August 2019

I have only one thing to say about the situation along the border, without even getting into the slaughter in the El Paso Walmart last weekend, as someone who has spent quite a bit of time studying it: what Trump is doing in order to rally whites whose grudges go back before the Civil War is exponentially increasing the corruption on the border. Like Abu Ghraib or My Lai or all the other horrors buried by vicious governments violently pursuing twisted political aims, in years to come stories will leak out of the hellhole there now.

Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry’s work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.

My politics have not changed—perhaps this is a condemnation of me—not a single inch from my teenage years. I stand at exactly the same place.