The open desert of the southwest has become one vast public dumping ground for trash. The latest fad in desert trash is TV sets. My guess is that lots of folks are buying the new, flat-screen, HDTV sets and tossing their old ones into the back of the pickup, driving out into the nearest patch of desert, and dumping them. I've counted six such additions to favorite pieces of desert landscape I've visited lately.
The next step in the existence of these unwanted television machines is that they become targets for the illegal desert shooters. Just about everyone out here totes heat. Rather than using the fine, fancy, tax-supported municipal shooting range just outside of town, the Yahoos prefer to go onto land that's used for hiking, grazing and quiet recreation, there to bang away at whatever suits their fancy. Today I went back to where I spotted the first of the serially dumped TVs. I counted 23 bullet holes.
Eventually, we'll have a big, gully-washing monsoon rain. It will flood the arroyos where these things have been dumped and sweep them downstream toward the river. Perhaps they'll lodge against rocks or other debris along the way. Perhaps some will reach the river. There perhaps they'll sink into the soft-sand bottom, or float lazily toward the Mexican border. Duty-free. NAFTA for trash.
In a wishful moment, out there in the desert, I thought that perhaps, in a fit of wisdom, my fellow southwesterners were making a comment on the quality of TV programming by casting these devices into the wasteland. But I know better; they're simply improving the pictures they get while soaking up the bilge that television dispenses. Wisdom is not a widely respected or widely distributed commodity in these parts. Fox programming is a big favorite.
If, by trashing our desert with TV sets, we are in fact ultimately dumping them on Mexico, some quid pro quo is called for. Mexico should send it back. Drug cartels run Mexico. They ought to half-fill every truckload of dope with trashed American TVs before they drive them across the bridge from Juarez to El Paso.
The drug cartels in Mexico are forever killing people. Members of rival cartels, civic officials, innocent women and children. The killers could be employed, instead, finding, collecting and loading American trash for reshipment to the Gringos. Probably they'd need more people to do this job right than there are killers in their employ. So the drug cartels, which are so profitable that money is no object, would have to add employees. Over time, this would lift the Mexican economy. Wetbacks wouldn't have to flock across the border for Yankee dollars to live on. They could work at home and save commuting costs.
With the flow of illegal workers into the United States diminishing and eventually stopping, we wouldn't need that border wall. We could tear it down, Reagan style, and use the material to build shelter for our homeless. Money already budgeted for further construction could be diverted to the bail-out funds for banks that are too big to fail.
See there? I set out simply to rant about people who throw trash into the desert. I've wound up solving The Immigration Problem and assuring the health and welfare of our banking system for at least the immediate future.
And it isn't even lunch time. I'll be able to get a start on finding the cure for cancer.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
