This is for all you descendants of the hordes. You know who you are.
You're the Heebs. The dagos. The Polacks. The micks. The greasers. The spics. The bohunks. The krauts. The frogs. The chinks. The Japs. The gooks. The camel jockeys. The cheeseheads. The Scandihoovians. The Russkies. The towel heads. The wetbacks. The coonasses.
Me, I'm mostly frog and coonass, with significant DNA from the cheeseheads, krauts and micks. All of my ancestors came to the United States "the right way." When they came over to the land of milk, honey and red-and-black genocide, "the right way" generally was understood to be "getting off the damn boat without tripping on the gangplank and drowning in the drink."
Actually, my French and Cajun ancestors never came to the United States -- they came to the Spanish colony of Louisiana in the 1780s. Les Americains came to them in 1803 . . . in 1810 to those on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River after the rise and fall of the West Florida Republic. My people may have thought of les Americains asles hordes -- I don't know.
That's not important now. What's important is that, at some point, in American history, descendants of previous hordes swarming toward American shores decided that the next wave of immigrants were the real horde, the one that totally was going to fuck up "American culture" for everybody. Right after, of course, they stole every last American job. Recently, Real Americans (TM) have been concerned about the tag-team hordes of Muslim Suicide Bombers and Latin American Rapist Drug Smugglers. (Hey! It must be true! President Trump keeps saying it, and millions of people with bad teeth and worse educations keep repeating it!) The tweeter-in-chief (whose personality and IQ may or may not be why they call it Twit-ter) largely managed to stem the tide of Muslims Who Blow Shit Up, but he's having limited success in stopping the Menace Coming From Mexico. (I mean, you'd think he'd extend professional courtesy toward a horde of rapists, but I guess not. They. Must. Be. Stopped.)
THERE IS SOME overlap between our present horde threats; Trump tells us that "unknown Middle Easterners" are mixed in among the Latin American rapists and drug smugglers, and he's "alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy."
It's the nativist obsession du jour. It's The Caravan, it's coming up through Mexico from the violence and grinding poverty of Central America . . . and it's coming for you. That is why our president says it's a National Emergy.
I am unsure what a National Emergy is, but it must be Serious, because it's Capitalized like Border Patrol and Military. And Southern Border. Now, I have no proof of this, but it may be significant that Ellis Island also is capitalized, and that had something to do with why it was bad over a century ago to let in all those Heebs, dagos, bohunks, krauts, Scandihoovians, Polacks and Russkies. Of whom almost none spoke English, which until recently was our unofficial national language before it was replaced by Trumpian.
I digress.
WHAT WE DO know is that The Caravan is a National Emergy because it is almost entirely a horde, which is coming to invade America and rape your women and force all the signage to be en Español. This is bad, because Real Americans (TM) still have to master the English "lanoguage." According to Trump, The Caravan, in fact, is an attack on the United States. Really.
President Donald Trump on Monday vowed to send as many troops as necessary to the U.S.-Mexican border to block a growing caravan of Central American migrants, calling their trek “an assault on our country.”
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY aboard Air Force One, the president said there were “people from the Middle East” in their ranks, reiterating a claim he made without evidence in a morning tweet. The president declined to say whether his assertion was based on intelligence agencies or some other source. While Trump has made unsubstantiated charges that Democrats had funded the migrants, he said the television footage that showed them straggling north was rebounding to the political benefit of Republicans in the midterms. The caravan could be seen on a TV, tuned to Fox News, on the wall of his office aboard the presidential aircraft.
“I think this could be a blessing in disguise because it shows how bad our laws are,” he said. “The Democrats are responsible for that.” That was akin to the unexpected political repercussions of the bitter Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice. The controversy helped energize GOP voters in advance of the Nov. 6 elections, he said. How many troops was he prepared to send to the border? “As many as necessary,” he replied.
AND THE REFUGEE I saw on television being pushed down a Mexican road in a wheelchair is the same as a resurrected Santa Anna in a Sherman tank. Desperate mothers with their small children? No different than Pancho Villa, no doubt. Really? Really. Ask American Conservative senior editor and blogger Rod Dreher, who has invoked(for the 975th time, but for the first time concerning this continent . . . I think) the dystopian 1973 French novel, Jean Raspail's The Camp of the Saints, which depicts desperate hordes from India descending on southern Europe . . . and a continent too culturally and spiritually exhausted to defend its borders -- and Western culture and civilization.
THERE'S THAT word -- horde. Not "caravan." Not "column." Not "migrants." Not "refugees." Horde. That's quite the loaded word. There is no such thing as a good horde. Dreher was alarmed Monday that over the weekend, "the migrant horde" had grown to about 5,000. Later media reports said the caravan now might number 7,000-plus. But, hell. The man was slinging exclamation marks like a methed-up fishmonger at a Washington Post report that the Border patrol was apprehending "a caravan a day" -- 1,500 people -- at the U.S. border with Mexico.
"Fifteen hundred a day!"
Holy fuck! It's the Latino Apocalypse! "Fifteen hundred a day!" They're invaders! Invaders, I say! Actually, Dreher did say.
SO . . . like, what do we do? Can we shoot the "invaders"?
To Dreher's credit, he's not so sure. Unless there are no non-lethal ways to keep poor women and children from "invading" the richest country on earth? So, maybe as a last resort 5-year-old Jesus gets a slug in the head just shy of territorii Americae?
It's just so goddamn complicated!
YEP. You know you really and truly live in a Christian nation when mercy is when you don't shoot Jesus bambino and his mama in the head during their flight from Herod into Egyptto keep them from "invading" the United States as they flee violence and grinding poverty in Central America.
But, you may exclaim, "It's a massive caravan! Five thousand, nay, 7,000 people! What if they were armed guerrillas!?!" (Oh, wait. Dreher already brought up the armed guerrillas. Sorry.)
To which I respond "1907."
Specifically, April 17, 1907.
On that day, 11,747 immigrants were processed through Ellis Island in New York Harbor, on their way to permanent residency in these United States of America. As I said before, in 1907, all that was required for the wretched of the earth of legally immigrate to this country was . . . to get here.
Unless, of course, you were Chinese. In 1907, they were chinks, sometimes Chinamen or slants, and we banned their entry from the 1870s to the 1940s.
Anyway, April 17, 1907, was the high-water mark for immigration through Ellis Island. That year, 1,004,756 souls entered the United States there. Averaged over 365 days, that's a "caravan" -- actually, a flotilla -- of (rounding up) 2,753 "invaders" every single day.
That year, 1,285,349 immigrants entered the country via all ports of entry. The estimated population of the United States in 1907 was 87,008,000.
Here's some more perspective for you: In 2016, 1.18 million people immigrated legally to the United States, which had an estimated population of 323,127,513. OVERRUN? Have we been overwhelmed by "the wretched refuse" of countless teeming shores? Can we not accommodate one more of the "homeless, tempest-tost"?
If the perpetually nativist -- and racist -- Donald Trump and the perpetually alarmed Rod Dreher are going to make a case for extinguishing Lady Liberty's lamp beside the golden door, they're damned well going to have to do it apart from numbers and demographics.
In 1910, the total immigrant population of the United States came to 14.7 percent. Remember, there really wasn't such a thing as illegal immigration then. And in 2016, America's immigrant population -- legal, illegal and temporary residents -- came to . . . wait for it . . . 13.5 percent.
If the combined 33,074,071 souls who live in Guatamala, Honduras and El Salvador said "Screw it!" got up and started marching toward the southern border of the United States -- then we might have a problem. On the other hand, Cherry County, Neb., is a fair piece bigger in area than Connecticut (and just a little smaller than Hawaii) but has only 5,818 inhabitants.
That's a middling size in this state. Arthur County, which is almost half the size of Rhode Island, has a population of . . . 457. Although some folks may have died or moved out since last year. THEN AGAIN, there never has been room enough in America for "those people," whomever "those people" happen to be at any given point in our history. I don't know -- maybe there always has been room for the English and the Norwegians, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Whenever I see footage of yet another of Adolf Trump's Nuremberg for Dummies rallies (or, for that matter, when I read yet another of Dreher's Camp of the Saints exercises in hand-wringing over the overwhelming of Western Civilization by the "hordes"), I always think of a story our parrain used to tell us about his school days in early 20th century south Louisiana.
Uncle Joe wasn't my godfather -- that's what "parrain" means in English -- but that's what all us cousins used to call the husband of Mama's second-eldest sister. And I guess the fact that we called him "parrain" would be proof enough for tons of alleged Americans that Frogs and coonasses like us don't belong in this country, despite the fact that we were in Louisiana long before "les Americains."
Parrain was a good bit older than Aunt Rose. In fact, he was of the same generation as my maternal grandparents, who were born in the late 1800s, and that was the first English-speaking generation of the family. Which had been in Louisiana, remember, since the 1780s.
Even though my grandparents and Uncle Joe were English-speakers, they were bilingual, and French was the language of their households. That is totally like the situation of many, many second-generation Mexican-Americans (and Dreamers) today -- the kids translate for the parents. In fact, my grandparents were the translators between their French-speaking parents and their English-speaking children. There's a reason their kids only spoke English, and it goes back to what happened to Parrain . . . and thousands upon thousands of French and Cajun schoolchildren in early 20th-century Louisiana. The short version of the story is that one day the teacher, one of les Americains, heard Uncle Joe and his friends conversing in French, and le professeur beat the shit out of those coonass kids. Those stupid coonasses -- and for certain of les Americains, the slur coonass always was preceded by "stupid" -- needed to become American, and Americans speak English. Only. And by the mid-1960s, the French language had almost died out in Louisiana, except among the old folks. Like my parrain. There's a term for that today -- at least among those who don't shit themselves at the thought of a "horde" of poverty-stricken desperates fleeing toward sanctuary in the richest country ever.
I think the term is "cultural genocide."
IT WAS carried out by a country that never even asked the "stupid coonasses" whether they even wanted to be Americans back in 1803. Les Americains were the purchasers, the "stupid coonasses" were the spoils.
And I had to take French in high school and college, because my mother could only speak a few words. My kraut, cheesehead and mick father, I don't think, had any desire to pick up any of that "coonass" lingo. Because, no doubt, us real Americans -- and our blessed culture -- are better than the other guy.
The United States has suffered -- yet again -- a horrible mass shooting. Another mind-numbing, soul-killing episode of domestic terrorism. This latest, early Sunday morning, came as some madman of Afghan heritage and a Muslim upbringing shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 and wounding more than 50 others in the deadliest mass shooting in American history before an Orlando SWAT team gunned him down. The mass-murderer -- the terrorist who aimed to deal with homosexuals the same way Adolf Hitler did -- pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in a phone call to 911 dispatchers. The atrocity's aftermath, unsurprisingly in these times, has been one of scapegoating, recriminations and outright mau-mauing on all sides. Unsurprisingly, our country's angry-ideologue class, along with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have been in the middle of the national freakout.
Take your pick on whom to blame, because everybody's getting tarred so far. Our battered, crumbling American society is in a bad patch of its ongoing nervous breakdown, and American Conservative senior editor and blogger Rod Dreher ain't feeling so good himself:
Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:
Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.
“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”
Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.
SO . . . what we're hearing is that, for fear that Hillary Clinton will open up a can of politically correct WhoopAss on believing Christians, it is somehow understandable and legitimate that allegedly believing Christians would cast their votes for a candidate who:
Actively and unequivocally encouraged violence against protesters at his campaign events
Clearly stated his support of torture — acts that not only are profoundly immoral but also are defined as war crimes in both domestic and international law
Differs not a whit from Hillary Clinton on abortion, based on his record and not his multiple campaign positions on the subject
Has reiterated his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, an act of religious bigotry that flies in the face of U.S. constitutional law and would, soon enough, be used against Christians once the forest of the law had been cut down and we had nowhere left to hide
Has called for the retributive mass murder of terrorists’ wives, children and families because “We gotta be tough.
Has used blatant bigotry and stereotyping to scapegoat and engender hatred toward Mexicans as a whole
Sought to bully a federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a lawsuit against him, deploying outrageously racist arguments in the process
Refused to immediately repudiate the support of onetime neo-Nazi and KKK grand dragon David Duke, and who regularly sends out rhetorical dog whistles to skinheads, Kluxers and all other ilks of alt-right refuse
Has refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in the Middle East and even Europe. Europe!
Is a well-known moral degenerate who routinely denigrates women, this in addition to his entire adult lifetime of sexually using and objectifying them. (We are supposed to elect this as president of the United States because we’re freaked out over gays and the tragically gender-confused? Really?)
Has built a long “business resumé” of shady dealings, crackpot schemes, failed ventures born of sheer narcissism and, finally, alleged out-and-out fraud
Routinely bullies his political opponents
Routinely threatens his political opponents
Routinely makes slanderous and outrageous accusations against his political opponents, the latest being against the president of the United States when he insinuated Barack Obama was somehow in cahoots with Islamist extremists.
I AM SORRY, but even thinking of voting for such a candidate won’t fly — not on grounds of one’s faith in Jesus Christ . . . not on grounds of one’s support of the United States Constitution and the rule of law. That may mean that Christians are just f***ed in this election but this is the real world, and f***ed happens. As for myself, I’d rather be honorably martyred under Hillary Clinton than live in dishonor under President Trump, effectively repudiating my Catholic beliefs as I shoveled moral excrement upon my Savior and my faith.
We Americans think "the social gospel" is just fine.
Just so long as it stays where it belongs -- between 30 and 33 A.D. The Bible talks about things from long ago in the Holy Land, allowing us plenty of time and distance to reframe both message and Messenger a bit more to our liking. We can deal with that. Things were simpler then -- it was before Obamacare. But if you really want to see the fit hit the shan, start preaching and teaching -- and, Dow Jones forbid, living -- "the social gospel" today . . . which is to say living "the gospel" today, because Christianity isn't an à la carte deal, it's a combination plate. That combination plate gave "orthodox" Judaism gas in 33 A.D., it gave the Romans gas for 280 years, give or take, and it gives everybody gas today.
Particularly, Pope Francis' renewed emphasis on "the social gospel" -- you know, "blessed are the poor" and "the meek shall inherit the land" -- has a whole lot of "orthodox" Catholics in a toot. The latest blow-up comes in the wake of a couple of American speeches given by one of Francis' trusted advisers, Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras.
There was, for one, writer and editor John Zmirak on Rod Dreher's American Conservativeblog:
Cardinal Maradiaga’s vision of the future of the Catholic Church is really a yellowed snapshot of the past—of the recent past of the Anglican church, which has buried the clear and consistent doctrines of Christianity, in favor of social activism on behalf of foolish and counterproductive policies. The result was predictable; it became spiritually irrelevant, a decorative tassel hanging from the left wing of public opinion, while its most fervent believers split off to found new churches that actually taught the Gospel, or decamped for Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy. If the Catholic Church follows its lead, to the point where it throws infallibility into question, the same thing will happen. Expect a torrent of converts to the Orthodox Church—made up of the most active, fervent, believing, Catholics.
As a North American who is grateful for the relative religious and economic freedom that produced a successful country, I reject the Marxian bromides being offered by men whose countries have never known such freedom. Amidst all Maradiaga’s rhetoric about Gospel solidarity with the poor, I smell more than whiff of brimstone, of a national and regional envy that has no clue how to lift up the impoverished, but would happily settle for tearing down the prosperous.
WHAT WAS the pope just saying about the dangers of ideology? And what exactly prompted such a furious reaction? Stuff like this:
The Church is not the hierarchy, but the people of God. “The People of God” is, for the Council, the all-encompassing reality of the Church that goes back to the basic and the common stuff of our ecclesial condition; namely, our condition as believers. And that is a condition shared by us all. The hierarchy has no purpose in itself and for itself, but only in reference and subordination to the community. The function of the hierarchy is redefined in reference to Jesus as Suffering Servant, not as “Pantocrator” (lord and emperor of this world); only from the perspective of someone crucified by the powers of this world it is possible to found, and to explain, the authority of the Church. The hierarchy is a ministry (diakonia = service) that requires lowering ourselves to the condition of servants. To take that place (the place of weakness and poverty) is her own, her very own responsibility.
ME, I was thinking "About damned time!" I also was thinking "This model either would have made the Scandals a lot less likely, or it would have enabled lay Catholics to deal with them a lot more effectively -- through less clericalism and more ass kicking." But that's just me. I'm a Bad Catholic who can digest clericalism and humorless scolds on the religious right no better than I can soulless Marty Haugen ditties during Mass or cheap-gracers on the liturgical left. If I were just smarter and holier, I would have been able to discern the Red Menace lurking beneath the surface of passages like this from the cardinal's Dallas address:
There is no possible reform of the Church without a return to Jesus. The Church only has a future and can only consider herself great by humbly trying to follow Jesus. To discern what constitutes abuse or infidelity within the Church we have no other measure but the Gospel. Many of the traditions established in the Church could lead her to a veritable self-imprisonment. The truth will set us free, humility will give us wings and will open new horizons for us.
If the Church seeks to follow Jesus, all she has to do is to continue telling the world what happened to Jesus, proclaiming His teachings and His life. Jesus was not a sovereign of this world, He was not rich, but instead He lived as a poor villager, He proclaimed his program – the Kingdom of God—and the great of this world (Roman Empire and Synagogue together) persecuted and eliminated Him. His sentence to die on the cross, outside the city, is the clearest evidence yet that He did not want to ingratiate himself with the powers of this world. Shattered by their power, He is the Suffering Servant, an image of innumerable other servants, defeated by the ones who rule and call themselves “lords;” but it was He, poor, silenced, and humiliated, who was designated by his Father as His Beloved Child and whom God Himself resurrected on the third day.
THE MAN even referenced that noted pinko, Blessed John Paul II:
In contemporary pontifical magisterium, we have two significant benchmarks: John Paul II’s 1990 Encyclical Redemptoris Missio, and the apostolic letter Novo Millennio Ineunte, from the same pontiff, in 2001. “In Redemptoris Missio, the Pope teaches us that the Church is a mission. It is not that she has a mission, like she has other traits; she is herself a mission. Everything in the Church should be weighted and measured in regard to the mission of converting the world.”
And in Novo Millennio Ineunte, Blessed John Paul II challenges the Church at the end of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, to leave behind the shallow waters of maintaining the institution and travel to the deep waters of evangelization. That is what Jesus tells his disciples in Chapter 12 of Luke, adding: “Duc in altum, put out into the deep.” [Luke 5: 4] This means that the Church will convert the world not by argument, but by example. There is no doubt that doctrinal argument is important, but people will be attracted by the humanity of Christians, those who live by the faith, who live in a human way, who irradiate the joy of living, the consistency in their behavior.
FOR WHAT it's worth, my wife and I are converts to the Catholic faith. No one argued us into the church; a number of people loved us into it. Meantime, the Rev. Dwight Longenecker worries that the gospel will get lost in a sea of "social work." Because, obviously, all you need isn't love. Or something like that.
I am not so much worried about what Cardinal Maradiaga said, but what he left unsaid.
And there the Church, in humble company, helps making life intelligible and dignified, making it a community of equals, without castes or classes; without rich or poor; without impositions or anathemas. Her foremost goal is to care for the penultimate (hunger, housing, clothing, shoes, health, education…) to be then able to care for the ultimate, those problems that rob us of sleep after work (our finiteness, our solitude before death, the meaning of life, pain, and evil…). The answer the Church gives to the “penultimate” will entitle her to speak about the “ultimate.” For that reason, the Church must show herself as a Samaritan on earth – so she can some day partake of the eternal goods.
Really? The Church’s foremost goal is to provide housing, shoes, health and education? Surely the church’s foremost goal is the salvation of souls. To be sure we must be engaged in feeding the poor, but in his talk on the New Evangelization the Cardinal does not mention the salvation of souls or the spiritual work of the church or the sacraments at all. Is he simply a social worker dressed in red, and does the red indicate more of his political opinion than his status as a cardinal?
REALLY? What part of "the answer the Church gives to the 'penultimate' will entitle her to speak about the 'ultimate'" is unclear? Again, I am a convert. I was "penultimated" into the Catholic Church. After all, God meets you where you are, not where He thinks you need to be. Where you need to be is a process -- one lasting a lifetime. By the way, I only can assume that the good father's cheap shot aboutMaradiaga being a "social worker dressed in red" or maybe just a Red, period, was for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls. I've seen stranger things done -- in all sincerity -- for the sake of kingdom come. Ideology takes the invitation that is the Christian gospel and makes it into a hammer. Ideology takes suffering souls and turns them into nails -- into the proverbial Them. Ideology say: Us, we so holy. I'M NOT sure how much the cardinal's American trip told us about what direction the Catholic Church is headed. I fear the collective cerebral hemorrhage we're seeing so early in Francis' pontificate tells us a lot about the Catholic right. "Cafeteria Catholicism," alas, is a bipartisan thing. And the cafeteria is getting crowded.
This is the part of the blog where I commit cultural suicide in the Age of Political Correctness by acting like a Catholic who actually believes all that sh*t. This self-immolation moment was prompted by Rod Dreher's blog post correctly calling out "progressives" who have the gall to disingenuously hector social conservatives that if they'd only been nicer in opposing same-sex marriage. . . .
Yeah, right. Now we're getting lectures on civility from folks whose default position involves employing the word "hater" or "bigot" when referring to people like me who think marriage may be many things, but that none of them involve, nor ever in human history has involved, a union of two men or two women. Human dignity is one thing. But recognizing the inherent dignity and rights of persons never has precluded society denying them any number of heart's (or groin's) desires for the sake of the greater good. Throughout history, sometimes "the greater good of society" has meant something as simple as not cracking open Pandora's box.
The long span of human history has taught us a few things about what works in building a stable, healthy society . . . and what doesn't. Sometimes this wisdom comes to us through the mists of time as part of the teachings and taboos of our great religions.Think of the Ten Commandments, for instance, as God's way of telling His children "Don't put your hand on the hot burner of the stove." Eternal 2-year-olds that we are, this is rarely compelling. Likewise, as we see today, rarely do we find ancient religious teachings and societal taboos against any manner of things -- like homosexual activity and, now, gay marriage -- compelling.
FOR A COUPLE of centuries or more, we've treated the earth itself as another thing with which we might do as we will. As if all creation belonged just to us, to use as we will and to abuse as we might, laying aside the consequences for another day. Another day has arrived. The consequences now asserting themselves include a radically warming climate, which we now know is a direct result of centuries of wantonly belching carbon emissions into the air in pursuit of industrial might, ever more creature comforts and three automobiles in every garage. In 1870 or 1912 or 1957, we merely thought we were building a better life through industry. Prosperity through petrochemicals. Greater happiness from greater consumption. In 2057, our children and grandchildren will be paying for our ignorance -- and arrogance -- with brutally hot summers, vicious storms (and more of them), wilder winters and coastal cities slipping under the whitecaps of the swelling seas. Who knew? Well, 60 years ago, we certainly had no idea. We possessed more hubris than knowledge and more optimism than ecological imagination. This was reflected in our actions, and actions have consequences . . . which someone will have to pay.
REGARDING society's wholesale acquiescence to the "gay agenda" and the acceptance and normalization of same-sex marriage, we're now hell-bent on turning taboo and societal norms upside-down within a generation. What we today proclaim as normative and just, 25 years ago was deviantand unthinkable. With that kind of overturning of the wisdom of the ages -- with that kind of societal rush to judgment -- what could go wrong? What could have gone wrong with the explosive growth of no-fault divorce? The normalization of procreation outside of marriage? The resulting explosive growth of single-parent households? What could have gone wrong with the attempt to fix some of the above with more and more legal abortion? With creating a contraceptive mentality instead of a let's-build-a-family mentality? Yes, we have our "freedom," but someone has to pay the bill for it. Oftentimes, that would be our children. Every time, it's the taxpayer. If there's a recipe for widespread poverty and social instability, "First, you have a kid but not a husband . . ." is the sociological equivalent of "First, you make a roux. . . ." But in 1960, or '65 or '72, who the hell knew? Well, yeah, those religious nuts, but they're hardly an objective source. "Haters" never are . . . until we're counting on them to help us clean up one of those "Who knew?" messes we've made for ourselves and now can't escape. Not only are we arrogant and ignorant, we're also presumptuous. Good thing those Jesus-freak Gumps are too hatefully stupid to catch on to that, right?
When you're out of Schlitz, it's time to switch to the dry Riesling. If you can find it.
Over on Beliefnet a while back, Rod Dreher notably recounted his struggles with the Pennsylvania state liquor collective in finding a simple bottle of dry Riesling. After much abuse from some uncultured gourmands whose idea of a dry wine is letting the Mogen David go a little vinegary, the poor man allegedly broke several state laws by sneaking across the border to New Jersey and purchasing illicit, yet suitably dry, hooch.
Sunday, Rod blogged about his Easter triumph. Or, at least, the triumph of the anonymous bootlegger who found dry Riesling across the Maginot Line and smuggled it back through the Quaker State defenses . . . thus sending Mr. Dreher into dipsomaniacal reverie.
I'm talking about you, E. Bunny -- if that's your real name. NOW, I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no piquant bouquets, or sniffin' no corks, or subtle fruitiness vs. Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests, but I do OK when it comes to sucking the stuff down. Because when you're out of Schlitz, you're out of beer. And when you're out of beer, that means it's time to switch to wine.
All of this gets me to Sunday. Mrs. Favog and I went over to some dear friends' house for Easter dinner, where before eating, the four of us killed off a bottle of a rather excellent dry Riesling.
Not even a slight hint of that certain . . . oh, je ne sais quoi . . . Formula 44 cachet. Or Boone's Farm, either.
Do you know what our friend Laura went through to get that dry Riesling? She had to go all the way to the neighborhood Hy-Vee supermarket. And there, in the wine section . . . voila!
OF COURSE, she had to call on pretty advanced sommelier-type skills. We're talkin' mad skillz going beyond the training of your average Pennsylvania ABC store manager -- she looked at the label, keeping her eyes peeled for the telltale clue that you've stumbled upon a truly dry Riesling.
And there it was. The words "Dry Riesling."
When she stopped laughing hysterically, there standing in the Hy-Vee wine aisle -- she had read Rod's account of his disastrous encounter with socialized liquor -- she bought it. And we drank it.
It was dry. And that was good.
Flyover country, my ass.
NOW, WHAT WITH all the drankin' that had been goin' on during this Easter feast (and a feast it was), I lost my head and began to lapse into my native Louisiana patois, which makes somewhat less sense to the Midwestern ear than, say, Boomhauer on King of the Hill.
As we all watched The Sound of Music -- Mrs. Favog's favorite movie ever (ask her about the time she met Julie Andrews) -- for the 4.327th time, one of the characters noted that a previous governess had gotten a snake put in her clothes, as opposed to Maria merely getting pranked with a frog.
"They ain't nothin' wrong with a snake," I remarked, using the proper pronunciation of "sneck."
At which point Laura got up, went to the freezer, pulled out an ice cream cake and dished it up.
She thought I said "There's nothing wrong with a snack." Which there wasn't. Nothing a-tall.