No, I don’t mean the fear of Mexicans that permeates the Great Southwest. That’s been going on for years though it has reached a fever pitch of late with all the anti-immigrant hysteria, and the likes of Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan rallying the yokels with their impression of “Trouble (Right Here in Riverside City)” — “With a capital T and that rhymes with B and that stands for Beaner…”

No, I’m talking about Towelheads, Camel Jockeys, Ay-rabs, dammit. Yesterday we were greeted with the story of an American of Iraqi and Palestinian descent who was barred from boarding a Jet Blue flight from JFK to Oakland because he was wearing a T-shrit that said, in English and Arabic, “We Will Not Be Silenced.” Oh, yes you will. According to one of the security people who stopped Reed Jarrar from flying, “Going to an airport with a T-shirt in Arabic script is like going to a bank in a T-shirt that says ‘I’m a robber.'”

Or going to your TSA job in a shirt that says “I’m a moron.”

And today I read of US Sen. Conrad Burns who said Americans confront a “faceless enemy” who “drive cabs in the daytime and kill at night.” As a former cab driver, I resemble those remarks (though I used to do most of my killing in the daytime and drove by night, the better to partake of prostitution and drugs) but he does have a point: There are a lot of Arabs driving cabs. In New York. Not so much Montana, though you may want to hail a cab to get the hell away from people like Burns.

This atmosphere of know-nothing racism is encouraged in no small part by our commander in chief, who just yesterday told a VFW audience in Utah that “If we give up on the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities.” Somehow those penniless unemployed Iraquis are going to fly to the US (wearing T-shirts with English-only messages touting Pepsi and Nike) and start killing us instead of each other if we don’t vote against your local Democrat (rhymes with Arafat) this fall.

Is there a hole for me to get sick in?

My son Adam came back from his Outward Bound adventure in the Sierras last week, and that alone should be cause for celebration. Honestly, I thought he might just bail halfway through the two week trek but he stuck it out and does not seem to regret it.

“Imagine if boot camp was run by Uncle Brian,” was his first attempt at a description and a rather amusing one: my brother Brian is a good soul and one of the last of the CA hippies, at least in ideals and outlook, and while Adam and I seemed to agree that a challenge was in order, a harsh one might have been counterproductive. He said his leaders were two young women in their twenties who dug the Grateful Dead and had everyone write in their journals every night. Which might have been more appealing if they hadn’t been climbing up a mountain face for 12 hours.

From the descriptions I have had from friends of OB outings in the past, I get the impression things were a little more hardcore back in the day. The ten participants in Adam’s trek were not made to eat bark or fend for themselves alone, a stable of the old OB experiences, and he got along with all of them. Since he has told me on more than one occasion that he can’t stand people, this is in and of itself sort of a breakthrough.

Now he’s back in SF, hustling around getting ready for college, finding a place to live. “All of that stuff that used to drive me insane seems a lot easier now,” he told his sister the other night. Difficulty is, after all, relative. Putting up with dorm life and lame roomates in nothing compared to a steady diet of trail mix and building a camp fire every night. It’s life and life only.

The news that Tower Records will have to auction off its assetshits me in a personal place. As a California native, the original Tower Records store in Sacramento was a touchstone of my musical education. The first LP I ever bought with my own money (Beatles for Sale) came from Tower, as did my first 45 (the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” b/w “Stupid Girl”) and I can still recall the expression on my mother’s face when she looked at the Stones in their Carnaby Street finery. “I suppose that’s how you would like to look?” she asked, rhetorically I suppose. I was only eleven but the answer was: of course!

And how she gloated when I brought home my next single by the Stones, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows?” which featured a picture of them in forties style drag, the ugliest bunch of queens any of us had ever seen. Not that we saw that many in Auburn, California. But you get the point.

The other Tower stores I encountered were paragons of haughtiness. Security guards stood at the doors of the one in San Francisco as if guarding Fort Knox. The employees always viewed my purchases with disdain if not contempt (searching for a Fred Neil import at the Tower on Sunset in LA I made the mistake of asking the man behind the counter if he knew anything about folk music) and even at its flagship store on Broadway in NYC they treated me like a thief. Didn’t I realize that Keith Richards lived upstairs? Why should they bother with me?

O how the mighty etc. Brought low by Napster and all that followed — a whole generation of kids who would sooner go to WalMart than a “record store” — Tower found itself in the sad position of begging for business lately. No one asked me to check my bag the last time I went to the store here; I was looking for a last minute birthday present for my friend Bob Roe and what I found were a bunch of gray haired white guys like me, pawing over the Bob Marley boxed sets. The sad thing is that we also bought new music — from Ali Farka Toure (RIP) to the New Pornographers to the Fiery Furnaces — to keep our ears happy and the record companies in business. Now I guess we’ll have to steal our music, like everybody else.

All ye Brooklynites who have watched in silent horror as Bruce Ratner and the forces of evil have rolled steadily forward with their plan to build a little midtown Manhattan — complete with traffic congestion, dusk-like shadows from the skyscrapers above and absolutely no place to park — in the middle of our fair borough, now is your time to speak. Or shriek. Or at the very least let your voice be heard on the hateful Atlantic Yards Development this benighted son of Cleveland is prepared to shove down our throats.

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, August 23rd) the Empire State Development Coporation will hold its only public hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement and all public comments will become part of the record of this fiasco. It is our best, and perhaps last, chance to slow down this behemoth. Even if you have sat on the sidelines until now, even if you were not swayed by Chris Smith’s excellent New York magazine story, or the stories in the New York Times, the Daily News, the Village Voice, the Brooklyn Papers et al that have painted this land grab as the biggest violation of public trust since the invasion or Iraq, surely the facts of the DEIS itself has made you queasy.

Say what? Haven’t had time to read the 2000 page report? Funny, you would think that Ratner and his political cronies would allow more time to digest such an important document. By cutting off all comment in September (and having the only public session at the end of August when even Brooklynites head for the beach) you would think they were afraid of a little give and take.

Don’t take it. Give them a piece of your mind. Show up early at Metrotech tomorrow (Kitgord Auditorium, 285 Jay Street) before the 4:30 kick off to sign up to speak or just cheer the speakers on. Even though you may send comments via email or snail mail after that (look at the Develop Don’t Destory Brooklyn website for addresses and links) a HUGE TURNOUT IS ESSENTIAL. The media will be in attendance and a groundswell of opposition has to be visible to counter the union types, ACORN whores and friends of Ratfink who will be sure to make a lot of noise themselves. To the barricades, people. The neighborhood you save may be your own.

All immigrants have the same dream: Come to America, see the Statue of Liberty and head for Hazleton, Pennsylvania, The Crusted Jewel of the Rust Belt. Sadly, illegal immigrants flocking to this bucolic paradise will find that their plans of moving in and living off the fat of the land — not to mention partaking of the city’s school system and public hospitals — will find themselves thwarted, proverbial grooms left standing at the altar. For the city fathers looked at the rising tide of immigrants and declared them unwelcome. A new law fines landlords and employers for renting to or hiring illegal immigrants who, according to Mayor Lou Barletta, are destroying the fabric of the small town (pop. 22,000).

It may be a little late for that. I spent a few days in Hazleton in 2004, canvassing the local Democrats for John Kerry, and my impression was of a town that time, or certainly modern time, had forgot. Knocking on the doors of registered Dems to Get Out the Vote I met a number of middle-class voters looking forward to election day (we won that county, btw, as well as the state of PA — guess we should have mosied on over to Ohio) but I also saw a lot of beat neighborhoods on the fringes of a town that was dying from the inside out. Downtown businesses were shuttered and the liveliest scene was to be found at Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, home of the loaded hot dog and a proud member of the PA Hot Dog Hall of Fame.

But what if Jimmy’s started serving burritos or tamales? Where would locals gather then to discuss the absence of job opportunities? My friend Bill and I stopped at a local internet cafe that was hanging by a thread itself. We fueled ourselves on caffeine for the trip up to Wilkes-Barre and another day of GOTV and spoke with the owner, a pleasant woman more concerned with the lack of local support than the influx of immigrants. The week we were there Hazleton was hosting a Hell House, one of those born-again haunted houses filled with living tableaux of human depravity: abortion, drug abuse, loaded hot dogs… She said that the guy playing Satan had come in one day in full regalia, trailed by two demons, but had not broken character. Nor did he buy anything.

If local businesses would be happy for paying customers from the netherworld, let alone the Prince of Darkness himself, I suspect they are feeling the pinch as undocumented workers take their business elsewhere. That the national hysteria over immigration seeps down to communities like Hazleton, where there ain’t nothing shaking but the leaves on the trees, says plenty about this issue. Though Mayor Barletta, whose ancestors came here from Italy and who were doubtless greeted with the same scorn as they headed westward from Ellis Island, has pointed to rising crime as the impetus for this new law, I see something much simpler. It is a search for a new Satan. You’ve got to blame someone.