Here’s a scandalous image:

Gang members driving luxury vehicles into Skid Row L.A. to sell drugs out of tents to homeless people imprisoned by the highly addictive nature of the drugs those dealers make so readily available.

It is hardly new. It’s been going on as long as the city has allowed stationary tents as a response to homelessness, according to my interviews with police, business owners, drug counselors, shelter providers, and others.

The arrests earlier this month of 23 such alleged Skid Row drug dealers are further evidence of the toxic reaction that results from stationary tents when combined with methamphetamine and fentanyl.

What was intended as a compassionate response to homelessness has evolved into semi-permanent swamps of exploitation, where drug dealers hide their business as they chain their customers to the products they sell.

After 14 years of reporting on our nation’s addiction epidemic, I have concluded that whatever sheltering benefit stationary tents may provide is far outweighed by the human abuse they foster and protect. Stationary tents perpetuate homelessness, addiction, and mental illness.

In Los Angeles, the chaos and degradation that stationary tents have caused stretches far beyond Skid Row — to South-Central, Hollywood, Venice, parts of the San Fernando Valley.

Thus, almost as damaging is the physical and emotional toll on the city and its residents. I’ve interviewed so many Angelenos who are bone-weary from the deterioration of neighborhood life that encampments foster, from the associated trash, fires, and rat-borne disease and from years of city inaction.

Stationary tents are the result of court cases that at first prohibited the city from removing tents from Skid Row, combined with others that the city interpreted as requiring it to leave tents untouched. In 2024, however, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that cities have the right to ban camping on their
sidewalks.

Thus, the Skid Row arrests and the upcoming mayoral election allow Los Angeles a chance to consider modest new proposals that would be truly compassionate.

The first step should be controlling the use of stationary tents, as so many other cities have chosen to do. Many, including L.A.’s neighbors, ban them outright: Vernon and Huntington Park, for example. If the city has no appetite for banning tents completely, it should make them temporary by at least returning to its former policy of prohibiting tents on public property between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.

This would not criminalize homelessness, but it would force homeless people out of their tents during the day. This would deprive drug dealers of the stationary clientele they now enjoy. Finding drugs might still be possible, but not nearly so easy. Constantly having to move would add incentives to homeless people to get off the street that they do not have now, mired in encampments of addiction.

It’s worth remembering that this situation didn’t always exist.

Sidewalk tents began to spread only after the Occupy Movement of 2011. Within a few years, though, tents, often provided by churches and similarly well-intentioned nonprofits, colonized much of Skid Row.

By roughly 2014–15, cheap, prevalent, and hyper-pure methamphetamine from Mexico also covered Skid Row, creating widespread symptoms of schizophrenia, as it has done nationwide since then.

Fentanyl arrived in 2018 adding greatly to the toll of overdose deaths.

Through the mid- and late-2010s, tents and meth, then fentanyl, spread to the rest of the city — a skidrowification of homelessness in L.A. The shelter-in-place orders during Covid simply magnified the phenomenon in ways Angelenos hadn’t seen before.

Through all this, as the city and county were spending millions on homelessness, meth and fentanyl subverted it all by each finding its own special relationship with the now-ensconced tent encampments.

The hyper-pure meth coming out of Mexico drives people to a psychosis that prevents users from living with anyone except maybe other meth users. Meth also prompts hoarding. Evolving case law led to the bizarre result that tents with large accumulations of junk, bike parts and more on public sidewalks were deemed protected as personal property instead of symptoms of a mind-mangling meth addiction.

Fentanyl, meanwhile, is certainly lethal on its own. But it metabolizes quickly. Thus those addicted to it must use it many times a day, living close to their dealer and living only for fentanyl, until they die of overdose or get off the street. Permanent tent encampments are perfect dispensaries for the drug that will kill them.

As encampments and these drugs spread, so did the annual L.A. County homeless death toll, particularly as fentanyl then Covid arrived: from 766 in 2015 to 2500 in 2023, dropping to 2200 in 2024 (still an average of six deaths per day), as supplies of fentanyl out of Mexico declined.

Lesser known, though, is the occurrence of rape, which goes all-but unreported in tent encampments. But from interviews I’ve done, almost all homeless women in tents have been raped, many of them repeatedly. Equally unreported is the tented incidence of assault, robbery, and pimping in encampments.

Contrary to the recent claim of Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, in proposing to exempt from the camping ban a dozen areas of his district, tents do not make homeless people easier to help. They inure them to abuse. They provide the setting through which residents get more deeply addicted to these two most addictive drugs, making them desperate to never leave those drugs.

“The encampments of more than four or five tents I was working at exist as a network of trading and using drugs,” said one former county homeless-outreach worker I interviewed. “No one who wasn’t actively using drugs would have the power to stay in a place like that.”

The L.A. Fire Department has handled an average of 47 homeless-related fire calls a day in the first eight months of 2026. Not all of these calls are related to tents, but many — the vast majority is a good bet — are.

Beyond that, though, squatter encampments create fire threats that often result in damage to the lives and property of Angelenos who live nearby. Tent fires are common on Skid Row, scorching the walls of the district’s frozen-food warehouses. But houses are just as vulnerable in neighborhoods around the city.

Tents and the hoarding that meth addiction fosters are among the reasons why uncollected trash is so prevalent in many L.A. neighborhoods.

Tents and the rats they fester are why Los Angeles now has typhus. A 21st Century American city is beset by a rat-borne, lice-and-flea spread disease that pre-dates humanity’s invention of sewers and anti-bacterial drugs.

This disease first appeared in Los Angeles in 2018 in Skid Row, where trash and food waste are ever-present due to stationary encampments lining sidewalks across that beleaguered district. Typhus is now citywide, per the county health department.

(The Nazis used to kill those they held in concentration camps by simply refusing them basic services, like sanitation, knowing that typhus would then spread and kill off many. Anne Frank and her sister died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. As it happens, many German soldiers also died of typhus on the Eastern front.)

Is removing tents between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. all that’s needed?

Of course not. It is a modest first step forward.

But a step that might actually begin to leverage, rather than undermine, the millions of dollars the city and county spend on homelessness.

And one that would begin to liberate encampment residents and the city itself from a policy that drags them both down in the name of compassion.

My father, mother, brother and I drove cross country in a second-hand Buick station wagon to Claremont, California. My father had a job waiting for him as professor of comparative literature at what is now Claremont McKenna College, where he would spend his entire career.

Along the way, he told us the stories of The Odyssey, by Homer, the blind Greek poet. It’s about the Greek warrior/king Odysseus as he strives to make it home to his family after ten years fighting the Trojan War and another ten years waylaid by one obstacle after another.

Listening from the back seat of the car, I was mesmerized by the one-eyed cyclops, blinded by the man named “Nobody” and his men, who tied themselves under the monster’s sheep. And the intoxicating sirens and the beeswax in the ears of Odysseus’s men.

At the time, I couldn’t remember the hero’s name. As we drove through Arizona and New Mexico, I kept begging him to again tell the stories of “the man who begins with O.”

Those stories are all I remember about the trip.

As it happens, now is a good time in America to read The Odyssey.

A movie version comes out next month. Plus, the themes are timeless, and relevant to today:

Boys become men by struggling, striving, going through difficulties. That community is always under threat and necessary to defend, as without it we are lost in a wilderness of selfishness and brutality.

A year or so ago, I embarked on reading or re-reading classic books: The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Tale of Two Cities, and Homer’s The Iliad.

Not long ago, rummaging through the book bins at my Goodwill Outlet, I found a copy of Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey and set to.

I was lucky enough to read the tale in conjunction with the book club of The Culturist, a Substack newsletter run by Sean Berube, whose insights added immensely to my understanding of the book.

The story is about the threat to us all of losing community. Greeks of the time, according to Berube, faced a world unruled by law, a world of violence, chaos, piracy, and wanton pillage and murder.

The refuges were the city-states governed by an invaluable idea holding it all together.

That idea is xenia — hospitality. In a larger way, xenia involves respect for community norms and the responsibilities we have in dealing with others.

The Odyssey is filled with examples of xenia. These are great feasts, in which the visitor is lavished with food and gifts, but is expected to entertain the hosts with stories, and, of course, respond in kind should he ever be the host.

And it’s filled with examples of the lonely, self-centered, brutish world we face without it.

Before we meet Odysseus, we meet some of the first fatherless characters in Western literature: the suitors invading Odysseus’s court. Their fathers were killed in the Trojan War. They are therefore uninstructed in a guest’s responsibilities in hospitality. They move in. They contaminate his court with unbridled consumption. They eat whatever they want, sleep with the maids, believing Odysseus also died in the war and his wife, Penelope, is therefore fair game to remarry.

Later, the mountainous cyclops, Polyphemus, we learn is “a grim loner, dead set in his own lawless ways” who “never mixed with others,” but in fact devours Odysseus’s men.

These are the worlds where xenia has been lost.

Odysseus’s story, Berube says, is of one man’s striving to restore behavior that solidifies, sustains community.

He has moments of weakness. He spends a year on an island sleeping with Circe, goddess of magic, forgetting all about returning home, until his men remind him of his duty.

In fact, Odysseus is a complicated hero. Strong, fearless, smart, inventive, prideful, egotistical, crafty, a plunderer, violent, vain — all in one guy.

He displays his talents for war and slaughter. But mostly, he uses creativity and ingenuity, bravery and wit — all in service of returning to family and restoring order to his kingdom that suitors have defiled.

The suitors remind me of designers of social media algorithms and those pestilent gambling apps, of junk food manufacturers, dope dealers.

With enormous resources, they invite our most selfish, lonesome human impulses, our consumption without limit, understanding that their best customers will be those who grow addicted to their products.

This newsletter of mine is a reader-supported publication, so why not go right ahead and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

They do so with apparently little feeling for their own community responsibility. Xenia seems to have deserted them, as it has Penelope’s fatherless suitors.

Odysseus, meanwhile, turns his back on pleasure to focus on the duty of returning home. He declines the offer the goddess Calypso’s offer of eternal life, and sex, if he will stay with her. He won’t stay on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where those who eat the lotus lose all desire to return home.

“He realizes man is not made for pleasure,” Berube says. And to be deprived of death would be to deprive the soul of striving. What makes Greek gods so petulant at times is that they’re bored with their own immortality, must strive for nothing, freed of the consequences of their actions. They’re the lottery winners of the ancient Greek cosmology.

Greek’s imagine the gods to be like prison gang leaders I’ve known, alone in solitary cells, creating drama for gang followers they’ve never met because they can and they have nothing else to do.

But striving is part of the human condition, and “has a meaning that stands tall on its own,” Berube says.

It’s just that our modern consumer-product marketing is busy convincing us this is not true. That we’ll be happy by kicking back, endlessly consuming their products.

Through dopamine, our brains push us to strive, to explore, to create. Without it, we would find no wonder and excitement in any of that. Dopamine can also lead to addiction, pushing us to want that pleasure to the exclusion of everything else.

Odysseus, in modern terms, has (mostly) balanced his brain’s dopamine and the consequences of unrestrained pleasure.

Odysseus is the fully formed adult brain (though still weak at times, like any human); the suitors are the unguided child brain in action.

“The fullness of his nature is reached through his identity as king and restoring virtue to the kingdom,” says Berube.

One last thing:

I find The Odyssey superior to The Iliad.

The Iliad is about a later portion of the Trojan War. It’s slaughter for slaughter’s sake. It’s bravery in service of destruction.

Humans are pawns of frivolous gods (read dictators or tech corporations in our modern era), bored by their own immortality, playing havoc with the lives of mortals.

And it’s about one man’s petulance. Achilles, the great hero, rages because the Greek King Agamemnon has taken his slave woman. For hundreds of pages, he sulks off in his ship as Greeks and Trojans battle and his countrymen are slaughtered.

It all makes for a book about the results of the worst of human nature, and the absence of human free will.

The Odyssey, on the other hand, is about human ingenuity, one man facing challenge, adventure and using his own bravery and wit to overcome. He encounters deceased Achilles in the underworld — as if Homer shows us that the world of The Iliad is what Odysseus is trying to avoid by striving to return home to restore order.

Together, though, The Iliad and The Odyssey form an uncanny description of the two halves of the Western civilization that would grow from them. Warlike, destructive of humanity, corrupt, violent and conquering, on one hand. Inventive, brave, enriching to humanity, promoting knowledge, the individual, and generosity, on the other.

It’s almost as if blind Homer could see what was coming and presented it to us in two tales, each telling half the story.

I spent a lot of time in Tijuana between 2014 and 2016.

It was a town I already knew fairly well, having written about it extensively during the decade I lived in Mexico (1994–2004). But I spent more time there during the last Obama years than I had before or since.

I did a lot of reporting there, mostly on stories about immigration.

I can tell you that never in the recent history of a town accustomed to deportation had there been so many deportees flooding into Tijuana.

City officials and charities were at their wits’ end. New flophouses were everywhere, particularly in the Zona Norte, the rumpled neighborhood abutting the border.

Long lines formed up often, reminiscent of Depression-era soup lines. the Padre Chava mission, run by an order of Catholic priests, ran food lines that had to clear people out every 30 minutes to bring new people who had been in line for two hours.

Even for Tijuana, it was unprecedented. You could see that and hear it in the words and emotion of the overwhelmed people who ran the missions and shelters, such as they were.

Taxis commented on it frequently, as many of them were either deportees themselves, from an earlier era, or they hated deportees. Deportees didn’t work, they said, or they were only `half Mexican’ after years in the U.S. There were other complaints.

Tijuana grew into a city of 2 million people based on deportees sent south, who stayed, and migrants headed north, who got sent back and also stayed. The town grew prosperous serving these relentless flows. They were like a raw material and Tijuana mined them. Most city residents have these flows in their family history. So to hear it spoken of in such new and alarming terms was, I thought, notable.

This was made more so when I visited flophouses and missions. The newly deported were often shellshocked. They had been torn from their families. Now the best they could expect to earn in a week was what they once earned in a day, or even a morning, in the U.S.

Some lapsed into alcohol or drugs. You’d see them slumped over on streets in the Zona Norte and elsewhere. The Bordo — the Tijuana River bed — swelled with the worst-off of people like this. That was a ghastly scene, filled with deportees, existing in filth on the stinking concrete river bed.

All this happened in Tijuana. I’m sure similar scenes took place in other border towns in Mexico.

You probably don’t remember it.

That’s because it took place fairly quietly in the U.S., using the criminal justice system, not deploying immigration agents across the neighborhoods, at worksites, shopping centers, Home Depots, or schools.

At the Tijuana missions or flophouses, what struck me, beyond the sheer numbers, were the guys (almost all deportees were men) who had been deported after an arrest for driving under the influence (DUI), sometimes their third or fourth, usually after getting off work.

I thought that nothing so reflected their complicated relationship with the United States and the U.S. with them as these DUIs.

On one hand, these guys did what I’ll assume is essential work — construction, plumbing, carpentry, electrical, all of which they learned here. But also factory work, landscaping, and more. They made wooden pallets. (Some day, I’ll write about the wooden pallet and how it is one of the most important industries in the country.)

This work allowed them to afford a car, housing far from work, and money enough for alcohol at day’s end. So while they did jobs that many places found beneficial — in some towns they were barometers of economic health — they also created costs that were serious and undeniable. DUI was one.

This was a story I heard often. They’d had a couple DUIs in the past with no repercussions, then suddenly a DUI meant deportation. A second or third DUI was common in the stories I heard.

The Obama Administration was trying to build support for immigration reform by showing that it could enforce immigration law. This was something previous administrations did not do, or could not — often because of pressure from local elected officials, immigration activists, and, particularly, business interests around the country.

Obama by then was called the Deporter-In-Chief by Latino activists.

He deported several million people. The official U.S. deportation figures of those years were made up of substantial numbers of people caught at the border and turned back. That was certainly part of the story. A significant number as well were illegal immigrants living far into the U.S. interior who’d committed some crime and that was it. These were the guys I saw flooding shellshocked into Tijuana.

It’s just that most Americans were unaware this was happening. Only reason I saw it was because I spent a lot of time in Tijuana.

I bring this up because it is entirely relevant to the deportations scenes taking place well into the United States.

Under Donald Trump, illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have dropped to record lows that were previously unimaginable. In 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security, federal apprehensions of illegal immigrants on the Southwest border dropped to a record average low of 251 a day and down from 5100 a day under the Biden Administration.

That’s a stunning figure to anyone like me who has covered the border on and off since the 1990s. People just aren’t crossing illegally in the numbers they did for decades.

To deport the quotas Donald Trump has promised — one million a year, 3000 a day are the figures I’ve heard — he has sent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into our country’s interior.

That has led to scenes of masked, well-armed agents, who seem unprepared for policing and civil encounters with American citizens, descending on U.S. streets, nabbing people at supermarkets or day care centers or immigration hearings.

It means deporting people with no criminal history.

Relying on the criminal justice system is too slow — and the numbers there are too low — to meet the administration’s daily quotas.

What’s more, the process is quiet, as the Obama Administration experience showed. It lacks the fearful public spectacle that has upset many Americans for several reasons — among them, the sight of a semi-military force killing U.S. citizens — but which seems integral to the Trump Administration’s deportation strategy.

The administration claims that its public-deportation strategy has led to more than 2 million illegal immigrants self-deporting since Donald Trump took office.

On a related note:

In 2018, I wrote that a border wall was, for Tijuana, a healthy thing. It forced the town to develop skills, a locally based economy, and veer from raw-material extraction: dependence on the vast flows of humanity coming north-south through their town.

It’s similar to many small American towns who for years sought economic salvation from big box stores, or shopping malls. I’ve written about that lately (here and here), and about some of those towns now turning, like Tijuana, inward to forge local economic capacity.

I’d like to see if that’s still true in Tijuana.

Illegal immigrants have been to Tijuana what oil is to many developing countries — again, a raw material, a welcome source of easy income, but teaching all the wrong lessons about solid economic development.

I’ve been busy with other things for the last year. But I have some time now. I hope to get back to Tijuana soon.

If so, I’ll report here what I see.

“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” sang Merle Haggard, in the first line of his Number 1 hit, “Okie from Muskogee.”

Maybe that was true in 1969, when the song was released. Today, though, some 20 cannabis dispensaries call Muskogee home, amounting to a significant number of its newest businesses.

I was driving through Oklahoma recently and I figured I couldn’t live with myself, as a Haggard fan, if I didn’t see what the town was about. So I swung 40 miles out of my way and into Muskogee’s downtown.

It was a quiet place, with a railroad running through the center. But there wasn’t much traffic downtown, and I don’t think I saw anyone walking. At most stop signs, seemed I was the lone car.

Merle’s song was among the first country music rebel yells of working-class white, rural Americans confronting the counterculture of the 1960s. (See lyrics below) Haggard’s family was from the Muskogee region, but left for California. He was born in Bakersfield, California in the middle of the Depression.

He followed the record the next year with “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” A subgenre of country songs lauding old-time values and in-your-face patriotism emerged from those two tunes.

If Americans have heard of Muskogee [pop. 36,000, south of Tulsa], it is from Haggard’s song. The town put in a bronze statue of Haggard and his guitar outside its civic center. It’s a sweet statue, with an unoccupied chair next to the singer. But even Merle’s statue has a lonesome stare to it.

I was about to leave when I came upon Arrowhead Mall just outside downtown.

The mall opened in 1987 — late in the nation’s mall economy. Its tenants were the major stores then: Sears, Robinson-May, JC Penney, Mervyn’s. Remember them? Heard of them?

The mall lasted just 23 years. Its tenants departed or went bankrupt one by one. By 2020, it was considered a “dead mall.”

All this got me thinking about the shopping mall in American life — not your typical Haggard theme, but a topic I’ve considered more than once in my career.

Indoor malls sprouted in a big way in the 1970s in suburbs of major cities across America. I grew up a mile from the Montclair Plaza in Southern California, and was caught stealing a record from the JC Penneys there when I was 14 I think — maybe 13.

For many metro suburbs, like Montclair, a mall was a nice complement to an already vibrant economy.

I went to work for The Register, the daily newspaper in wealthy Orange County, CA in 1987. The county already had 13 malls by then, as I recall, including South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, the town I covered for the paper.

South Coast Plaza generated more revenue than any in the country — so much that the city while I was there gave its taxpayers a rebate. The newspaper had a reporter on the “mall beat.”

Smaller towns turned to malls in the 1980s, more or less. To these towns, desperate to halt an economic withering, malls seemed to hold the promise of salvation.

They were not an adjunct to these towns. They were the intended cure.

Writing Dreamland and The Least of Us, I visited several small towns who’d banked on malls as economic balm in the 1980s. These malls were usually out on the interstate. They often killed off their towns’ slowly emptying downtowns. Arrowhead went in near downtown to revitalize Muskogee as a regional shopping magnet.

This post is public so feel free to share the heck out of it!

Either way, though, malls built with great expense and hope in mid- and small-town America had only a two-decade lifespan before the internet changed shopping habits. The 2008 recession and the Covid pandemic followed. Those mighty department stories couldn’t keep going.

One Youtuber has a whole channel devoted to “Dead Malls.” It’s grim stuff for those of us rooting for small-town America. Nowadays, though, dead malls are not just in those mid-sized towns, but in major metro areas as well.

Dead malls left a lot of these mid-sized and small towns worse off than before. Now they had a vacant town center and a hulking shell of inertia advertising their dysfunction.

All this seems to be part of Muskogee’s story.

Arrowhead today houses only a nail salon, a beauty salon, a Marine recruiting station, a Check-N-Go, and a U.S. post office. Even the gumball machines are empty.

Together, the mall and parking lot would seem at least the size of Muskogee’s downtown. But the only cars pulling in are couples who come to walk inside the mall for exercise. They stroll along the storefront perimeter, their footsteps echoing on the tile. [Walking opens at 10 am, according to a scrawled sign near an entrance.]

But there’s more to the town’s story than depression.

In the last year, Muskogee has changed its focus.

It’s now investing in making downtown a more appealing place for small businesses to form and locals to come.

There were large replicas of Fender Telecaster guitars, painted in swirling colors. There were a few of the murals that many small towns these days use to add color and energy.

Main Street Muskogee’s aim is “an environment where local businesses can thrive, historic architecture is preserved, and a strong sense of community is fostered … [by] providing support and resources to existing establishments, and organizing a wide range of events and activities to bring people together.”

I guess the town learned the hard way not to rely on salvation from elsewhere.

More and more, this seems to be the approach in small towns that are still battered, now by dead malls and opioid addiction, as well as factory and coal-mine closures and population decline. That is, making themselves appealing not to Walmart or shopping malls, but to local residents and business start-ups, igniting local entrepreneurial creativity in the process.

I’ve written about other towns focusing small and local to climb out of economic depression. It takes longer and isn’t as sexy, but it’s my impression that the results are more lasting and perhaps more satisfying.

I hope it helps Muskogee.

It’ll need it.

For the town seems lacking in one other economic area: immigrants. Only 3 percent of its population is foreign born. That’s even below Oklahoma’s low figure of 6 percent. [Fourteen percent of the U.S. population is foreign born.]

Immigrants, particularly Mexicans and Central Americans, tend to move to where the jobs are. Their absence, like an empty mall, tends to be a symptom of poor economic health. New blood, meanwhile, tends to jostle a staid status quo.

Muskogee has a couple Latino markets and some restaurants in other parts of town.

But I’d just come from Fort Smith, Arkansas, on the border with Oklahoma. Fort Smith was different. 90,000 people. Twelve percent foreign born. Several Latino businesses, mostly restaurants, including a large Mexican popsicle shop, are in and around downtown. All this has a vibrancy, a hip, forward-looking economic vitality that still seems missing in Muskogee.

I find it sad, not to mention ironic, to report so many of Muskogee’s newest businesses are cannabis dispensaries.[Merle’s face is painted on one at 420 Main Street, along with Bob Marley’s.]

Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018; recreational use remains illegal. So 20 dispensaries might suggest a lot of ill people in Muskogee.

Probably though that number is also a bow to the town’s hard economic realities, in which any new investment is welcome.

But dispensaries are economic double-edged swords for towns like Muskogee.

Yes, they do some business, and some folks may benefit medically. But what dispensaries also sell is lethargy, inertia, (psychosis in some cases, given the THC potency many cannabis products contain). No offense to Muskogee, but these seem the last things the town needs.

I figure dispensaries are like malls or casinos: They may end up taking as much as they give.

I left Muskogee feeling the town, instead of doses of deadening dope, could better use infusions of immigrant energy.

In 1969, Merle Haggard’s Muskogee seemed to reflect what was going on in an ignored part of the country.

It may still. I wish it the best.

Haggard never disowned “Okie from Muskogee.” But it’s my sense that his many other songs on up until his death in 2016 (at 79), while always rooted in American working-class life, had a different feel — one with which “Okie from Muskogee” seemed an odd fit.

I wonder how he would write about the town these days.

Dead malls, dispensaries, and downtown revitalization.

There’s a country song in there somewhere.

Methamphetamine is causing havoc across the United States

The drug is made highly potent and in ghastly supplies by traffickers in Mexico, who’ve had ample access to the chemical ingredients needed to make it.

I’ve done a lot about this for my Dreamland Newsletter.

I’ve wanted to talk to those who have moved on from the drug, something that is difficult to do.

I was put in touch with Jorge through a drug counselor. We had a great conversation.

The key thing, he said, was that he was forced to be away from the drug by being arrested, spending a long time in jail, then pushed — again, forced — into treatment, which was another significant amount of time.

The longer he was made to be away from meth, he told me, the more he wanted recovery.

Listen to the story of Jorge from Florida. Share it with those who need to hear it.

Originally published at https://open.substack.com on January 15, 2026.

We started with political revolutionaries, but unique in history, they were all lawyers. This is why, I figure, our revolution fared better than those that quickly followed — the French, in particular, but also the Mexican, and so on.

Instead, our upheavals have mostly come from some part of the private sector.

Which is why I grabbed Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream, a terrific 2008 book by retired University of Missouri historian Steven Watts, when I came upon it in a bin at the Goodwill Outlet near my house. (I review books found at Goodwill on my Substack in what I call Goodwill Book Reviews.

I opened the book just wanting to learn how Hefner started Playboy magazine, which seemed so radical when it appeared in 1953.

Hefner began the magazine with nothing but some money from his family and a conviction that he was rebelling against the country’s Puritan impulse and that of his Methodist upbringing.

Driven, he lived on fried chicken and Pepsi, virtually a shut-in at Playboy in those early years.

His life from then on was about male fantasies realized, one after another. Probably more than any other prominent American, Hefner would faithfully embody the most important theme of each of the next five decades in our nation’s life.

In the 1950s, he was all about breaking down the sexual taboos, and combining that with the country’s emerging material prosperity to propose a new Playboy lifestyle to Americans tired of war and Depression.

His magazine was at the vanguard of that societal change in America. In Playboy, the centerfold was no longer reserved for stars, but instead ordinary, though gorgeous, young women. The Playboy centerfold “appeared as an icon of sexual liberation in the 1950s,” Watts writes, “suggesting that, as Hefner liked to put it, `nice girls like sex, too.’”

In the 1960s, his empire booming, Hefner espoused left-wing views: anti-Vietnam, pro-Civil Rights, pro-women’s rights and legalized abortion. This coalesced with his Playboy Philosophy of sexual liberation as part of larger personal and political liberation Americans now seemed to thirst for. The magazine carried serious interviews and journalism that reflected that. He employed some of the emerging writers of the time — Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion, Gay Talese, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe — to whom Playboy gave ample space and wages for their work.

Americans tired of political activism in the 1970s. No one better reflected the Me Decade than Hugh Hefner. His Playboy clubs were booming. They, and the Playboy Mansions — first in Chicago, decamping then to Los Angeles — became centers for movie, rock, and sports stars to be seen, hang out with Hef, hook up with some Playmate. Hefner’s espousal of political activism gradually faded.

He had various girlfriends at once, all in their mid-20s, as he aged. (He was born in 1926). He was the audience he imagined for his magazine, and, he said, “committed to the idea of non-commitment.”

In the summer of 1972, reaching adolescence, I discovered Playboy in a California beach house we rented for a week, which happened to coincide with the Munich Olympics. I spent a significant part of that week looking at the stash of Playboys I found in a closet. Consuming my memories of that week are Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli Olympic wrestlers and Liv Lindeland, Playmate of the Year, the most beautiful woman I’d seen naked up to then. A fairly jarring, probably unhealthy but unavoidable, combination.

It was apparently during the 1970s when Hefner took his rebellion against sexual taboos beyond monogamy to include group sex. Better put, him having sex with several women much younger than he at the same time.

This was matched with an obsession with other realized fantasies. He grew up intoxicated with movies of the 1930s and 1940s. For decades afterward, he had weekly movie nights, showing old films. He played games incessantly: Monopoly, pinball, and especially backgammon. Watts writes of Hefner staging three-day backgammon marathons. Breaking only for sex with one woman or two or five.

By the 1980s, America had adopted many of the ideas Hugh Hefner put forward in his Playboy Philosophy. Seems to me that you’d be hard pressed to find another magazine that so influenced the changes in American mores.

But that decade was a tough one for Hefner and Playboy. The feminist left attacked him for his objectification of women as “playmates,” among others things. So did the Reagan Right. The two formed an unlikely alliance, pursuing pornographers, whose paragon, in their view, was Hugh Hefner.

Radical feminists Catherine McKinnon and Andrew Dworkin, in what was the beginnings of political correctness, called for banning pornography. The Meese Commission set about to investigate pornography and pornographers.

Hefner fought back in his pages and in media interviews. But the murder of Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten (in 1980), AIDS, and the perception that Hefner, in pajamas, surrounded by blonde women who never seemed to age, withered his image by the end of the decade.

In the 1990s, he dropped the pajamas, and opted for monogamy, marriage, children, in the spirit of the decade’s New Traditionalism. When that ended in divorce, largely because of his young wife’s desire to eliminate much of the partying and endless guests at her now-home, but which her husband had grown to love, Hefner returned to the bevy of blonde females in the 2000s.

I confess before reading this book, I had rarely thought about Hugh Hefner in the decades since finding those Playboys in 1972. I remember once, sometime in the 2000s, being surprised to hear he was still alive. He seemed to me a joke.

That’s how our cultural revolutionaries tend to end up. It happened to Elvis, who died fat and with ten drugs in his system.

I just re-watched the magnificent movie Capote, with Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Truman Capote revolutionized nonfiction, creating a new genre with the first “true crime” book, In Cold Blood (1966). He was America’s most famous writer for several years, the toast of Studio 54 and endless New York parties. He never completed another book, and died 18 years later from liver disease and drug intoxication.

Same can be said for Hunter Thompson — whose “gonzo journalism” created a rebel image of the writer that launched his fame. It was an image he either couldn’t or wouldn’t shake. After a creative spasm that produced some of the great “journalism” of the 1960s and early 1970s, he devolved into a caricature of himself, partying away precious writing time and energy with rock stars and sycophants who visited him in his home in Aspen. He shot himself to death in 2005, his best work decades behind him.

Political revolutionaries, when they fall, are often the victims of the worst human impulses that they themselves have unleashed. Think Trotsky or Robespierre. Or they become essentially the dictators they revolted against. Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

In the U.S., our modern-day cultural revolutionaries are consumed by excess. Poisoned by relentless adoration, too much money or power, and perhaps unable to disbelieve their own press clippings, their presence outlives their relevance.

Or they’re economic revolutionaries, who become the elites whose ramparts they stormed. Our tech bros seem intent on destroying their image as nerdy rebels disrupting old oligarchies, and improving American life in the process. Google’s motto for a while was, literally, “Don’t be evil.” (The company dropped the motto in 2015 for “Do the right thing.”)

Many of tech’s once-vital rebels have become sick jokes — tech versions of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua — pursuing wealth regardless of the harms their algorithms so clearly inflict.

Hefner weathered the test of time far better than many cultural and economic revolutionaries.

He and his magazine presided over, and chronicled, major transformations of post-war American life. These were, Watts argues: Our sexual revolution; the supremacy of consumer culture; the rise of the feminist movement as part of “Hefner’s `dream of personal, political and economic freedom’” and despite the trenchant critiques the movement leveled at him.

Hefner was, Watts writes, “a major architect of America’s dominant culture of self-fulfillment in the twentieth century,” comparable to Henry Ford and Walt Disney — two other American cultural/economic revolutionaries Watts profiled.

“For good or ill,” Watts writes, “we do live in a Playboy world in modern America.”

Hugh Hefner died in 2017. He was 91.

Three years later, Playboy ceased print publication and is today a lifestyle website.

He forged a tuba life for himself, which isn’t easy, with the help of the vibrant L.A. economy and a couple powerful tuba mentors.

Jim Self, at home with his tubas

He took it to levels that I don’t think many tuba players had achieved, at least so consistently and for so long.

I got to know Jim while writing my book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work. I met him at the practice hall he built above his house in the Hollywood Hills.

It wasn’t until like the third visit that I realized that he had built the practice hall to measure 38 feet long, in order to fit the 36-foot sound wave of the deepest tuba, the B-flat. He was tired, he said, of enclosing his horn in the small practice rooms at USC, where he had taught for many years.

The tuba’s sound, he said, needs freedom.

So did Jim Self.

Writing about people who execute such strange, big ideas is never dull.

He had the hall designed, he said, and workers dug away part of the hill behind his house, then added this enormous room — 38’x19’x19’ — on top of his house, all to free his tubas and give their sounds room to prowl.

He had come to Los Angeles from Knoxville in 1974 for that kind of freedom, he told me.

He was mentored by Harvey Phillips, Indiana University tuba professor, the staunchest advocate of tuba liberation — that the horn should no longer be confined by popular ideas of all it could not do. Tuba players, Phillips believed, had to be fully realized musicians — a radical idea in the 1970s music world.

Phillips organized the event that in the book I call Tuba Woodstock.

In 1973, Tuba Woodstock was a giant meeting of hundreds of U.S. tuba players scattered around the country. Phillips rightly figured that they would see their numbers for the first time, and find energy and encouragement from that.

Tuba Woodstock marked the beginning of a national tuba consciousness and the Tuba Civil Rights movement, which taught players to break with limitations others imposed on their horn, reach higher, and expect more of themselves, as well.

The first time a tuba quartet ever performed in public was at Tuba Woodstock. Self was in the group. “It sounded like mud,” Jim told me, “but it opened a lot of minds.”

That’s why I liked writing about tuba players — their stories were about liberation, about lifting blinders.

I had written for years about drug addiction, which is about obeying limitations.

Jim Self was the opposite of all that.

His career was also made possible by the L.A. economy. There was TV and movie soundtrack work. Disneyland and colleges and universities. Meanwhile, to L.A. came waves of the new arrivals looking to nurture their most creative instincts in music, movies, TV, and tech.

A capitalism of non-conformity roiled amid Southland smog and traffic. Jim Self thrived in all that.

He learned a lot from the L.A.’s native titan twins of the tuba who did as well: Tommy Johnson and Roger Bobo, both now deceased.

Johnson taught him the business side, and the teaching side. Johnson played on hundreds of movie soundtracks, and taught at USC. Self followed him into movie soundtrack work and as the school’s tuba professor.

Bobo showed Self the musically experimental side. Bobo became the world’s first tuba soloist, having fled the L.A. Philharmonic as too confining. Bobo performed the first solo tuba recital at Carnegie Hall and went on to record with jazz and classical groups.

Jim recorded all kinds of music. Jazz, classical, pop and show tunes. He was very punk rock in that way. He just did it. Didn’t wait for permission. Recorded it all on his own label — Basset Hound Music. (Self, like other tubists, had a penchant for Basset hounds, owned some 20 of them over the years, he told me.)

He became the fully formed musician Harvey Phillips said tuba players needed to be: musically experimental and professionally (financially) grounded.

Last time I spoke with him was about three weeks before he died. I’d sent him a copy of the book. One of the chapters was about him building that 38-foot practice hall atop his house in the Hollywood Hills.

I included it, I told him, because it was in talking to him that I finally realized why I was writing the book. It had become not just about tuba players and band directors, but about the liberation of creativity.

His practice hall was the architectural manifestation of that — an example of the beautiful, offbeat things that can come from a vital economy and a rambunctious imagination.

He read the book, said he was thrilled. It seemed to elevate the tuba; it was about something larger than the horn, he said.

He sent me two CDs. One was a tuba country-western record. (“Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Folsom Prison Blues”)

He said he had had no idea what I was going to write. But the book seemed to him now to transcend the horn: Find your capabilities, then work like hell all your life to refine and express them.

I think this appealed to his inner punk rocker.

He had not expected this, I remember him saying.

“It’s like philosophy.”

His own, perhaps.

and why I wrote “The Perfect Tuba,” and just read “A Tale of Two Cities”

The soon-to-be-concluded government shut down was about whether to hike premiums for medical insurance for the poorest among us. That now looks like a certainty.

The White House achieved a Marie Antoinette moment when it decided time was ripe to renovate the building itself, including “accents” of 24-karat gold, and a lavish new ballroom paid for by (tax-deductible, meaning taxpayer funded) donations from our wealthiest.

As SNAP food benefits were then poised to end, the president opened his Florida resort to a Halloween party with a 1920s “Great Gatsby” theme, honoring the country’s last Gilded Age — before this one, I mean.

The man who randomly fired federal workers and cut U.S. foreign aid to some of the world’s poorest countries is also the man who runs a company whose board of directors just approved his $1-trillion pay package.

The pay to U.S. executives continues to leave what’s paid to workers in the dust.

The World Series reminded us that two L.A. Dodgers have contracts that together are valued at more than $1 billion. Add another five Dodgers and you get to $2 billion.

Meanwhile, other already wealthy athletes keep lining up to hawk gambling apps that ensure their (much lower-income) customers — mostly young men — will continue to lose money they don’t have, thus mortgaging their future to men who don’t need their money. (Charles Barkley, Wayne Gretsky, LeBron James, the Manning brothers, Conor McGregor, Cristiano Reynaldo, etc.)

I hear billionaire Peter Thiel claims that “capitalism isn’t working for young people” due to crippling student debt and a lack of housing they can afford to buy.

Yes, but I’d say those are at the tail-end of the story.

The more immediate, daily scourge is all those products/services, fine-tuned to be highly addictive, aimed at young people, mostly men, and promoting for profit one or more of the following: obesity, poverty, addiction, distraction, debt, impotence, loneliness, isolation, and lethargy.

Derailing, in other words, any thought of going to college or buying a home, in the first place.

Gambling apps are just the latest bright idea that we’ve blessed, allowing our legal addictive economy to forge weapons to hammer customers’ brains to the profit of these companies. This list of these weapons arrayed against us also includes: video games, pornography, ultra-processed junk “food,” hyper-potent marijuana and ultra-processed derivative “products,” and of course numerous smart-phone apps, which turn a small machine into a drug dealer.

These potentially addictive products and services are (legally) made intensely more so, through ultra-processing the product, relentless advertising, or both.

We live in an ultra-processed, 24-karat-gold, hyper-potent time.

We have created it for ourselves, under the belief that this is the natural order of capitalism.

No doubt, fentanyl and meth are the examples of what happens when drugs are illegal. But many more examples exist of what happens when supply is legal, allowed to be ultra-processed to the point of addictiveness, and made in staggering potency and/or availability.

With these examples of a rigged capitalism ensuring wealthy people stay wealthy at the expense of those who are not, why should we wonder that young people seem enamored with socialism?

All the foregoing is behind why I wrote my latest book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work.

The book is about tuba players and band directors. Seemed to me they stand as a bulwark to what I’ve described. Their lives are about focus, postponed gratification, working hard for achievement, without the promise of wealth or fame, finding fulfillment through perseverance and collaboration.

We need their examples. We need to see their pursuit of liberating creativity, honing it with hard work.

That’s what I tried to do in The Perfect Tuba.

Tuba players, in particular, are about liberating creativity from the limitations others would impose on their instrument.

Band, unlike our Gilded Age, is about winning later, and quietly. “How did the band do this year?” a director was asked. “Too soon to tell,” he said. “Ask me in 10 years.”

As an aside, I can say that in my dozen years writing about our national epidemic of addiction, I was asked often how best to keep kids away from drugs. I didn’t have a good answer.

Today, though, I can say that the only thing I’ve found that serves fairly well to keep kids away from drugs is high school band.

I’m sure there are others, of course. I don’t claim any kind of complete knowledge. But band is the one thing I’ve seen work well — because what it teaches kids allows for maturing with healthy values, attitudes, and habits.

All this seems important for these times.

I’d suggest those times also require reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens — which I just finished. (I read it first in high school, I believe.)

It opens with some of the most memorable lines in English literature, which again are eerily relevant:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period …”

Dickens’ tale is a Victorian melodrama. What makes it current is that it’s set against the French Revolution and what led to it: the extreme poverty of most French people, with an aristocracy that not only lived on the backs of its less fortunate countrymen but believed that their exalted position was the natural order of things.

Eventually, the French underclass had enough, rose up, freed those in prison, slaughtered many of those upper-class French, lopped off the head of the king, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette. Then it kept on lopping off heads. If we believe Dickens, this Reign of Terror that ensued created a culture of demented humor and insane partying, fermented by pervasiveness in French life of the guillotine and the lack of rule of law.

Dickens has zero love for the mob and its kangaroo courts. But he writes eloquently about why the revolution happened. In particular, because of the chasm between rich and poor and the entitlement the aristocracy felt to its increasingly frivolous privilege.

Which I assume included 24-karat-gold accents.

Early in his life, painter Edward Hopper (1882–1967) went to Paris, which was where young artists of the time aspired to live. Impressionism and modern art were in vogue. Picasso, Matisse, and others.

I was struck reading this book that Hopper visited Europe as a young artist three times, but, uninterested or unimpressed by the avant-garde, he returned to the United States in 1910 and never went back.

Instead, he lived, married, and painted in New York City and Massachusetts and devoted himself to themes of America and unadorned realism.

The strange thing is, he did so by removing most Americans.

Reading through this beautiful book that I found at my Goodwill Outlet, I was struck by the fact that his country seems almost absent of people.

He paints theaters, city sidewalk, cafes and restaurants, yet they are almost always empty, occupied by a lone subject usually with a far-off stare suggesting the scene before her is as empty as the room she inhabits. His city streets have no people, no cars, no street vendors

His art reminds me of scientists who try to isolate for variables in an experiment, eliminating all the extraneous so-called noise, to get to the clearest expression of truth.

Those Americans who remain in Hopper’s paintings seem disappointed, missing out on something that makes life worth living. We see them alone with their thoughts that we’re free to imagine, but which we can’t believe are joyful. Certainly, no one’s laughing.

Perhaps Hopper appeals to me because he leaves social criticism out of his art. I prefer artists who do that. He lets details tell what story viewers would gather for themselves from each painting.

This is remarkable because in his day social criticism was viewed as what a politically aware artist should produce.

I’m a journalist. I believe facts and details, accumulated into stories, without many adjectives or adverbs, is the most powerful kind of nonfiction writing. You’re more likely to impact a reader that way. You just can’t control what that impact will be. You have to be fine with that.

Think of the difference between Bob Dylan and the folksingers he broke with shortly into his career. They wanted him to sing protest songs, the message of which was always clear. He wanted to write uncorseted.

Hopper’s painting left out the adjectives, the adverbs, figuring, I guess, that we could all interpret his art the way it occurred to each of us. Which in the end is the most radical idea — that we can each have our own version of art, of truth. That also may be why he rarely did interviews.

My copy of Hopper I found buried deep in a Goodwill Outlet bin beneath the sedimentary layers of self-help books, both secular and Christian.

But leafing through pages of Hopper’s paintings, I was struck by what his works have in common with those tomes.

Those books are artifacts of the search we all undertake in one form or another for some kind of place in the world. It’s a place we feel passing us by at times in our lives when we feel we should see the path forward more clearly, have things more resolved.

The figures in Hopper’s paintings seem filled with a similar longing. They never face us. They’re reluctant to look us in the eye. They’re always alone, lost in (often anguished) thought or engrossed by something out on the street that they observe from a sad apartment, or an empty café or office.

His paintings “reveal a human world that is no longer in a state of innocence, but has not yet reached the point of self-destruction,” writes Ivo Kranzfelder, author of the analysis of his career included in this book.

It’s as if Hopper was documenting the beginnings of an American isolation that deepened and came into sharpest relief decades later with our opioid-addiction epidemic.

Our economy has a way of turning so many activities into alienating, solitary pursuits that lead to compulsion. A company has no better customer than one who is addicted to its product. Shopping, gambling, which once had to be done in public, now can be done on apps, alone. Porn does the same with sex.

Today that isolation is everywhere, intensely damaging, and giving rise to the worst symptoms of depression, mental illness, addiction, and suicide.

I spoke recently with an official of a midwestern city medical examiner’s office who said that fentanyl was falling in supply since late 2023 and opioid overdoses were dropping, but that suicide was rising. “Gunshots, hangings, purposeful overdose — from kids to seniors,” the official said. Kids “don’t know how to cope, don’t know how to fail. Meth may be causing mental health issues, too.”

What would Edward Hopper make of our world of Airpods, smart phones, remote work, and whatever AI is about to bring — a world he may scarcely have been able to imagine?

Like the people in his paintings, we are as isolated in our public places as we are in our homes. I go to a gym and people rarely talk. The sounds are all metallic, machine generated. Like a factory. I write at independent cafes. They’re usually fairly quiet. I’m as much to blame. I put on my earphones and listen to music as I write. Don’t often engage in conversation, though I wish I would.

The places I know where people used to flock — Fisherman’s Wharf and downtown San Francisco and Venice Beach in Los Angeles are recently on my mind — are about as barren as Hopper’s theaters and cafes.

One difference is that the people in those places I’ve visited recently are too often captured and alone with the most tormented mental illness and addiction. Perhaps Hopper’s half-dressed woman alone in her room is no longer the reflection of our country that he imagined. Maybe, instead, it’s a homeless woman, looking out from under her street tent, her face contorted in anguish at a merciless hallucination conjured by some methamphetamine so cheap that she got it for free.

Or maybe that’s just me, like Hopper, too long taken up with one aspect of the country.

I’ve long thought that one reason meth addiction gets so little sympathy is because it reveals something deep and true about us that we’re forced to turn from it in, what?, disgust? Anguish?

It’s interesting that Hopper once said he was never able to depict exactly what he intended. I feel him. I always have a mental idea of how a story can go that is different from what I’m later able to come up with.

But that’s the most optimistic idea in Hopper’s work. Each time, he must have known that the painting he conceived would not turn out just as he had it in his mind’s eye. He did it anyway.

I think that’s the best we can do, despite feelings we haven’t figured life out the way we should have by now: Just imagine what might be possible, then take a stab at it.

Then repeat, getting closer through the practice, though never quite there.

Long before I wrote two books about our nation’s drug-addiction epidemic, I lived in Mexico for a decade (1994–2004) and wrote mostly about Mexican immigration, probably more than any other American journalist at the time. Spent a ton of time in Michoacan, Oaxaca, Guanajuato, Zacatecas and other immigrant-sending states.

This was the subject of my entire second book, Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration.

Covering immigration was thrilling. Every immigrant’s story is an opera and reminded me over and over why I loved being a journalist.

But I can say that I changed my mind on the topic almost hourly. I will in this post, as well.

To begin, I note Matt Walsh, prominent conservative pundit, finds the Statue of Liberty’s “huddled masses” quote to be “a stupid poem.” He apparently wants to welcome only rich people. To me, that quote is America’s sublime message to the world: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

He appears to misunderstand why America is prosperous. We are prosperous because we attracted the world’s “huddled masses,” and not its royalty. America gave them the chance their home countries had denied then, and this ignited the great energies of those “huddled masses.”

They repaid the offer over and over. By and large, they built productive lives and revved our economy in the process, making it the most robust and innovative the world has ever seen. Classic Adam Smith.

Their raw material is more important than any fossil fuel. Comfortably monied elites don’t have it. Only those ‘huddled masses’ know how to bring it.

[Full disclosure: Like so many of you, I’m the descendent of a member of the huddled masses. My Spanish grandfather was the illegitimate son of a father he never knew and a mother who abandoned him. He came to eastern Pennsylvania in 1920, worked in a brewery, married, had three children, and his second son, my father, was among the poorest kids to attend Northwestern University when he arrived as a freshman in 1953. He obtained a PhD from Harvard in comparative literature and spent 40 years as a professor.]

Over the years writing about immigration, I concluded that what Mexico has lost in the constant drain of its most energized blood far exceeds any amount of money the departed would later send back. People risked death to leave Mexico, like those who tried to flee the Soviet Union.

This constant bloodletting is one reason why, despite more than 70 years of migration north, legal and illegal, and hundreds of billions of dollars sent home, Mexico remains a developing country: It expelled its huddled masses.

Meanwhile, I keep in mind the equally enormous costs to working-class Americans of the presence of millions of people illegally in their country.

I remember a conversation I had with two Mexican-American mothers in west San Bernardino years ago. Their great-grandparents arrived in the early 1900s fleeing the Mexican Revolution and found work on the railroads. The women had no connection to Mexico, nor wanted one.

I was there to speak with them about another topic. However, they detoured me for more than half an hour during that conversation to talk about the grave threat to their families and their fraying neighborhood by the arrival of so many illegal Mexican immigrants.

These men, the mother told me, didn’t speak English, they lived six or eight to an apartment, driving rents higher. Most important to these mothers, these guys took “the jobs our boys should have.” Car washes, restaurants, some others.

I keep these mothers in mind always.

I was reminded of how Cesar Chavez fought against illegal immigration. He viewed them as scabs undercutting the wages his farmworker union members — who were Mexican-Americans.

Today, too, I think about the results of November’s election, the Hispanic vote shifting to Trump, something Democratic leaders believed could never happen. [A year before the election, when President Biden was still a candidate, a Democratic poll showed this was most certainly happening.]

After the election, I thought again about those mothers. How they would have been outraged by something like, say, sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary cities formed in response to Central American civil wars and refugee asylum petitions. But in time, they grew to reflect immigration defenders’ rigidity.

Sanctuary cities were now to give refuge to any immigrant, no matter how outrageous, how criminal, his behavior, or how many times he had crossed illegally.

Law enforcement was too often blocked from doing its proper job, which was prosecuting that person, then showing him back to his home country.

The result: With regularity, immigrants were arrested for major crimes. When this happened, it would have helped had sanctuary defenders been as outraged as the victims of those crimes. The response was never to adjust the policy, but instead to insist that, well, crime is lower in immigrant neighborhoods than elsewhere. This ignored the point: That a person without authorization to be here was committing a crime of any kind. Not surprisingly, this rationalization served to outrage and galvanize Americans who couldn’t see how this was logical or right.

President Obama’s administration removed 3 million people who had illegally crossed the border and were in the country — more than any other administration. It did this without raids on schools, restaurants, parks, and without masked, armed federal agents tearing parents from kids, or accosting people based on their ethnic appearance, etc.

No reality TV show. Just government that understood that deporting illegal immigrants was one of its many jobs.

It was in no way without human cost. I saw this first hand in Tijuana where I spent a lot of time reporting in 2015. The city was filling with these deportees, most of whom had been deported after an arrest in the U.S. for some crime or another — most often, it seemed, for driving under the influence. Tijuana soup lines were long, shelters full. Many of these guys were shellshocked, struggling to adapt to a country they didn’t much know while they earned in a day what they once earned in an hour.

Yet using the kind of raids we’ve seen recently, Trump’s administration will likely not come close to deporting the number he promised during the campaign. There are efficient, less contentious ways of going about it that rely less on picking on people who are actually working, people whom we might fast-track to citizenship if we could ever get our immigration system figured out.

So I’m not alone in the impression that the point of these raids is inflaming outrage.

President Trump seems to be banking on the far left, which never seems to miss a chance to play the role he has selected for it.

Thus: burned Waymos, looted businesses, graffiti, F-bombs, and masked youths lecturing cops on the depth of their class betrayal — all of which must be borne by a city already cutting budgets for services, many of which are aimed at poor and working-class people.

The flying of Mexican flags is particularly mystifying in protests of deportations to Mexico.

In an era of Tik-Tok and Instagram, it doesn’t matter that vandals are in the protesting minority. They may well be. They remain social media’s delicious main course.

What’s more, they distract from the bigger picture. …

In the last fifteen years, we’ve had several jobs done on our house. The contractors were U.S. citizens of various ethnic extractions. Their workers were from Mexico or Central America, legal and illegal, I suspect.

I spoke often with them. They had come here in their teens — hidden in the trunks of cars — with no skills other than how to milk cows. This country gave them an education they never received back home.

They did what any “huddled masses” do when offered a real new deal: They repaid the offer over and over. In tile, plumbing, roofing, carpentry, masonry they were now wizards — no other word for it.

Twenty years after they crossed, their work reflected a repertoire of skills that any country would — should — be eager to retain.

No AI nor any robot will ever do what they can.

I find the “No Kings” protests’ title compelling. We live in a time when the rich get richer in spite of themselves, and it is so difficult to be poor and working class. In a roundabout way, that’s exactly what my last books have been about: Dreamland and The Least of Us.

In such a time, for example, a significant “royalty tax” would seem a healthy thing for a country: a dynastic prophylactic, of sorts.

Instead, Congress proposes a bill that will cut health care for the working classes and increase the amount of non-taxed inheritance money a couple may bequeath to its children: from $27 million to $30 million.

In the years I’ve written about immigration, the issue has grown more complex, more hardened. [Though I wonder where we’d be today had Donald Trump not killed the bi-partisan immigration bill that Congress forged in the months before the election.]

Through the last few days, I’ve read the Substack posts of Peter Coyote — actor, narrator and Zen Buddhist priest — and find him wise. He counsels going to protests dressed as if for church. Marching in silence. No rocks, no spray paint, no lectures on class war.

Here’s a bit of what Coyote had to say:

“There are no purely good or bad guys. To believe that we are good and our opponents are evil Relies on assuming that our nature is fixed, static, and permanent. If that were so, we could never change.

To believe that we are good and others are bad, means we haven’t taken responsibility for our own faults — Jealousy, anger,, envy, — negative characteristics all humans possess. When we ignore them or won’t admit those parts of ourselves, we project them onto other people and name them enemies. …

Once we realize that we all share the same nature, then we have to learn how to communicate with one another. This is why I wrote “no one accepts an invitation when they’re being screamed at. “

The cops are not necessarily our enemies. Like most of us, they usually signed on to do something good, but they are under the authority of others. To some degree we are all under the authority of those we work for. We may even regret the products we make or use, but are constrained by our need to have jobs. When we scream at them, and threaten them, they get anxious and they’ll respond with fear and rage.

When we behave that way, we are not representing our Democratic values, our desire for peace, or the kind of citizens we want to be. We are not behaving like people they could respect. We are venting because we’re upset and we’re frustrating our own best intentions. The American people see this too as they’re trying to figure out which side to be on. …”