Think They're Getting an NEA Grant for This?

How do you like these people? They come into our country illegally, they undercut our wages, they live it up on welfare, they speak that Jose Jimenez language, they smell funny and make too much noise. They even think they're too good for real Coca-Cola, for crying out loud! And now we're supposed to believe they're a bunch of "artists"?

The New York Times reports on the cultural boom in Tijuana, and includes a surprise appearance by everybody's favorite doomsaying L.A. sad sack:

It's not that these artists ignore the barrier that separates this city from prosperous San Diego. That might be unreasonable, given that many Americans long to extend the wall along the entire length of the border to keep Mexicans out.

So Marcos Ramirez's contribution to "Strange New World" is an off-site highway billboard for motorists driving south toward the border. It depicts a gray-haired man in camouflage—a reference to the Minutemen, as some American vigilantes patrolling the frontier call themselves—looking toward the wall and the cluttered Tijuana hillside beyond. (The model is actually Mike Davis, a Southern Californian urban theorist.) The billboard exhorts: "Don't be a man for just a minute, be a man your whole life." Only the back of his head is visible.

Best part: The article is by one "Elisabeth Malkin," whom I like to think of as being the Moriarty (or Mycroft?) figure to Holy Spirit High School's proudest daughter.