Discouraging Discourse

Apparently Geraldo Rivera has written a book. His Panic: Why Americans Fear Hispanics in the U.S.

Let's ignore the implied sexism of the title; it's not the worst part.

"His panic."

Get it? Get it?

He was on NPR the other day talking about it. The conversation shifted from his personal experience — my dad came over on a banana boat, no one calls me Gerry, my mustache is a part of my cultural identity, that kind of thing — to a more general discussion about U.S. immigration policy.

"The hostility by some anti-immigrant activists against Hispanics is no different from that directed against earlier generations of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants," he said.

Many of the most fervent anti-immigrant activists are themselves the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The style changes, the accents change, the geographical antecedents change, but it's the same. You can track headline for headline the response to the Irish wave of immigration in the mid-19th century to the reaction of the Minutemen and similar radical anti-immigration groups today.

I can track with him so far. I probably wouldn't argue with much of what he says in the book. But he took a turn in the interview that really disappointed me.

The anchor asked him something like What would you say to the people who argue that their views about immigration are mostly colored by the legality of citizenship and border security?

Geraldo responded in a tone of confident superiority: "Are you really concerned about 'border security,' or are you concerned about the changing demographic face of the United States? For example, if it's terrorism that you're concerned about and you want this fence built between the United States and Mexico, why don't you want the same fence built between the United States and Canada?"

For Geraldo to jump directly to the bugaboo of terrorism struck me as a total dodge, and it really bugged me. Especially considering that Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff himself has stated publicly that he's more worried about the terrorist threat from the Canadian side than the Mexican side.

Besides that, given the context, I understood the question of "border security" to be more about illegal immigration than terrorism.

He continued: "It's not crime. It's not terror. It is demographics that is the true fear. If we wanted secure borders, what about the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts?"

That's fine. Xenophobia and the institutional bullying of immigrants is certainly a problem. But also, certainly, is the growing pool of undocumented workers in this country. His evasion of the illegal immigration question does his argument a disservice. This — not terrorism — is the entire reason his book is relevant, and I think Geraldo missed a golden opportunity to contribute something meaningful to the national discussion. But he passed it up in favor of an intellectually dishonest soapbox. Perhaps more disappointing is that the anchor did not press him to answer the question. Apparently, a strongly worded statement about terrorism gets you a free pass.

Under the Influence of Giants

	You too can be cool enough to buy this album.

I have it on good authority (in other words, a well-spoken bar friend on his 6th vodka and tonic) that both the new Dixie Chicks album and the new John Mayer album will change your life. This may be true. But I'd like to point you toward something else entirely, a band called Under the Influence of Giants.

Being a public radio nerd, I eschew mainstream radio, especially Top 40 schlock. One of my more reliable sources of good music is Pandora.com. Just by having that site running in the background at work I've learned about a lot of stuff I wouldn't normally hear otherwise. Check it out; it's great.

One day I heard something that sounded like an incongruous mish-mash of The Killers, Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin, filtered through an '80s-tinted lens. The song, "In the Clouds," was relentlessly driving, arresting, beautiful. I had no idea what it was about, but it sounded damn good to me.

That night I downloaded their entire album from iTunes and listened to it over and over for a week.

James Christopher Monger of All Music Guide once described a Jill Sobule song, "Cinnamon Park," as "ludicrously catchy." Take a listen and I think you might agree. It's either catchy, or ludicrously annoying. And there is a fine line between the two, I think.

Anyway, "In the Clouds" is definitely in the "ludicrously catchy" category, and the rest of the album is just as gorgeous.

I don't know enough about music or musical influences to write anything coherent or useful about these guys. For starters, they are nothing like Jill Sobule. So, let's leave descriptions of their sound to the music journalists. Mainly, I want people to know about them and support them and buy this album. I am never ever on the edge of anything. Other people are always telling me about good new music, because I am so not plugged in. But I'm beginning to see these guys in magazines and they have 58,839 MySpace friends. Probably, I'm still behand the curve and you already know about these guys. Regardless, there's a very selfish music-snob influence inside me that wants to have some satisfaction that I can actually make a good music recommendation for once.

Now that's ludicrous.