Mother, did it have to be so high?

It's probably just all the doom and gloom of Kunstler's The Long Emergency darkening my brain right now. But I read all this stuff about the imminence of various global catastrophes -- raging pandemics, starvation, the crash of civilization, all due to converging crises like oil and natural gas depletion, climate change, and constantly mutating diseases -- and I see how immigration -- immigration, of all damn things -- has suddenly become the hot button issue among conservatives, with some conservatives even demanding Bush's impeachment if he doesn't shut down our borders completely... and... well...

Yeah, I'm probably just paranoid. But in a world where there's not enough of anything to go around, and especially one where new epidemics of antibiotic-resistant diseases are seen by many health professionals as imminent and unstoppable, turning North America into a walled off fortress makes a very ruthless, very pragmatic sort of sense.

However, corporate profits, as well as the political status quo, require that the cattle (that's us) not be stampeded prematurely, so if if the U.S. government started to fortify our national borders for no apparent reason (let's remember, the Big Energy companies are still spending a lot of money on ads to reassure all us sheeple that 'peak oil' is just a myth propagated by fringe loonies as a scare tactic; the last thing our lords and masters want is for us to get frightened of anything they don't require us to be frightened of at the moment), well, it would cause talk.

But, hey... if they can just whip the base into a frenzy of anti-immigrant hysteria and get them to demand that the government build massively fortified walls along all our borders... well... hey... the Feds would just be obeying the people's mandate, right? And if, five or ten years from now, as the latest killer influenza depopulates the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and Asia, the U.S. just sits back behind its gigantic walls, wringing its collective hands because, you know, we just don't have the resources to help all those poor foreign people, no matter how much we want to... well... I gues history might call that 'foresighted'.

Especially since we'd most likely write it.

Apparently, Bush's speech last night, which most pundits assume was meant to mollify his base, spectacularly misfired, and wound up pretty much enraging the right wing even further. Left wing analysts seem baffled by this, wondering why he bothered with the speech in the first place... but this all fits my (probably paranoid) hypothesis, if we assume that the speech was simply meant to whip the base up even more, until they become so infuriated that Bush can, finally, capitulate, and start fortifying the borders... and while the left wing may rant and rave about how much money he's spending and his corporate masters may scream about how much money he'll cost them by cutting off their slave labor supply, still, he can shrug his shoulders and say "well, they WANT me to do it, I am but a servant of the people, what can I do?"