The former Republican presidential candidate John McCain has been accused of "scapegoating" Mexicans over comments he made linking wildfires in his home state of Arizona to illegal immigration.
The issue ignited over the weekend when the US senator said there was "substantial evidence that some of these fires have been caused by people who have crossed our border illegally. The answer to that part of the problem is to get a secure border".
Immigants! I knew it was dem, even when it was the bears I knew it was dem! Remember the point about alienation, it naturalises social disaster and personalises natural disaster. Arizona is the neo-con paradise, a white-flight state where life's problems are just a bad dream after a heavy TV dinner. Despite the fact that Arizona is, ahem, dry and prone to fires, nature has let its citizens down.
John McCain's assertion is simply mad. But John McCain isn't mad. The right wing, the ruling class use the intervention of events to continually shift the terms of class struggle in their favour. Recession, declining living standards, joblessness etc, has hit the working class and middle class like a force of nature. People must come to terms with what's happening to them, however; find a root cause.
Consent for capitalism is organised in large part around the idea of supposedly natural competition. Who's to blame for your predicament? Your competitors. Who are your competitors? Who knows, they could be anybody but, oddly enough they rend to be those brown people speaking a funny language, the ones you rarely ever meet. They must be dealt with!
I digress, the point is, our ruling class work night and day to shore up their hegemony, to help their subjects understand the world in a way that guarantees their continued rule. In America this means singling out Mexican immigrants (often identified as a flood or a swamp - natural metaphors) as a unique source of chaos and destruction. McCain is trying to blindside people by attaching a ludicrous assertion to a distressing event.
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