It's a little after four in the afternoon, and I’m standing in the blazing heat, in a parking lot at the Northwest corner of 32nd Street and Thomas in Phoenix. Most of the parking lot is roped off with yellow police tape, a dramatic move by perhaps the most dramatic sheriff in American history. Inside the taped area are deputies. Lots of deputies. Lots of sunglasses. And big, big trucks housing mobile jail cells. Lots of TV news crews. Lots of hatred. Ah, Arizona, how do I love thee? Let me count the deputays.

I am here as an editor, as a reporter, and as a citizen observer. But I don’t go inside the roped off area with most of the other reporters. They’re here from all the TV stations, from the newspapers. Sheriff Joe Arpaio farts in Phoenix, and many in the corporate media here come running to celebrate it against a backdrop of American flags and tough-guy scowling. There has never been a more lauded scoundrel than this, I think. Question is: Will they celebrate this day as well? After all, Arpaio is here today, on Good Friday, to tell the people of Maricopa County that he has begun another weekend of “patrols” in predominantly Latino neighborhoods. For Easter Weekend. The last time he did this, it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Nice timing, from a man who bragged on CNN that he found being compared to the KKK to be a compliment. Ah, Arizona.

In Arpaio-speak, this "patrol" thing means claiming that crime is up in the neighborhood, when, in fact, it is down. It means claiming that people in the neighborhood have called his offices to ask for more patrols, when in fact no one I talked to in the neighborhood has anything but fear and loathing for the sheriff. It means arresting people for minor offenses, such as a cracked windshield or mild speeding, offenses that in Scottsdale or Cave Creek would get the offender a ticket at the most.

It is Good Friday, and Sheriff Joe has decided this is the perfect time to terrorize Latinos for a weekend. Easter weekend. He has hundreds of deputies all over the neighborhood, along with armed members of a volunteer “posse”. I see one such volunteer stride past, in a shirt that reads “GOD’S ARMY,” his pistol in full view. He is tall and stiff as an SS soldier, a stick lodged somewhere quiet high up his rectum. He sneers at me and all the people who stand with me, most of us brown, almost all of us Latino. Because I am a wiseass, I cannot resist.

“Dude,” I tell him. “I am so relieved God likes white people best. You rock.”

The man ignores me, but the silent brown people around me stare at me in horror. They don’t realize I’m kidding. So I repeat myself. My six-year-old son and his dad are here with me, and my son begins to laugh at the sight of the volunteer’s shirt.

“God’s army? What is that supposed to mean? Isn’t God peaceful?”

I shrug and look around. “The logic of children,” I deadpan. “What do they know?”

There are a couple hundred people in our group, organized by various community groups to be here. There are representatives from Los Abogados, an agency of civil rights lawyers. Our side consists of families, and people in suits and ties. We look good, and decent, and civilized. We look like regular people.

Then comes the rumble of motorcycle engines, as the same tired-ass six neo-nazi fools roll up and park next to us. You know them. They are the sub–literates who end up on the cover of the Arizona Republic whenever something like this goes down. They have tattoos and long, greasy hair, and almost all of them are grossly overweight. They wear leather vests with decals proclaiming their hatred for “illegals”. There is one exception among their group, a very old lady, with a white tight perm. She reminds me of my grandmother in New Mexico, but then again, anyone with a perm reminds me of someone in New Mexico.

The bikers men have bandanas on their heads and menace in their eyes as they roll them over to look at us. Size us up. Roll up their sleeves, like the moms and babies here want a fight. There is one enormous woman in their group and I have seen her before, in Latina magazine I think. She is Mexican American and a Minuteman. Yes, I know. It’s like being a gay black Republican. It happens, just like it happens that there are people who like to cut themselves with razorblades. I can’t explain it, though I do head over to talk to her for a while.

“Excuse me,” I say to her, as she holds her big sign reading GOT BORDER SECURITY. “Can I see your papers?”

She balks at me. “What the hell did you just say?”

“You look Mexican to me,” I say. “I need to see your papers. Some identification. I don’t want to have to make a citizen’s arrest today.”

She stares with vacant eyes that have seen entirely too much Jerry Springer and entirely too little of the insides of books.

“I don’t got ‘em right now, but whoa yeah, trust me, I got ‘em at home.”

“That’s not good enough. You look Mexican. You shouldn’t be out today. Not with the safety roundups going on. You should never travel without papers looking like that. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m gonna get me a passport,” she says, missing my point. “My parents came here legally.”

She shouts the word “legally” and spit flies out of her maw.

“I don’t believe you,” I tell her.

There is a tall, supersized man standing next to her, holding a big American flag so high that his gray t-shirt has ridden up and exposed his beer belly. His hair is long, gray and greasy and reminds me of a skinny rat stapled to his beefy head.

The woman starts to curse at me now. Very foul language. My son is there, listening. “That’s very American of you,” I tell her. “Setting a wonderful example for the youth.”

“Well what the hell you doing bringing a kid to a think like this anyway,” asks the man with greasy rat hair.

“Oh, that’s easy,” I tell him. “I’m training him to be a president who respects the Constitution and believes in civil rights, human dignity and justice.”

“Hail Barack,” says the man with greasy rat hair, only he pronounces Obama’s first name the way you would pronounce the buildings soldiers live in. The greasy rat man begins a rant about Obama now, and says he will win because he “sees all the un-strife going on in America with all you people.”

“Un-strife?” I ask him.

He nods, vacant, babas dribbling onto his chin.

“That means the opposite of strife,” I tell him. “And strife means conflict. So, Obama will win because he senses the lack of conflict in the Latino community? I can’t say we disagree.”

The man is confused now. He moves his hands like a mouth moving. “That’s all you do,” he says. “Talk, talk, talk.”

I move on. I cannot reason with something like this. Not without getting a headache too mighty for Tylenol.

I find a group of highly motivated, funny, intelligent young Latinos, holding signs. One of them, a young man in a striped polo shirt, shouts into a megaphone, as Arpaio spews his press conference on the other side of a semi truck. He is half concerned citizen, half stand-up comedian. He is damn funny. And damn angry. And I think of Jerry Seineld who once said "comedy is nothing more than socialized rage." No wonder there are so many funny Jews. I imagine that by the time this is all over, we'll have lots of funny Latinos running around, which should blessedly put Carlos Mencia out of business once and for all. Silver linings.

“Hey, Joe Arpaio, you’re not my sheriff anymore,” the man says. “I declare myself sheriff now. You are a state-sponsored terrorist, Joe Arpaio.” He goes on and on, eloquent, and elegant, and funny. “Joe Arpaio! Hey Joe! Your head is tiny and your feet are big. No, wait, I got that backwards. Your feet are tiny and your head is huge.”

People laugh. A TV crew rushes over and asks to interview the young man. He clams up. All of the young Latinos clam up. They ignore the media. They are rude to the reporters. I am stunned. I realize that our side has a major public relations problem. I understand that these young people don’t trust the media. Look at where they live. But this attitude is not going to help, I think. Not going to help at all. I realize that our side needs to do media training for ourselves. We need talking points, smiles, American flags. Anger and attitude are merited, but they will not play well on the ten-o’clock news. Not like the flags of the burly biker babes and permy wormy grandma.

I move on. Back to the area with the lawyers in their suits. Back to past the six Minutemen. I tell one of them that his having dressed like a criminal is scaring my son. “You guys should try to look like upstanding Americans instead of common thugs,” I tell him. “It would really help.”

The man gives me that same watered-down, ate-too–much-lead-as-a-baby look, and says – and I joke not, my friends – wait for it, wait for it…ready? He says, “Talk legible. If you talked legible we could understand what you said.”

“Legible is not an adverb,” I offer, in the spirit of sisterly helpfulness that permeates so much of what I do. “I believe you meant to say ‘speak legibly,’ but that doesn’t make sense either.”

The man begins to frown and walks away. I follow him. “Sir?” I call. “Sir! Legible means readable. You cannot speak readably. You can write readably, or legibly, but you cannot ‘talk legible,’ and even if you could, it would be best phrased as ‘talk legibly’.”

“Two words,” he tells me. “Jenny Craig.”

He is fatter than me. As are all of his pals, except the old woman with the perm, who reminds me of my grandmother with the perm. “Is that the best you can do?” I ask him. “C’mon. Try a little harder than schoolyard taunts.”

He says nothing now.

I take the opportunity to offer more helpful advice. “You know, if you are going to roar out here on your road hogs, demanding that we speak English, I highly recommend that you learn to do so as well.”

“Shut up,” he says.

“That’s better,” I tell him. “Keep it up. You’ll get there.”

On and on it goes, and I am having a blast. I love that our side has hundreds of civil, kind, good-hearted people who speak two languages well, and their side has a handful of overfed gang members sucking on Big Gulps. What I don’t love is the way the media keeps going to the Minutemen for comments, whilst ignoring the hundreds of brown people standing mere feet away.

The first arrests begin to come into the roped off area, and Sheriff Joe parades them proudly. Illegals are being taken off the streets! See? One man is hurried into a holding cell. His best friend runs alongside the police tape, into our crowd. I ask him what’s going on, and he tells me, in broken English that is still better than the MinutemenBonics I’ve just been subjected to, that the police have arrested his best friend.

“He was coming home from work,” he tells me. “They arrest him. He needs medicine. They don’t understand me when I tell them, he has the hypertension, he will be very sick without his medicine.”

“What did they arrest him for?” I ask.

“Speeding.”

“How fast was he going?”

“Four or five miles over the speed limit.”

Ah. And they arrested this man of 56, with heart problems and hypertension, shackled him, and herded him into a mobile prison cell so that the evening news could show a brown man being taken off the street.

“Is he a criminal?” I ask.

The man, who is neat and clean and tidy and kindly, looks confused. “He is a worker,” he tells me.

“What does he do?”

“He works for a landscaping company.”

“Does he have a family?”

“Back in Mexico, yes.”

The Minutemen applaud the arrest. I don’t know if the man will get his medicine. I doubt it.

Suddenly, a man who looks a bit like Michael Moore comes harruphing over the line, from the inside to the outside.

“They threw me out,” he grumbles. “I guess they don’t like the New Times.”

It is reporter Steve Lemmon. I want to shake his hand. The New Times stands up to Sheriff Joe. They are the only media outlet in town to do so. Sheriff Joe repayed the favor by arresting the publisher in the middle of the night, which was illegal and will likely cost the County lots of money when it’s all over. Lemmon is understandably grumpy and apparently unimpressed by me, but at least he doesn’t recommend Jenny Craig.

“Can they do that, just throw you out of the press conference?” I ask him. “Is that Constitutional?”

Lemmon looks at me like I’m a bit slow for thinking the Constitution meant anything to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the man who has gotten famous by making inmates wear pink jumpsuits, eat green balogna, live in tent cities in 120 degree weather, and work in chain gangs.

“Right,” I say, shrinking back a pace or two. “I forgot.”

On and on it goes. The media circus, with Sheriff Joe Arpaio as the most daring clown who ever was. And the most expensive. He has already cost Maricopa County $40 million in lawsuit settlements for his breeches of civil rights, and yet he has an approval rating somewhere in the 68 percent range. It is because he does stunts like this, where he poses big and tough with the Mexican Trophy for the xenophobic masses of uninformed zonies. Looka what I caught, ma! A neeeger, only a 21st century neeegar. Circus? Nah. It’s more like a lynch mob.

The press conference ends, and people begin to leave. Our group assembles to talk over details for the citizen observer groups that will be trailing the sheriff’s roving gangs of thugs all weekend, taking photos and notes as they roam about. And then, just when you think it’s over, he appears, the man himself, Sheriff Joe, ambling over to talk with the Minutemen.

We watch from afar, and then I decide to run over to hear what he has to say to Minutemen. I am morbidly curious. I am also astonished at how short and homely the man is in person. He looks like a cartoon character. I get there just in time to hear him say something about how proud he is that our troops are in Iraq and something like “and that their numbers are almost 4000.”

Huh? Is he actually saying he’s proud we’ve managed to lose nearly 4000 American soldiers in Iraq? I have a Daffy Duck moment, where I sort of rub my ears to make sure I’m not losing my mind. Maybe it’s a special IdiotSpeak one must employ when addressing Minutemen, so that They Will Understand. I don’t know.

Then, they are on me, his beady little eyes. The meanest eyes in Maricopa County.

“Is that your PR department there?” Sheriff Joe asks the Minutemen, jutting his chin in my direction. They all laugh.

I look at him and he asks me, directly, with a grin to indicate that he thinks the question rhetorical and improbable to such an extent as to be impossible: “What are you, with the New York Times?”

More laughter. Of course. Of course no Latina scribbling on a notebook could be employed by the New York Times. (Come to think of it, he’s probably right, but that’s another story.)

“Where you from?” he asks.

“Latino Perspectives magazine,” I tell him, honestly. Then I wonder if I have said too much.

“What? What’s that?” he asks. He screws his face up for extra drama, the Head Clown in Charge.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s nothing. I’m no one. I’m an idiot. Don’t worry about me.”

He says nothing, just sizes me up with his crow-eyes. Then he mutters something about how no one needs to worry about newspapers that are so worthless “you have to give them away to get people to read them.”

“I agree, sir,” I say. “You’re right. I’m worthless.”

He retreats from the friendly White Power contingent now, heads toward the mobile prison where a Mexican man of nearly 60, who has spent the day trimming hedges in 80-plus degree weather, is growing sicker by the minute for lack of medication.

The old woman with the perm turns to me now. “You should be ashamed,” she hisses.

“You’re right,” I tell her. “But I’m curious, why do YOU think I should be ashamed?”

“For calling Sheriff Joe an idiot.”

A younger woman is here, under her American flag umbrella, listening to our conversation now.

“Ma’am,” I say to the perm. “You are mistaken. I called myself an idiot. I told the Sheriff I myself was an idiot.”

The old woman looks confused. “Well,” she huffs.

The younger woman laughs nervously. “That’s kind of a stupid thing to say, too,” she tells me.

I nod. “Yes,” I tell them. “That’s right. But I told you I was an idiot.”

A harmless idiot of a journalist, new to town, who could never work at the New York Times, who needs Jenny Craig, who could not possibly make a difference in this hellhole of hate called Phoenix….

Right?

The next day, the Arizona Republic features a story about the whole thing on page A1. There's a cop, shoving a brown man into a patrol car. There's another similar photo with a different brown man (in pink handcuffs) on the front of the B section. There is also a pullout quote from Arpaio, saying "We lock up murderers. We lock up everyone." Nowhere is it mentioned that these men were arrested for going four miles over the speed limit. Nowhere is it mentioned that they are not murderers. Nowhere is it mentioned that hundreds of us were there to protest. But they DO quote the old lady with the perm, and they DO mention that there were Arpaio supporters there.

Where is the American left? Where are progressives? Where is Jeff Farius? Where is Al Sharpton? Being in the US without documents is a misdemeanor, for crying out loud. "Illegal" is not a noun. Why is the left letting the fascists do this? Where is Randi Rhodes? Where is Chuck D?