hating el paso texas -- a rant

First time visitors to this blog are advised to read the entry from 1/16 as well as this entry. (In any case, anyone who is not a regular reader of this blog is likely to mis-judge what is written below if it is read in isolation from other entries as my reasons for disliking EPTX are numerous, and not listed in detail below....neither are they collected in one place, but are scattered throughout numerous entries ....)

I hereby declare that the below words are a RANT, hence do not presume to follow standards of evidence appropriate in the academic world.


despite that fact
there may yet be
truth behind what i am about to say...


i hate el paso texas
i hate the cars
i hate the people
i hate the stupid presumption that every human must have a car
the brutish inaccessibility of everything
the need to have a car
the size of the cars
the poor quality of the food
the bright lights of the cars
the assumption that this is just the way it is
the failure to recognize the ugliness and stupidity of it all.....


On top of that today I visited a so-called video store. I was forced to endure the sounds of a stupid movie. It apparently was about a bank robbery and a kidnapping. The voice I heard was speaking in a tone pretending to be objective. Of course, the movie itself is a piece of ignorant hysteria masquerading as social science or description. Fear of crime! --Itself a religion among the USA middle class, and a device of social control, a means to cloud the mind. The bright lights, the ugly sounds of the movie (played loudly)--boom boom.... the voice of the truth-sayer ( who actually is a liar) uses the conventional sound and tone which marks objectivity in the minds of the audience), the rows and rows of movies with pictures of muscle men and guns! It was all too much for me. And then, worst of all, a large part of the store devoted to crap food. It was really all too much for me. I felt nauseous. And as I ran for the exit, a young woman asked me if she could help me. It was all I could to summon up the energy to lie and "politely" (i.e., falsely) say, "No, thank you. I was just looking around." In truth, I was thinking: "Help me? The only way you could help me is to let me leave this ugly environment filled with propagandistic images, perversions of reality...." But I am afraid to speak the truth these days, after previous unpleasant experiences in the land of unfreedom.... free speech? make me laugh. The most insidious form of social control is already in the minds of the populace....


NOTE
On the gap between the reality of violent crime (e.g., that it primarily occurs outside of middle class neighborhoods) and the popular imagination about its nature (that it involves the poor, and violent person of color preying upon the white middle class), see Loic Wacquant, Punishing the Poor; The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2009.