Jesus, do you really need me to go on? I mean, what better? Those of us who pay attention to all that other shit end up bogged down doing blogs like this, about a non-issue, while - while what? Tell me. TELL me.

Etc, etc.

So, in the end, what do we have, here in Arizona? I’ll tell you what we have. We have a tiny group of radical and misinformed racists (some of them in chaps, God help us all), rallied together by a tiny group of corporate media leaders with a vested interest in the status quo, declaring war on an enormous population of (mostly) productive undocumented workers, leading to an almost certainly unenforceable law being passed by cowardly and ill-informed politicians, and that law being trumpeted now by the same tiny groups who started the whole ball rolling, as “success”, even though there is no proof to back up the claim.

We have a city – Phoenix – that is two percentage points away from having a Latino-majority (cue Borat, whining "high five", baby!) and a white already-minority that hates losing power the way a toddler hates losing a lollipop after it fell on the ground. A walk through the Arizona Mills Mall, or on Tempe Lake, or a bike ride though the “pedestrian freeway” of parks and lakes in Scottsdale, only proves what no one in the media wants to admit: Phoenix has become like Miami, like New York, like Los Angeles, like Chicago; Phoenix is a Latino city. A Latino city with some hangover lameass racist leaders who know, as we do, that their days are numbered and soon they'll simply have to haul ass to Idaho. Some people fear this. I am not one of them, obviously. That is probably because I like to think of us Latinos as human beings – just like the people who were here before us, and the ones who came before them. Etc, for ten-thousand years.

Whether or not the employer sanctions law will actually change anything in Phoenix remains to be seen. (How's that for an imitation of the mainstream media voice, eh? Mad props to me, yeah.) And whether those changes look like the changes we have been led to expect, also remains to be seen. It could just be that all this immigrant-bashing and tantruming will have the same sort of result as any other tantrum. The offending screamers will be sent to their rooms.

Oh, wait. They already did that.

When the Freedom Riders chose to move their protest from the Latino neighborhood of Pruitt’s furniture shop in Phoenix, to the lily-white neighborhood of the Paradise Valley Mall, they pretended it was to effect a quicker change, just as they pretend all their members who lost jobs are at work and can't come to protest for jobs. But they know the truth as well as I do: Their change of locale signaled nothing less than the inevitable retreat of this state’s pipsqueak racist minority, they being gracefully and vastly outnumbered by a quiet, sleeping giant of people who value freedom and hard work. It was the Krybaby Klan, going to their white-washed room, to cry in the hopeful yet helpless way of children, among familiar things they will soon be forced to outgrow.

Meanwhile, the paper this week had another story, about the "important" protests another group of nativists have been waging in town. A quick read of the story revealed that the important protest was attended by...twelve souls. In a city of 4 million.

And that's news.

At least, that's all the news that someone, somewhere, deems fit to print. Question is: Who?