Another Country
by digby
When asked her opinion of the LA boycott of Arizona on Ed Shultz's show today, Karen Hanratty thinks LA is a foreign country.
(Big eye roll)I think the Los Angeles City Council is the last governmental body I would ever take advice from. (Ed laughs uproariously.) By the way, go to any hospital in los Angeles and see what their emergency room looks like, how many illegal immigrants are in those waiting rooms. Something needs to be done in this country and Los Angeles is probably not the best indication of how we should fix our budget, manage our local municipalities. You know LA is a land unto itself.
And she wonders why Los Angelenos feel solidarity with their Latino brothers and sisters in Arizona? We're not real Americans either, are we?
Therefore, I propose that our country pass a law that allows us to deport Karen Hanratty if she tries to work here. I'm sure a lot of attractive blond women will be stopped and harassed, but that's just the way it goes. After a little training the police will be able to tell her by which season of Jimmy Choo's she's wearing.
It also occurs to me that she may have inadvertantly given us some good advice. Considering the budget woes we suffer here in the "land" called Los Angeles, perhaps we should cease all the "foreign aid" we throw at all those red states.
The truth is that I don't really care if fatuous gasbags insult LA. It's a huge metropolitan mess and nobody should feel that their locale is above criticism or cheap laughs. But I do object to the double standard that allows these gasbags to go on TV and talk about LA like it's dysfunctional, foreign dogshit while insisting that Real Americans are not to be criticized. The sad truth is that at the moment this whole country is a big mess.
Arizona unfortunately has elected some leadership that is allowing right wing nativist demagoguery to get the better of them. It's going to hurt their economy because a lot of people around the country don't want to lend support to a place that discriminates and racially profiles. Just as it's Hanratty's right to disparage LA, Los Angelenos have a right to take a stand on what we believe to be an unfair law.
As Laura Flanders said in that Ed Show segment:
It's a great American tradition: an injury to one is an injury to all.
That's rather old fashioned, I know, but just as we feel solidarity with the West Virginia coal miners and the Louisiana fishermen and the Tennessee flood victims and any other group of fellow Americans who are getting a raw deal from the powerful or are in Mother Nature's angry path, we feel solidarity with Latinos in Arizona who are being treated inhumanely. It's a worldview and it applies to people everywhere. And contrary to current opinion, that's as American as it gets.
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