The American Dream
The American Dream last night at 3 a.m. was shoveling the Scapa Ice Flow: all the sidewalks, driveways, and entryways in McWorld. For some, that dream was doing it while not wearing gloves*. For others, it was all yelling out Spanish phrases at 100mph. For all, it was doing it for $5.00 an hour. I call it a Scapa Ice Flow because it was the most impossible of snow packs: we here in Philabuttball got about four inches of snow and about four hours of ice, then we got us around four more hours of -10-degree wind chill–making an immutable, superglued, strata of bedrock for them there forced labor servants “illegal immigrants” to make clean on this side o’ the border.
The Mexicans had to earn their money this morning–they needed to rub those palms into Elmer’s glue-like calluses, wielding their Home Depot snow shovels. They needed to work mighty hard to buy themselves a few Chinese-made, dollar store treats.
It all started around 7 p.m. when the indentured servant trader dropped them off in our development. I saw the lucky, the favored, the obedient spill out of the passenger cabin and the newbies, the ill-favored, the junior-grade members of the lot, hop out of the truck bed. The guys in the truck beds had gray hoods pulled over their black heads.
They worked on through the night–slamming Dachau’s metal shovels into McWorld’s concrete ice, repeatedly. By the sounds of it (my bedroom is above the front ‘driveway’ where they toiled through the night), they made about five feet an hour. By the morning, they had cleared the sidewalks for the white folk and the occasional Indian yuppies (with their Direct TV satellite dishes that get Indian Thriller videos broadcast on decibel level fiddiemillion…
….and their unintelligible, misogynistic phrases in Hindustani, screamed through my shared wall) to admire: no one walks on them; it’s a movie set remember? This place is a Goddamn facade.
Bank solution to all this: give them all Visas. Let them rack up consumer debt MERICAN STYLE!
Yeeehaw!
*Some young guy neighbor noticed this and gave him a pair of his gloves
February 16th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Bush administration solution to all this: Give them amnesty and basic training and send them over to Iraq. I mean, at least they wouldn’t be our sons and daughters. Hell, a troop surge of 20,000? Try 200,000! Let them earn the right to stay in ‘Merica, dammit!