Well, I like to talk to the regular folks, not the celebrities, and I was able to speak with a few of them before my co-blogger Claudio arrived and stirred up a ruckus. One white-haired gentleman (actually they all had white hair except for Lupe) has turned against the War on Iraq and agrees with me that our government lied to us about the real reasons for the invasion and occupation, that it's all about oil and imperialism, and that it's a senseless waste of military lives and treasure. But he had an interesting way of tying it into his pet peeve of illegal immigration: If we just deported the "30 Million" (their absurdly inflated figure just keeps inflating) "illegals" that are here, we would need a lot less oil here, and we could leave Iraq with honor. He was nonplussed by my observation that you don't see the immigrants driving SUV's and hummers so much as you see them walking, biking, and taking the bus.

He was proud that the movement he was part of had forced the issue of immigration into the political discourse and claimed that no politicians had been talking about it till the Minutemen came on the scene - I didn't bother telling him how Dana Rohrabacher and Tom Tancredo had been using immigration as a wedge issue to win elections for decades. He was of course very unexcited about John McCain and sour on the war, so I'm hoping that these folks include a lot of lapsed Republicans who will sit this Presidential Election out.

Then there was the Vegetable Lady, pictured here wrapped in flags. She asked me not to take her picture and at first I agreed while she was being nice (even though I can't understand people, including some of our war protesters, who feel strongly enough about an issue to stand out on a busy street with a sign, but consider their privacy violated when someone takes their picture.) So anyway, when I first got there, I was arguing with some of them about whether or not Mexicans are taking away jobs that Americans want to do (of course they're not), and this lady started boasting to me of how she will never buy vegetables from Mexico or Honduras, and instead grows all her own vegetables in her yard, and has her freezer STUFFED with vegetables she grew herself! I was confused about why she refused to buy vegetables from other countries - I mean, maybe there's good health reasons, but if her biggest concern is not wanting to have immigrants come up here looking for work, shouldn't she be happy to help their economies down there? Once again I was able to make no headway with this person's logic.

Anyway she did eventually turn into a shrieking hag, accusing me of being a traitor to my nation and my race. Maybe she started to get a bad vibe from my guayavera shirt, or noticed that I was a friend of Claudio Gallegos, who is like an Antichrist to these folks. Or maybe she noticed that while her colleagues were trying to impede the entrance to the Mexican Consulate and insult and sneer at all the Mexicans who walked in and out, I was meanwhile holding the door open and saying "Pase, hermano!" So I reneged on my promise not to photograph her, and there's my picture of the Vegetable Lady! May she enter the Minutemen Hall of Fame with her full freezer of greens.

Then there was the guy who drove around in the amazing white pickup pictured here - round and round the block he went, honking while his comrades cheered; you can see a picture of the driver in the crowd yelling at Claudio here, he's the guy who looks like Lloyd Bridges in Airplane saying "Guess I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue." I also saw the celebrated Lupe Moreno, even más fea in the flesh, hollering at Claudio about how Jesus had saved her from her immigrant-shtupping ways. But I was most eager to get a chance to speak to Minuteman leader and my fellow Huntington Beach resident Barbara Coe (pictured below between two real tough customers) - I wanted to know how the Minuteman community feels about my state senator Tom Harman.

You see, I've been writing a series for The Orange Coast Voice entitled "The Descent of Tom Harman" on how he has suddenly changed, on moving from the assembly to the state senate, from a moderate Republican defender of the environment and the little guy, to a strident rightwing anti-environmental immigrant-basher. (The first segment, on his changing environmental record, should be hitting newsstands today.) I'd been wanting to know if these folks, to whom ending illegal immigration is the most important issue, feel they can trust someone who is such a sudden and recent convert to the cause.

Well, Mrs. Coe was effusive in her praise for Senator Harman, "He doesn't just say the right thing, he actually gets out there and does it!" When I countered, "Don't you see a little bit of political expediency there, his suddenly getting religion on this when he's being threatened with a primary from the right?" she responded proudly, "I really think it's due to a meeting we had with him, where we truly impressed upon him what a huge problem illegal immigration is." Ah, the naïveté of the true believer. (I wish we had had such luck with him when six of us tried to convince him to do something about our healthcare crisis ... but then we couldn't credibly threaten his political future.)

Well, I still suspect that behind these people's standard official concerns about "rule of law" and "stolen jobs" is really mostly a distaste (also known as "racism") for folks with darker skins and a different culture who speak a different language. And of course we've seen throughout history that the poor majority facing economic insecurity and social upheavals will often look for scapegoats of a different race. But at this point the powers-that-be are benefiting too much from the status quo to want to change anything, and only isolated demagogues like Congressman Rohrabacher and Senator Harman are interested in taking advantage of the nativist obsession. Neither of the major parties has much to offer these Minutemen; I guess I'm saying we can afford to laugh at the poor schmucks.

Two other points: The Mexicans are not taking any jobs that grownup white Americans want to do. Areas that have really cracked down on employers for hiring the undocumented have discovered that they had to make do without waiters, dishwashers and gardeners. You know why? BECAUSE THIS IS WORK THAT TEENAGERS USED TO DO! And our lazy spoiled teenagers, if you noticed, are lying on the couch playing Grand Theft Auto rather than picking lettuce. There's one thing you nativists can do if you want to cleanse your streets of brown people: make your kids get minimum wage jobs!

It would also be neat if we would stop electing fascist leaders who systematically pursue policies that hurt the working classes of all countries. It's not reported at all in the US media, but there is practically a civil war going on in Mexico right now. It's not natural that a country with Mexico's resources should be so poor that their citizens would need to come up here for subminimum wage work. But our elites are constantly interfering in Mexico's political process. Most Mexicans consider their real President to be the populist Mexico City mayor López Obrador, whom the people elected to pursue policies to help the Mexican working classes; but the US company Choicepoint - same folks who helped Bush "win" in Florida in 2000 - managed to pull off just enough hanky-panky to install the US-corporate-friendly Felipe Calderón, who is trying to privatize Mexico's oil, making things even worse for his country. And as I write, the Mexican legislature has been shut down as part of a showdown between these two sides - it is amazing that we hear no news of these earthshaking events in our closest neighboring country. (Get more information here: http://www.owcinfo.org/ ) In short, the Mexican people are trying to take their country back, our government interferes with them much more than most of you can imagine, and the rich are keeping the poor down here and there. Don't let them trick us into fighting each other.