For a decade-and-a-half now, I've been using the line "Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive", but I don't believe I've ever defined the precise point at which that wretched state is reached. I will today.
As discussed here a few weeks ago, a fifth of truck-drivers in the United States are Sikh immigrants. Now we learn that a big chunk of what's left are Afghans. Shocka headline from Vermont's "alternative" newspaper Seven Days (they've interviewed me, rather agreeably):
Google Maps Routed These Afghan Truckers Through Canada. Then ICE Detained Them.
Afghan truck drivers transporting cookies and coffee are getting ensnared in President Trump's immigration crackdown at the Canadian border.
Is Google Maps working for Trump now? Well, no: what the headline neglects to mention is that His Majesty's Canadian Government denied these truckers entry to the Great White North so they were obliged to do a U-turn and return to the American border post. That will always attract extra scrutiny from the US authorities. It did for at least one of my children on the Vermont/Quebec frontier when she attempted to enter the Dominion with Canuck ID but a Yank car. After re-entering the US, she drove one border stop west and cruised into Canada "without let or hindrance" (as His Majesty commands), before the wankers at the previous Quebec post had entered her denial of entry into the RCMP/FBI computer.
Alas, your average Afghan trucker lacks the native wit and low cunning of the "niche Canadian"'s even more niche progeny. So:
On September 5, Enayetullah Walizada, a commercial semitruck driver from Afghanistan, picked up a load of cookies in New Hampshire and plugged his destination — Union, Calif. — into Google Maps.
So driving cookies from the Granite State to the Golden State is yet another of those jobs Americans won't do. We need to start passing out H1Bs in the bazaars of Kandahar.
He soon found himself approaching the international border near Derby Line, Vt., realizing too late that his route was taking him through Canada. The snafu may cost him his shot at a life in the U.S.
When Canadian border officials turned Walizada back, he had to pass through a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. Despite his pending asylum case and valid work permit, border agents detained him, claiming his legal status in the country had expired days earlier. He is now being held at Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans, fighting deportation.
Walizada is not the first Afghan trucker to be ensnared in President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown at the Vermont-Canada border...
"The trend we're seeing with Afghan truck drivers who are working to get American goods from point A to point B is deeply concerning," said Molly Gray, executive director of the Vermont Afghan Alliance. "In this case, these truck drivers are..."
Whoa, whoa, hold up there. The "Vermont Afghan Alliance"? You made that up, surely? Perhaps for an amusing competition to come up with the least convincing name for a 501(c)3?
But no: apparently, it's a real thing:
We welcome and assist Afghans resettling in Vermont.
They provide services such as driving lessons in Pashto, fluency in which is certainly what I'm looking for in the guy in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler coming at me on Route 15 in Hardwick. Yet VAA assists Afghans so successfully that Vermont (previously one of the "least diverse" states in America) now has "the largest per capita population of resettled Afghans in the country", ready to do for Burlington what Somalis have done for Minneapolis. Take it from Mohammad:
These gatherings allow me to feel a little bit of Afghanistan in Vermont.
And Khalid:
I was able to speak with the Mayor of Burlington and share my experience and concerns as a new resident and voter.
He's voting already? Wow, that's one expedited check-in.
As the Vermont Afghan Alliance notes:
One of the biggest challenges for Afghans arriving in Vermont is building and maintaining community and retaining cultural traditions and celebrations.
What "cultural traditions" does the Vermont Afghan Alliance feel the Green Mountain State is missing out on? Bacha bazi? Child marriage, and thus the world's highest rate of maternal mortality? The be-nosing of teenage girls? Denying women the right to feel sunlight on their faces? Executing homosexuals by building a wall and then crushing them by toppling it on them? Which probably wouldn't work with clapboard, but might liven up the increasingly dreary Tunbridge World's Fair now that the greased pig race has fallen out of favour - and would, in any case, be haram for the new Vermonters. Or is it just their general predilection for sexual violence that enables Pushtun lads to feel a little bit of Vermonter, as their cousins likewise feel a little bit of English and Norwegian schoolgirls?
Personally, I miss the old Vermont's "cultural traditions", like the tourist-friendly bumper sticker that read "Have a great vacation - and don't forget to leave". Half-a-lifetime ago, I dated a girlie from Burlington, and observed the then "cultural tradition" of not needing to lock the car when we parked for dinner or a movie. Vermont's largest city, once David Brooks's model post-political latte-town, is now a crime-ridden craphole, and no politician has a clue how to recover what they've lost.
But turning it into Little Jalalabad is sure to work.
When the war against the Taliban got going in 2001, every hack pundit in America was suddenly an expert on Afghanistan as the "graveyard of empire". As I noted back then, that was largely bollocks. Britain certainly lost the first Afghan War, culminating in the massacre of virtually its entire expeditionary force in the 1842 retreat from Kabul. Yet, having concluded that these were not people any prudent person would wish to bring formally within Her Majesty's Dominions, London nevertheless, with a very light touch, maintained Afghanistan within the Britannic world as a client state buffering the Russian empire for the next century, until the 1950s.
True, things did not go so well for the Soviets in the 1980s. However, imperial-graveyard-wise, neither Westminster nor the Kremlin thought the answer to humiliating military defeat in the Hindu Kush was to import hundreds of thousands of Afghans to Britain or the USSR.
For that, we had to wait for the bleepwits of the Beltway with their priority boarding for legions of the Pentagon's loyal Afghan translators, who mysteriously, upon disembarking in Virginia and Texas, require translators of their own.
Nowhere outside Afghanistan needs Afghans - not even their immediate neighbours:
Pakistan has deported more than 19,500 Afghans this month, among more than 80,000 who have left ahead of a 30 April deadline, according to the UN.
But the whiter-than-white ladies of the Green Mountain State feel that, where Uzbekistan and Pakistan and Your Stan Here are dragging their feet, Vermontistan needs to step up. Non-diversity is so boring, don't you find? Buzkashi in Bennington! The dancing boys of Derby Line! The child brides of Chittenden! The Pushtun warlords of Peacham!
Sometimes a society becomes too stupid to survive, and the precise point at which you cross that frontier is when your do-gooder neighbours decide to found a local "Afghan Alliance". When they do, clean out your checking account, sell your house for kindling, and hit the road. But watch out for Afghan truckers wondering where the Pushtun highway signs went.
~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on a bloody Yom Kippur in Manchester. On Saturday the latest edition of Steyn's weekend music show remembered a great lyricist, while Rick McGinnis's movie date pondered Jules Dassin's Rififi. Our Sunday Song of the Week offered not an apple but a song for the teacher, and our marquee presentation was Part Five of Mark's special twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of his highly prescient demographic bestseller, America Alone.
If you were too busy this weekend driving nuclear waste cross-country on your Sudanese driver's license, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
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