Flashback

But while the city and state forces had seriously underestimated the power of the reconquista forces—they seemed totally surprised by the amount of armor and artillery brought north from Old Mexico (some of which I’d seen parked under camouflage nets in the huge cemetery across from Emilio’s compound)—at the same time, Emilio’s and his spanic allies’ forces were obviously being surprised by blacks rising up in South Central, by Asians fighting in the western suburbs, by the mercenaries hired by the wealthy in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, the Mulholland highlands, and elsewhere, and by a score of other fighting cadres aligned with neither the state of California nor the forces of Nuevo Mexico. Because of this, the simple reconquista-versus–California National Guard battle over the future of Los Angeles almost immediately turned into a twenty-sided brawl. Los Angeles was becoming a purely Hobbesian state… every man pitted against every other man.

When I mentioned this to Julio and Perdita, they understood and agreed immediately. They’d both read Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. So much for my lifelong assumptions about truck drivers and their levels of education.

And speaking of education, Val is receiving an interesting one on this truckers’ convoy.

After his first night and day of being almost catatonic—and I’ll write more about that later—I saw Val begin to pay serious attention to his surroundings and the people in them.

During our two nights camped with scores of other eighteen-wheelers’ convoys in the desert outside the walled-off but still beckoning lights of Las Vegas, I noticed Val’s avid—almost hungry—interest in what the men and women around the campfires had to say. Poor Val… by law and by Department of Education fiat, he’s had to celebrate “diversity” (for diversity’s sake alone) almost every hour in school since his first day in kindergarten in Denver almost a dozen years ago. But he’d never really experienced diversity until this convoy. Val has grown up in two cities, Denver and Los Angeles, where neighborhoods are racial, ethnic, linguistic, and (more and more) religious fiefdoms, each sparring and warring for a larger share of some theoretical cake in an endless zero-sum game of politics, gangs, and outright warfare.