🔭 The American essay

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America—and, more importantly, Red-White-and-Blue-Blooded Homo Americanus—is standing on terra infirma. The entire country hovers six feet over a festering potter’s field of ne’er-do-wells, ready to rise up and commit crimes. Mercifully, there’s a solution.

Deport the dead.

Go back a few generations, and you’ll unearth row after graveyard row of corpses without REAL ID or up-to-date documents. Ignorantia juris non excusat. 

I know, I know, great-great-great-great-granddad got legal via the Naturalization Act of 1790. That was then, this is now. You can’t go around grandfather clause-ing every Tomás, Ritschert, and Henryk. What kind of country would America be if the legal system was tied up “interpreting” ancient paperwork originally inked and quilled to address temporally, contemporary and context-specific issues?

Go get your shovel and get ’em outta here!

That takes care of the illegals. On to the traitors.

The poster child for post-mortem deportation is Benedict Arnold. You don’t have to Google him to find out what he did, why he did it, and how it might be slightly more nuanced than you assumed. His crimes are tattooed on the knuckles of American history. (“FUCK BENY.”) Guess what? He was never stripped of his U.S. citizenship. Problem is, he’s buried in London. Can someone set up a Kickstarter to exhume, extradite, and deport this tombstoned turncoat?

Traitors are legion. Anyone who fought on the wrong side of any war or “military conflict” rests in a shovel-ready site. But according to whom? As has been lamented by the greatest anarcho-dadaist philosopher of the day, there are “some very fine people on both sides” of all conflicts. Still, war has clear winners and losers. Just look around. Ad victorem spolias. Thankfully, we have institutions like the National Museum of American History to keep the record and signage straight.

Now into murkier waters. The pre-deceased.

Surely, we can all agree on the cold, hard facts of Religious Science—cinerem ad cinerem, pulverem ad pulverem. U.S. Senator Joni Ernst did a great job warming up the crowd. Still, some folks aren’t quite ready to carpe mortuus.

Luckily, the United States has an empathetic and efficient cadre of federal law enforcement agents and borrowed USPS employees ready to get their hands dirty.

FULL STOP. Unless you’re an ICE agent, this column is over. Need a pithy slogan that ties back to Latin-based irony? Scroll to the end.

Okay, now that it’s just us True Patriots here, we need to talk. ICE has an optics problem. You know, because of your behavior.

Guilty consciences, anyone? Me too. We’ve all got bodies in various states of skeletonization in the closet. Unless you’re full-on First Nations or were brought or bought here, your ancestors were immigrants. Shhh. Keep it down. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t ask for it; you’ve been in on this scam since birth. Kinda like original sin.

(Ignore that low-hanging fruit about migrant workers picking pomegranates in the Garden of Eden. There’s no time for that.)

We need an actionable solution. All the rubes are digging up proverbial dirt because they think second-order Swiftian prose incites ontic change like a horse with peanut butter in its mouth lip-syncing “Look What You Made Me Do”… and now I’ve got a headache.

Just stop being assholes.

If you want to keep this whole “America” thing going, you need to cool it on the racism and bigotry. If people ever realize nation-states are nothing more than tribal brainwashing psyops, this whole house of cards will collapse into kindling. It won’t be another “No Kings Day” walk in the park. Not even an “Occupy Wall Street till we run out of PTO.” The proles might go full French Revolution.

The writing’s on the wall. Romanes eunt domus.

Treat people with dignity and respect. Pretend if you have to. Treat them like your mom. Well, not your actual American single mother, minimum wage slave, who never had time or education to help you with your Algebra homework. Treat them like that horse you read a book about and fantasized about braiding its hair in the fading summer sun, whispering sweet nothings that meant everything, even though, somewhere in the back of your head, you understood your family was only one bounced check away from sending it to the glue factory.

Okay, now I’m gonna dip back into satire in case anyone bothered scrolling.

…

To say nothing of the additional real estate for the homeless and other deplorables.

Grab a shovel. Let’s repatriate the remaining remains to their country of origin, C.O.D. Pro gloria et patria.