EMIGRATION BLUES: A pair of gentlemen who had nothing else to do with their time decided, for reasons best known to themselves, to walk around the world, or as much as of the world as they could reasonable walk without getting their feet wet, no mean trick on a planet covered mostly by water. The two gentlemen began their trek in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America some years ago and had reached the furthermost Russian settlement in northwestern Siberia, where the Russian border authorities promptly arrested the two of them and returned them to Alaska.

The Russian border authorities are deluding themselves. These two gentlemen are merely the first of a horde that will soon swamp any attempt to hold back the tide of immigrants from south, or in this case, east, of the border. We see in our time the Aztec drive for conquest reborn and pressing ever onwards as the Aztecs seek to reestablish Aztlan in los Estados Unidos de Gringolandia. Having reversed Winfield Scott’s victory of 1848, the Aztecs will demand that they get their portion of the 54-40 or Fight demand that led instead to the occupation of Tenochtitlan by the evil gringos. Once all of western Canada and Alaska is in their hands will come the inevitable push into Siberia. The day is rapidly coming when Ivan Ivanovich will look out over the frozen wastes of the Bering Sea and see men in blue jeans and baseball caps hopping from ice floe to ice floe trying to make landfall on the sacred soil of the Rodina. He will try to stop those men, sometimes arresting them, sometimes shooting them out of hand, but nothing will stop the inexorable pressure of their coming. Once they establish their presence in Siberia, then they will bring their wives and children after them in order to complete the occupation, and an area once took its orders from Moscow will take them from Mexico City instead.

There will some positive results at first; Russian golfers will finally get greens worthy of the name and Russian contractors will get workers who will do a good job without having to give them a couple of shots of vodka first, but in the end there will come a crisis. Radical immigration activists will demand teachers teach in both Russian and Spanish, no mean trick given that the two languages have completely different alphabets, and the Russian Orthodox Church will have to replace the Virgin of Kazan and the Vladimir Mother of God with the Virgin of Guadalupe if the Church knows what’s good for it. On the other hand, the borscht will taste better with some jalapenos in it, and people who don’t like vodka can acquire a taste for tequila, although I think the Russians might be more than a little put off by the worm. Vodka doesn’t have worms, after all, and while cultural cross-pollination is no doubt a wonderful thing, some things just won’t make it over the culture divide and my guess is that worms are probably one of those things.