FOAMING AND GROANING: Now that the backlash is in full swing, Santa Barbara better hide its family jewels. The backlash to which I’m referring is the one directed against anyone who looks vaguely Arab, Muslim, or, for that matter, Puerto Rican. And the family jewels to which I allude are Santa Barbara’s historical, defining architectural style. This look is described in the brochures alternately as “Spanish,” sometimes as “Andalusian.” But whatever tag you give it, the key element activating our collective pineal glands is decidedly “Moorish” in origin. That’s right, Moorish. As is no longer taught in school, the Moors were both Arabs and Muslims, and they invaded Spain way back in the pre-Crusade day. The stereotypically Spanish exclamation “Olé” for example, is an enthusiastic bastardization of “Allah,” the Muslim prophet. By any modern metric — math, astronomy, the disposal of unwanted bodily excretions — the invading Moors were far more “civilized” than their Spanish invadees. Before eventually being forced out, the Moorish occupiers would seek to cram this civilization down the ungrateful throats of the occupied, who, in spite of themselves, still wound up learning a thing or two about Moorish architecture. Hence the Andalusian pipedream that today is Santa Barbara in all its self-intoxicated splendor. No more conspicuous example of this hallucination-as-art can be found than at the corner of Mission and State streets, former home to a blandly utilitarian Mobil gas station and now home to what any idiot could easily confuse for a mosque. But instead the building, silly by even Santa Barbara’s most shameless standards, is home to new 7-Eleven and Subway sandwich shops. If the Backlash Brotherhood ever does make it to Santa Barbara, I would suggest this new edifice should be Stop Number One. The Slurpees, I’m told, are to die for.
I get that people are jumpy. If terrorists — even American-born, American-raised, county bureaucrats living in the Inland Empire — are going to target obscure government office buildings in San Berdoo, who among us can delude ourselves we’re immune from attack?
In this week’s Republican Punch and Judy show, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump went at it tooth and claw, and my heart went out to the relatively sane, measured, and balanced individuals I know who belong to the Republican party. Trump, we are told by Republican pundit Tony Quinn, is inevitable because he speaks to “the racism of nostalgia” so imbedded in older white voters composing the backbone of the GOP. Having become afflicted with a bad case of Trump Fatigue, I found myself perversely cheering on Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Watching the debates, I am reminded the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Had the United States bothered learning this simple lesson when it comes to waging war in the Middle East, none of us would be worrying today about ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or email hoaxes that shut down the entire Los Angeles Unified School District.