prejudiced, race-baiting, doctrinaire, dogmatic, extremist, flag-waving, jingoist, maniacal, persecuting, puritan, red-neck, biased, chauvinistic, contemptuous, dictatorial, fanatical, hateful, illiberal, inflexible, narrow-minded, obdurate, one-sided, small-minded, waspish, immoderate, fascist, arch-conservative, right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-semitic, anti-everybody crank.
Well, you know. It’s just that he begged so plaintively this morning for someone to say something like that about him. And I am nothing if not a southern gentleman, so I am happy to oblige.
V.V.C. allegedly writes a “tale of two aliens.” One was the best of aliens; one was the worst of aliens. He compares his daughter-in-law, a German teacher who wants to immigrate to the Untied States, to a straw man: one of the
hordes of illegal immigrants coming into our country to swell the ranks of the estimated 8 million to 13 million already here.
V.V.C. makes it obvious what he has in mind: an illegal Hispanic immigrant straight out of Cheech Marin’s Born in East L.A.
Oh, but his daughter-in-law! His daughter-in-law is an attractive and intelligent woman who cooks and cleans when she comes to visit him. Not just cooks and cleans: she irons his socks and underwear. Thanks, V.V.C. Just a little too much information there.
Thanks to exclusive Panhandle Truth Squad mind-reading technology I am able to read V.V.C.’s mind and tell you that he’s really thinking: Oh how sweet it is to have fought Germans as a young man and now to have a German of my very own issued to me to cook for me and clean for me and iron my bedsheets. Oh and glory be she wants to move here to iron this old American’s bedsheets all the year round!
She has made many trips to the U.S. and wants to become a citizen, especially a Texan. She lives in a mountainous area that is cold and damp. She loves heat and sunshine and complains about our too cold, air-conditioned buildings.
V.V.C. asks us to compare his beautiful German governess with his little brown stereotype swimming across the Rio Grande and asks:
Which will make the more desirable citizen? I'll be called a racist, but I think the answer is obvious.
Desirability, of course, didn’t used to be the point in the great American melting pot. But, as we keep saying, lots of things are changing as America quickly becomes Rome. Now, to be assimilated into the great American empire, you must prove yourself worthy. You must have something of value to offer to the collective.
Whom did Emma Lazarus have in mind when she penned “The New Collosus”: the tired, poor, huddled masses fleeing poverty and oppression, or a comparatively rich European whose socialist utopia is too cold and who wants to use her pension to move to sunny Texas?
I’ll be called a naïve idealist, but I think the answer is obvious.
SPACEDARK
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