Franks on Drugs

Border fence between Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona, a few years ago. "Arizona Governor Janice... Brewer’s office had received complaints from Nogales residents that illegal activity is happening everyday at the border in plain view of both Americans and Mexicans. Initial investigation by the agents confirmed that Americans and Mexicans on either side of the border have been playing volleyball using the fence as their net. The activity has gained popularity in recent weeks and agents fear that it might spread to the rest of the entire Arizona–Mexico border. Agents dispatched to the scene are now on a 24-hour watch over the border to ensure that at the end of each game, the Mexican ball does not end up on U.S. soil, which would violate customs regulations." (The Adobo Chronicles, October 8 2013)

Via Josh Marshall—Trent Franks, the Arizona Congressman from the Metro Phoenix region (180 miles or so north of the border and some 79% white, which is coincidentally not much more than what Franks scored in the 2014 election, though he's fallen off a bit since then) with the comic porn star name, explaining what terrorists would do if they wanted to smuggle a nuclear weapon across the Mexican border (because it would be easy to get it from their weapons factory in Lebanon or wherever he thinks it might originate to Mexico):

“We sometimes used to make the point that if someone wanted to smuggle in a dangerous weapon, even a nuclear weapon, into America, how would they do it? And the suggestion was made, ‘Well, we'll simply hide it in a bale of marijuana.’”

"Davy Crockett" bomb, via Wikipedia.

And exactly how high were you when you used to make that point, Congressman?

As high as you have to be to imagine a gang of Persians or the like disguised as Mexicans, in their serapes and sombreros no doubt, leaping gracefully over the Nogales fence, thanks to the pusillanimity of the Democrats who won't let Trump build his wall, with this pretty large, really extremely large bale of weed

—not technically a bale according to current 21st-century usage, which the Urban Dictionary tells me is a compressed brick of ten to forty pounds, but presumably something more loosely packed in some kind of huge garbage bag perhaps and big enough to conceal a tactical weapon, of which the smallest ever made is the W54 series used in the man-portable M-388 Davy Crockett projectile of 1961-62, just 31 inches long and around 50 pounds, and I may add that it takes a ton of science to get them that small—

confident that if they get stopped by the CBP those guys will just peer at the surface contents and wave them along—"Oh, you got some of that marijuana, huh? Have a nice day! Long as you're not bashing any contraband foreign-made volleyballs over this side"—and hence never realize that there might be something dangerous and illegal in that bag. That's pretty fuckin high, people.

Mexican cannabis bale, 1936, at left. Image via Stressed and Depressed.

The 20-year-old, who's turning out suddenly to have some of Dad's feeling for semantics, says the way Franks must have constructed the story would involve not so much imagining or visualizing a story as just squeezing the stereotypes together, border, radicalislamicterrorism, pot—until, I might add, they attain a kind of critical mass and explode into some of that narrativium.