“Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.”
— “Deportee” by Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie, by God, that Commie Okie, the troubadour of the Dust Bowl. It was Woody who gave me the dirge to chant after I saw the picture of a young father and his daughter, dead on the muddy banks of the lazy Rio Grande.
They should never have picked those dead bodies up out of the mud. They should have left them there to rot.
“To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil,” Guthrie wrote in “Deportee,” a song about Mexicans in America illegally who died when the plane deporting them crashed.
They could have made a little memorial out of the rotting corpses of the man and his 23-month-old child, to show the world we care.
Here’s how to get the most out of the memorial idea.
Put a semi-automatic rifle in the dead man’s right hand. We care about guns in America. Without guns we wouldn’t BE America. We’d just be some Communist pansy-land where people don’t want to die.
Put a Bible in the dead child’s right hand. In America, we love us some Bible, we love us some Jesus. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children.” Or maybe he said, “The little children should suffer.” Same thing.
Put a nativity scene near the dead man’s head. Americans hate that you can’t have a nativity scene on the lawn of city hall, so let’s right that wrong by making sure Baby Jesus has his proper place at this impromptu national memorial to muddy death.
Erect a big flagpole and fly the American flag night and day. Make sure the flagpole is properly lit, and that all flag etiquette is followed precisely. Americans will not tolerate any disrespect of OUR flag.
Eventually, the bodies of man and child will rot, or be swept away by some rain-driven rise in the river. Local animals may eat some of the remains, but you can’t expect to break into someone else’s country and get a grave.
Anyway, long before that happens, the memorial will be enshrined in and funded by the state and federal governments, and there will be an access road, and a station for the ranger, and signs warning you not to feed the migrants because it makes them dependent. Better to let them live in the wild, as Jesus intended.
Put a copy of the Ten Commandments on the bank, too, almost within the dead child’s reach. Americans are always trying to get the Ten Commandments in courthouses, and schools, so we should show this rotting dead child reaching out for the sweet succor of Christian values.
“We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.”
Woody, by God. Woody Guthrie. That damn dirty Communist. His Okie-twanged, dust-scraped voice is singing tonight. Down by the river.
Marc Dion, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a reporter and columnist for The Herald News, the daily newspaper of his hometown, Fall River, Massachusetts. For more on Dion, go to go to www.creators.com.
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