L’imaginaire
We like to encourage our kids to exercise their imaginations. This is misguided. No one can stop people from imagining; it’s baked into our nature and needs no encouragement. On the contrary, imagination requires discipline and restraint. We like to imagine that imagination is all about love, butterflies, and stardust. More often it’s about avarice, crippling fear, lust, useless worry, sadistic revenge, or an omnivorous hunger for power. Imagination needs a choke collar. Imagination too often (ahem) Trumps reality.
Yeah, I’m gonna talk about that guy again . . . and about Republicans. Their latest imaginings, or at least their bloviating, involves massive military incursions into . . . Mexico.
Yes, Mexico! Where there are 1.5 million American expats. The biggest trading partner of the United States. Where more than 11 million Americans have family. 758,449 square miles of Mexico. Thirty-one states of Mexico. 129 million people Mexico. 1,954 miles of contiguous border with the US Mexico.
I know I’m late to the party on this topic. I didn’t pay attention to the recent “debate,” so I hadn’t realized that there’s a Trump-fueled escalation dynamic in Republican batshit. The race is on to see which hopeless fuck of a Presidential candidate can outdo the rest in proposing lunatic foreign policy initiatives. Which macho demagogue can most effectively charge up the immigration-panicked fraction of the Party?
It’s a big fraction, so this imaginary war on Mexico has charged up the whole field, from the still dominant Indictee-in-Chief, through De Santis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott.
The problem with campaign rhetoric is that it can be actualized if and when one of these lamebrained assholes moves his toys into the Oval Office. We already have a lamebrained asshole there who thinks it’s a good idea to pour billions of dollars into sacrificing countless Ukrainian lives and risking nuclear war to gain a geopolitical advantage against Russia; but I’m not going to engage in whataboutism, which is the laziest form of critique. I’m just saying, believe these assholes when they say they’ll try it. They’ll do anything, because they are STUPID AS FUCK.
Arturo Sarhukan, a former US Ambassador to Mexico, recently said in an interview, “I think that deep down, [the assholes ^^^] do believe in what they’re saying.” Not not not reassuring.
Ramaswamy said he’d divert resources from Ukraine to Mexico. Aaaaahhhhlrighty then!
The only candidates out there right now on either side who think these are both bad ideas are Robert Kennedy and Marianne Williamson, with another dissenting voice — Cornel West — running Green. Of these, the only one who has a remote prayer is Kennedy (who’s more popular than either Trump or Biden, but who’s still perceived as a dark horse).
Ron DeSantis said “[I] will declare a national emergency on day one, mobilize all military resources, declare the cartels to be narco-terrorists, and change the rules of engagement on the border. The full force of the federal government will be utilized to ensure that illegal drug flow is stopped, and he will bring to bear every tool he has to this end.”
Day one, start a war. Dude, send me your yard sign!
DeSantis is a military veteran who likes to point out that he once worked with a SEAL team; but he leaves out that his job was as a JAG officer (yeah, there’s a pun there)— a lawyer — who knows as much about military operations as your average sixteen-year-old gamer. Apparently he’s forgotten most of what he learned in Yale Law School, too, because what he’s suggesting are massive violations of international law. (Not that this has stopped either party’s chief executives in the past . . . Obama violated international law almost on a daily basis, but without the kind of disastrous domestic fallout an invasion of Mexico would precipitate.)
Earl Anthony Wayne, another former US Ambassador to Mexico, said, in so many words, that DeSantis doesn’t know shit from Shinola about Mexico. That hasn’t stopped Republicans in the past. George W. Bush his merry band of neocons invaded Iraq (with Democratic approval, it must be said) without having the faintest idea about the place where they deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to kill more than 2 million Iraqis.
The favorite Republican batshit “special ops” invasion fantasy is taking down the drug cartels. These guys have watched waaaay to much television! The first thing the Mexican government is going to do when the US militarily violates its sovereignty is to cancel every existing bilateral agreement between the US and Mexico, effectively expelling all US law enforcement agencies . . . like the DEA. But also agreements on migration, joint development, and economic coordination.
US exports to Mexico total nearly $700 billion a year.
Imports? Just shy of $400 billion.
Start with that and work it out. The loss of the second largest export market after Canada, and the loss of the second biggest import market after China. To bomb backyard drug labs and run a bunch of clusterfuck raids (happens when you lose all timely intelligence).
Oh, and right now Mexico’s government is holding back a northbound sea of desperate migrants escaping crippling droughts and violent lawlessness. When the first bomb is dropped, that will be over. The wave will hit the border with full force. So much for Republican machos dealing with “the immigration crisis.”
Most of the drugs will continue coming into the US — as they are now — through legal ports of entry (the interdiction of which requires bilateral intelligence cooperation).
General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, diplomatically said these Republican fantasies are misguided.
“Having spent a fair amount of time in Latin America,” Milley said, “I would argue that the best thing that can be done is by, with, and through the local governments that are friendly to the United States, and work with them and their militaries to try to stem the flow of drugs.”
I’m no fan of the war on drugs, but this sure sounds a lot more sensible to me than the Republican imagination of A-Detachments fast-roping into semi-arid cow pastures at midnight to find ten guys who were making bootleg fentanyl and left last week . . . and crashing an already teetering economy in the process. Go Republicans!
I wrote in July about the unoriginal macho energy of “special ops” vogue cosplay, when I took down the whole Tim Ballard narrative — another Republican scam of its increasingly credulous base. This is just more of the same.
We don’t need more imagination; we need curbs to imagination, checks on imagination, downpours on the parades of imagination.
Imagination can put armies in the hands of infants.