O CANADA, GET LOST: There’s been a great deal of debate about Arizona’s illegal immigration law in particular and illegal immigrants in general these past few months, and yet I haven’t seen much comment about the Vampire State’s plans for one group of unwanted immigrants, which, I must admit, surprises me no end. I thought the idea would raise a ruckus with the same breathless alacrity that the gaggle of goniffs in the state legislature raise taxes, but no one seems to be complaining much about the idea, except for the usual suspects, and, strangely enough, no one seems to care about their opinion in the matter. I know that odder things have happened here in the Vampire State—odd is something we do well here— but this seems very peculiar to me, yes, it does.

So let me go on the record right now and say that I am all for gassing these lousy little bastards, and before you go calling me a typical, right-wing Rethuglican scumbag, permit to say that my brother, a life-long New Deal Democrat, supports gassing these wretches as well. And to the inevitable charge of racism, I say poppycock; I do not, in any way, shape, or form, advocate physically harming this country’s large population of illegal Mexican immigrants. Mexicans come to this country to find work to support their families, to help their children have better lives, and to earn their share of the American dream. Canadian geese come to this country to crap in my driveway. There is a difference, although it’s difficult to get some people to see that.

Unlike Mexican immigrants, who work hard for their money, Canadian geese lead entirely parasitic lives once they get across the 49th parallel. They contribute nothing to the economic life of the nation, they refuse to pay taxes, they are a burden on the community, they are an ongoing environmental disaster, and they spend an inordinate amount of time relieving themselves in my driveway. Supporters of this ongoing avian assault on this our Great Republic and my increasingly noisome driveway (they crap there in the bucket loads, just in case I haven’t mentioned it already) excuse such behavior by saying that, unlike Mexicans, most of whom intend to stay in the United States, Canadian geese are migratory by nature and will leave our country and my driveway sooner rather than later and that all we Americans need to do is display a little patience with them. I can sympathize with this point of view and those who hold it, though I also understand that in order to reach this conclusion geese supporters must weave intellectual loop-de-loops so intricate that they would take the breath away from anyone even reasonably irrational and leave the completely rational completely agog and looking for a drink, but my sympathy fades when I look out my window in the morning and see the objects of their intellectual desire parked in my driveway crapping away like they had nothing else to do with their time. I don’t like having to park my car in the middle of my lawn, folks, I just don’t, and then my toleration for this weak-minded rubbish flies out the window, often with some choice words following after it.

For the supporters of these geese to call these birds migratory is to take the dictionary meaning of the word, lay it upon the Procrustean rack, and stretch the word beyond its lexicographical breaking point. There are birds that migrate thousands, if not tens of thousands of miles every year, looking for food and a place to breed, preferably somewhere with much lower school taxes than I am about to get hit with. Those Canadian bastards parked out in my driveway couldn’t migrate back to Canada if their lives depended on it. There is not one of them that doesn’t look like they’ve spent their entire time in the United States chowing down on everything on the supersize menu at McDonald’s five times a day and twice more on Sunday, and then washing their Big Macs down with vanilla shakes served in fifty gallon drums. If this particular set of Canada’s ornithological pride and joy tried to migrate to the driveway across the street, 75% of them would drop dead from heart attacks before they’d managed to get to the other side, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that the 25% that did arrive in my neighbor’s driveway were all diabetics. In short, the only way these fat, crapulous bastards are flying back to Canada is if the immigration people buys them all tickets and ships them home on American Airlines, preferably in economy class.

The foreign policy mavens will insist that I do nothing to these geese, that I should wait for the wise solons who govern my native state to decide whether or not they should use poison gas on these birds before I do something rash and permanently damage US—Canadian diplomatic relations. Again, to this I say poppycock, and if you don’t like poppycock, then there are balderdash, codswallop, twaddle, and baloney, attorneys at law, for you to select from. The fact is that the state government will never gas those geese—they will either find a way not to do it or they will try to kick the decision up the Federal level or they will try to run the geese for the state assembly on the Democratic Party line, where the geese will immediately become incumbents and thus a not terribly endangered species protected from the thousand natural shotguns that gooseflesh is heir to. So the geese are here to stay, which means I will have to do something about them, whether or not my doing something causes an international incident. Remember, I did not invite these geese to use my driveway as their personal rest room; they invited themselves, so clearly the onus is on the birds and not on me, although I suspect that more than one of those birds has tried to drop more than an onus on me these past few weeks. If the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs objects to the forcible methods I intend to use to remove their citizens from my driveway, let me just say that if the Canadian government would be better off trying to find ways of gainfully employing these geese in Canada rather than looking the other way when these birds decide to come across the border to crap in my driveway. If Canadian—American diplomatic relations suffer because of this, tough, that’s not my problem. In any case, that’s all I have to say about this. Really, it is—I’m not kidding.