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What does Barry Bonds have to do with the illegal Mexicans you ask? Well, they are both hot topics in the news these days; that could be the answer right there, but it isn’t. Baseball is very popular in Mexico and Bonds as we all know, is a baseball player; perhaps baseball is what links the two, but no, that’s not it either. How about this? They both break the law and get rewarded for it. Now, the rewards earned by the illegal Mexicans hardly compare to the rewards racked up by Senor Bonds, but, they are still rewarded with higher pay than could have earned back in Mexico, if they could have earned anything at all south of the border. Not to mention access to better schools for their children, fewer scorpions and nicer weather, unless of course you like temperatures soaring above one hundred and ten every freaking day of the year. By now you’re probably asking yourself; “Who is this heartless, right-wing ogre that is so callous to make light of the Mexican’s plight?” Or, you might be saying; “I still don’t see what this has to do with Barry Bonds.” All right, I’ll quit beating around the bush. Here’s my point accompanied by an analogy that I’m sure you will all understand. Okay, Barry Bonds has taken steroids to boost his performance—he hasn’t admitted to it, yet, but then it took Pete Rose decades to admit to betting on baseball. Maybe they will have joint coming-out parties as part of a deal to get in the Hall of Fame. Anyway, in 1991, the commissioner of baseball, some guy named Fay (girl’s name) Vincent, sent a dictate to all teams informing them that steroid use by the players could result in them being booted out of baseball. I get memos like that all the time, I usually do with them the same thing the club owners did with that memo; I leave out on my desk for a couple days to see if the memo is going to come to life and dance on the desk, then if not, I throw it in the trash. Well, since there was no following memo from the player’s union stating that they were in full agreement that is what most team owners did with the memo, they threw it in the trash. I’m sure there may have been a few anal-compulsive owners that made a new file for the memo, but that is the same thing as throwing it away, only more organized. The smart ones probably put it right into the shredder. Going, going, zip…gone. So as a result, the players continued to juice up, balls started flying out of the park almost as fast as fans started coming back in after the strike, and everybody was happy, not to mention rich…and extremely bulky. Then came Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa—remember them? Oh how we loved them, and baseball, and mom and apple pie. There they were two bigger-than-life heroes, one black, one white, both amiable and engaged in the greatest slugging battle since Maris and Mantle. Damn, makes me want to go out to the ballgame just thinking about it. The day McGuire broke the big record; the Cardinals were playing the Cubs, who just happened to have Sammy Sosa on their team. We were proud of how far we have come as a nation when the two baseball giants hugged after McGuire hit home run number sixty-two. Gosh, why can’t we all just get along? We even felt sorry for poor ol’ Roger Maris even though the asterisk that hung over his head like a goofy conical dunce cap had been removed years ago. Steroids? What steroids? See where I’m going with this? Border? What Border? A few years back, the federal government passed a law making the use and possession of steroids a criminal act—it is now against the law to juice up, has been for a while now, kind of like sneaking across the border, getting a fake social security card and working your asno off for three dollars and fifty cents an hour, or, driving thirty-eight in a thirty-five—illegal, all of it. But, we like home runs, they are fun and exciting, and we like cheapo broccoli too, of course, going thirty-eight in a thirty-five, come on, that’s within the “comfort zone” of breaking the law. |
