This morning I saw a truck for the area pest control company "Truly Nolen":http://trulynolen.com. Their car ads are everywhere, from the "yellow bugs":http://www.trulynolen.com/AboutUs/index.asp?c=mouse_cars.html to yellow work trucks to "antiques":http://flickr.com/photos/tags/trulynolen/ with the logo on the side. It's fairly effective advertising, as I wouldn't be able to name another local pest control service. The work truck I saw this morning was different. It was a little too far away to get a cameraphone snap, but it was a white truck with a green stripe down the length of the side. In fact, it looked exactly like a "US Border Patrol":http://www.cbp.gov/ vehicle.

border patrol vehicles

Towards the back, instead of saying "Border Patrol":http://www.palominas.com/images/ds_photos4/bp_otj1.jpg in the stripe it said "Pest Prevention". Now, I don't want to be part of the alarmist left-wing blogger media, but I found that fairly offensive. Just being here for the short time that I have, I'm pretty aware of the uneasy _menage a trois_ between Arizona residents, illegal immigrants slipping over the border to work and live, and the Border Patrol agents. Witness the recent flap over the "Minutemen Project":http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=minutemen+arizona&btnG=Search+News, which was quite a large story in this part of the country. So it's hard for me to think of this particular paint scheme as anything but a xenophobic view of Mexican immigrants as pests or lower creatures. Not cool.