Deporting the Poor

Writer. Composer. Videographer. Husband. Father. Brother. Senior Vice President, Development. Taxpayer. Conscience of his generation. Contact lens wearer. Voter. Allergy sufferer. There are many things you can call me, but first you must call me a patriot, by which I do not mean expatriate. They’re two different things — they are apples and oranges, Beatles and Stones, chalk and cheese, as my present neighbours would probably prefer.

I am full of non-alcoholic cider and love for country. I have never been prouder to be an American than I am this morning after the passage of the historic Deportation of the Disadvantaged Act, whereby those Americans living below the poverty line must choose, within one calendar year, between being deported to Liberia and making their eyes, lungs, hearts, livers, and kidneys available for harvest by the rich’s personal physicians.

I by no means wish blindness or death from organ failure on fellow members of the privileged classes, but I will admit to hoping that the vast majority of the poor opt for deportation. I am sick to death of seeing them loading their shopping carts with highly caloric junk food in the Korean-owned supermarkets in which they shop. I am sick of their causing traffic jams in the decades-old, pollution-spewing luxury cars they buy with their welfare checks, and of reading about the moronic, semiliterate tweets with which they befoul the ether. I am sick of their producing most of the nation’s running backs and soldiers and Jerry Springer guests. I am sick of their exclaiming on such shows, “But I couldna gotten Sha’niq’ua pregnant; we only partied the one time!”

(The misplaced “only” is the champagne and caviar of grammatical mistakes, an Ivy League-educated rich person’s mistake. You will see it in the glossiest magazines, those that reek of perfume samples, those with high-priced copy editors in bowties. We partied only the one time.)

If the poor imagine their living conditions are woeful now, let’s see how they feel about Liberia, where the average annual income is less than $4, and where the national dish is boiled sewage.