Fresno: Here There Be Beasts

In case you don’t know where Fresno (Calif.) is, suffice it to say that it is the intellectual and cultural center of the western United States. The brightest and best high school minds the world over compete to get into Fresno’s high-powered universities.

Sophisticated international tourists often book rooms years in advance so they can assure themselves of an opportunity to experience the splendor, culture, and beauty of Fresno. As anyone from California will tell you, Fresno is the spiritual heart of the Golden State.

Little wonder, then, that the world listens when Fresno speaks.

And Fresno did just that a few days ago.

They scraped up enough folks speaking the King’s English, or more likely Elvis’ English, to put together a snappy little protest at–and you’ve got to love this–Fresno’s “Fashion Fair Mall.”

Yes, FASHION. Did I forget to mention that Fresno is also the fashion Mecca of the world, where top Italian and French designers are trained? Indeed. Forgive my oversight.

So the planet’s most cosmopolitan double-knit polyester clothes were certainly in evidence as a reported 20 to 50 protesters agitated at the FASHION mall. The focus of their ire: Saipan.

Namely, the same old bogus gibberish about how it’s somehow unethical to allow Saipan’s foreign workers to bootstrap themselves into the middle class in their native lands after doing some honest and comparatively well paid work here in Saipan. Hey, not everybody can collect welfare in beautiful Fresno…some folks gotta’ actually work. They come here as legal aliens and have jobs…but that’s the problem, you see: Legal immigration and gainful employment are totally alien concepts in Fresno.

The last time I was in the Fresno area, the only new building was the welfare office, and crime was so bad the public defender’s office had to subcontract for outside legal firms to help defend the snowballing rolls of accused criminals.

Formerly pleasant neighborhoods had been transformed into welfare ghettos. The streets swarmed, at all hours of the night, with hoods and punks and the worst human scum ever to crawl from the gutters.

Every teenager was seemingly either knocked up or knocking over liquor stores.

If you can’t even find Fresno on a map, worry not. Nobody in Fresno can find Saipan or even the Pacific ocean on the map. Fresno’s geographic understanding stops at Bakersfield, where maps depict such nether regions with pictures of dragons and the warning “Here There Be Beasts.”

Yes indeedy, the world is full of beasts, beastly people, and the beastly places that harbor them. If you’ve ever been to a trailer park, or a mall in Fresno, you know exactly what I mean.