Imaginary icebergs
by David Benjamin
“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
— Joseph Stalin
MADISON,
Wis. — There’s little evidence — even in the alt-right online sixth
dimension — that ravening hordes of “illegal aliens” are swarming across
the Rio Grande and killing Americans. The firmest numbers I could find
on this claim were in the right-wing Washington Times about a year ago,
which counted 124 homicides committed by undocumented immigrants between
2010 and 2015.
Sounds like a lot, until you dig down. In those
six years, there were 95,876 other murders in the United States (give or
take a few). The illegal-alien share in all that bloodshed comes out to
.00129 percent, or one out of every 774 murders. Putting this into
perspective, you’re eight times more likely be killed by a cop, 2,170
times more likely to be offed by your wife (if you’re a guy), and 5,271
times more likely to be strangled, shot or immolated by your husband.
Obviously,
if you want to drum up hysterical fear of immigrants, statistics like
this don’t really sell the goods. What you need is the perfect anecdote,
a story so wrenching, touching and emotionally charged that even a
skeptic is appalled into silence. If you’re talking about wetbacks on
homicide sprees, your story begins and ends with Kathryn Steinle, killed
in San Francisco on 1 July 2015 by a chronic border-jumper named Juan
Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.
Steinle’s death is, at first blush, the
xenophobe’s perfect storm. The victim was young, beautiful, bright (a
Cal Tech grad), bursting with promise and — most important — white. The
shooter was a career offender swarthy of complexion who’d been deported
five times, only to sneak back into America, only to be arrested,
convicted, imprisoned, and deported again to his native Mexico, only to
sneak back across the border.
Add to this San Francisco, the
most notorious (to the right wing) of all so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Even worse, Wandering Juan was only on the street because a Frisco judge
had just vacated a marijuana warrant that was too old — 20 years — to
prosecute. Meanwhile, nobody in town had told the feds from ICE that
Lopez-Sanchez was at large.
If various authorities in at least
four states (California, Washington, Arizona and Texas) had been more
effective in kicking Lopez-Sanchez back to Guanajuato and keeping him
there, Ms. Steinle would be alive today. Before the shooting,
Lopez-Sanchez had been jailed in San Bernardino County for entering the
U.S. without a pass. Once released, he wasn’t deported. And, apparently,
nobody in California knew that he was a fugitive from Texas, where he
was on probation.
Lopez-Sanchez’ vocation of petty crime spanned
five presidencies and two agencies, INS and ICE. All of the horses and
all of the men under Reagan and Clinton, two Bushes and Barack Obama
couldn’t keep this bad hombre out. The lawmen who kept catching
Juan treated him more as a pest than a monster, probably because — until
the shooting — he had no record of violence. His thing was narcotics.
He fed his habit by selling heroin and marijuana, for which the best
market in the world is America. This explains why Lopez-Sanchez wouldn’t
stay put down yonder.
Kathryn Steinle’s death was a confluence
of heartbreaking happenstances. Four days before the shooting, a Bureau
of Land Management (BLM) ranger, in the city for business, parked his
vehicle near the Embarcadero, a popular tourist mecca on San Francisco
Bay. Someone, possibly Wandering Juan, broke into the car and hit the
junkie jackpot. Just lying there was a .40-caliber handgun.
Of
course, the BLM doesn’t routinely issue guns — especially .40-cal
cannons — to its employees. This was a “personal” weapon that its owner
hadn’t very carefully concealed.
Lopez-Sanchez either stole the
gun or acquired it from the thief. His rap sheet suggests that he had no
plans to use it. However, before he got around to selling the gun,
Wandering Juan, who was habitually stoned, took it into his head to
stroll by the Bay and plunk a few sea lions. Considering his history and
his high, it’s likely that if he’d aimed directly at Kathryn Steinle
and fired, she would have gone unscathed. But he wasn’t trying to shoot
her, or anyone. Ballistics experts confirmed that the bullet that
pierced Steinle’s aorta had bounced off the pavement.
The
killing, by a small-time felon waving a stolen handgun, was almost
surely accidental. This likelihood is among the many ironies that render
the story all the more poignant.
The biggest irony, of course,
is that we’re all talking seriously now about erecting a $21 billion
wall to protect the homeland — from the Beaner Who Couldn’t Shoot
Straight. We’re looking at an extreme case of anecdote abuse.
I
hasten to emphasize that a good anecdote, applied properly, is a neat
expository device that helps make thorny issues accessible. Every day in
the news, we see reports about complicated crises that people need to
know, but they’re hard to explain. So, to draw readers in, the
resourceful reporter will often lead by telling the story of a real
person whose situation illustrates the dilemma.
Typically, the
story then goes from the specific to the general. The reporter marshals
testimony, documentation and measurable evidence to verify the scope and
urgency of the issue that was capsulized in the opening anecdote. In
professional journalism, the anecdote never stands alone. It rests atop a
pyramid packed with proof, context and meaning.
An anecdote
without a pyramid, however, is just bar talk. Or it can be magic. Sell
the story as though it’s the tip of an iceberg, an example among
thousands, and suddenly a singular outrage — like Kathryn Steinle's
murder — becomes an epidemic that threatens to shred the very fabric of
civilization. In reality, it threatens nothing, but never mind. By
emphasizing certain details and omitting others, the magician of
hyperbole — without actually lying — can transform a single senseless
crime into a holocaust and mount a statue of its luckless victim, bathed
in floodlights, atop the Great Wall of Paranoia.
Kathryn
Steinle’s loss is a heartbreaking story. But it has no pyramid and there
is no iceberg. It’s not the story of alien invasion and liberal
appeasement trumpeted by its hucksters. Certainly, some of the
undocumented who sneak into America are drug mules and junkies. A few
are rapists, even killers. But most are maids, tomato-pickers and
gardeners — as well as the odd honor student, poet or chemical engineer.
These arrivals to our teeming shore pose problems, but they aren’t big
problems. After all, this is America. We’re better here at unfolding the
couch and finding an extra blanket than anywhere else on earth.
The
bigger problem today is a flood of scary stories too pat to be true,
spun by blowhards too smug to believe. Rather than freaking over a
trickle of Muslims and Mexicans, we should be focusing our fear on the
propaganda that’s abroad in the land, and the totally “legal” people —
millions of us — who swallow it.
The barbarians, Gracie, are not at the gate. They’re in the West Wing.
Friday, February 3, 2017
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2 comments:
"The bigger problem today is a flood of scary stories too pat to be true, spun by blowhards too smug to believe" is an excellent line. Well done, David, well done.
Oh, yes! So very well done indeed. You are the maestro wordsmith of all blogs I stay tuned to on a regular basis. Thank you.
I keep thinking, where's another Will Rogers or Mark Twain...or someone like that when we need one? And here you are. Thank you, thank you.
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