History Lesson

Dear Indigna,

What the hell? National Guard troops on the border with Mexico?? But they’re only there for “surveillance, reconnaissance, aviation, intelligence, engineering, training, vehicle dismantling, linguistics ... transportation and logistics”????? (Linguistics?) Listen, aren’t we already re-enacting Vietnam over in Iraq? I mean, sure, Bush has failed the history assignment Cheney gave him (prove we coulda won if Johnson and Nixon hadn’t been such pussies), but they’re already setting up Iran for another attempt; do we really need to threaten Mexico at the same time?

And let’s not forget, Bush is a “C” student at best. How many chances does he get?

Considering Canadian Citizenship
Cape Fear, NC

Dear Canuck-to-be,

Haven’t you been paying attention? I predicted the militarization of the border way back in April (see “Immigration I,” April 16, 2006). However, I see Bush is not opting for the “cybernetically-enhanced army” option but instead is using his fall-back position, the National Guard. Now, linguistics is a critical part of this whole operation. Did you know that a lot of people south of the border speak a different language? Part of the Guard’s mission is to study the national threat posed by “colonial, hypermetropic, and wishful linguistics,” phylogenetics, epistemic modality markers and other hedging strategies, secondary discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness, asynchronous forums, inflectional morphemes, polyphonic visibility, even aphasic interaction, and, most importantly of all, “is L2 ultimate attainment isomorphic with fossilization?” The ultimate goal is to determine if it might be possible to formulate some way to communicate with these people so that we could simply tell them to stop crossing the border, rather than having to shoot them.

Oh, and in California, he gets six to eight chances to pass and only has to get it 55% right.