Word: pancho
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From cases like that of Pancho, U.S. officials like to make projections and then estimate that there are now 6 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.?or 7 million or maybe 8 million. One official estimate by the Immigration and Naturalization Service even computed that illegal immigrants cost the nation $16 billion in unpaid taxes plus welfare and other costs. Such computations satisfy the stereotyped view of illegal immigrants loafing about and collecting benefits (they also support I & NS requests for more inspectors and a bigger budget). In fact, however, nobody has any real idea how many illegal immigrants...
...began a few years ago as a "severe, organized counterreaction" to academic pressure. At first the Buttfucks limited their activities to a sort of "nameless, roving aggression," along the lines of stealing parking meters, destroying bathrooms, that sort of thing. Two years ago they elected a parking meter named Pancho Valdez to a post in student government. (For months afterwards, "Free Pancho Valdez" graffiti could be seen all over the Yale campus.) But their major foray into public depravity on a grand scale, an event every Yale upperclassman remembers, was something called BUTTFUCK...
That was the high point of the Buttfucks' public depravity. Yale has freshmen now who have never heard of the group. Even Pancho Valdez is gone now, "sort of stolen back by the police this summer." Graduation looms for the Buttfucks, who say they have settled into "a quiet, domestic depravity." They are not particularly concerned about academic pressure, although Yo Mo Dobro Jo himself talks about a continuing sexual tension at Yale; "the sexual scene basically just isn't very cool," he says...
RIDING ACROSS the dusty plains of Mexico with Pancho Villa and his band; rallying the members of the International Workers of the World to close the Paterson silk mills; storming the Winter Palace in Leningrad, shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks in 1917--this is the stuff of which a radical's fantasies are made. Indeed, the entire adult life of John Reed '10 reads like a travelogue of the great events of the first two decades of this century. It is a long way from Portland, Oregon, where Reed was born in 1887 to a prosperous family...
There are striking similarities between this biography and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Many of the same great personages appear--Emma Goldmann, Henry Ford, Pancho Villa--and one gets the same impression of noncontingent events held together by a single thread. In the case of Ragtime, the thread is Doctorow's narrative structure, and here it is the presence of John Reed as observer of and participant in history. But unlike Ragtime, Rosenstone's book need not be played slowly. Romantic Revolutionary is best read quickly, selectively, so as to glean the golden Russian wheat of Reed's life from...