Where the frontier had been imagined as the future, the borderlands
stage the past’s eternal return, the place where all of history’s wars
become one war. The Minuteman Project, a group of border vigilantes, was
founded by a Vietnam vet, just around the time that the Abu Ghraib
prison torture story broke in the national press. Many border patrollers
and private security contractors have done multiple stints in Iraq and
Afghanistan, or in one of the many other countries where the United
States is waging its global War on Terror. “For me, it is therapeutic to
come down here and join my fellow veterans,” said one member of a
border vigilante group, who after four tours in Iraq was left with brain
injury and stress disorder. “I miss it,” a private security guard at a
border detention center recently confessed to another veteran, a Border
Patrol agent. “I’ll see a Black Hawk fly by and think of those days.”
“You’ll never get it back,” came the agent’s reply.
The horrors blend into each other, with the closing of the frontier
hastening the hallucinatory collapse of historical time. A recent ACLU
report documenting the sexual and psychological abuse of
migrant children detained by U.S. border agents could have been written
in the years after the Mexican–American War, when U.S. soldiers
committed acts so heinous they would, according to General Winfield
Scott, “make Heaven weep.” Passages from Cantú’s memoir echo Samuel
Chamberlain’s My Confession (1950), the memoir of the author’s involvement with an infamous borderland gang that inspired McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
In any case, the United States stands on the precipice. As the poet
Anne Carson writes, “to live past the end of your myth is a perilous
thing.”
hmmmmm…. perhaps apathy is boring……. & perhaps passion is cool………. being excited about things is endearing……..having interests makes one more interesting…….perhaps mocking and finding flaw in everything makes one’s world less saturated and enjoyable……..hmmm……..just been thinkin about it….
