“He who is afraid to die
Invents a spirit in the sky
He who knows not how to live
Has never heard he said, “forgive!”
From Kaaley Ko Aagey Dhuklo by Bachchoo
Dear gentle reader, My friends, Adolf Nazisalutewala and Benito Ducebhai are encouraging me to apply for the post of foreign adviser, with third world credentials, to US President Donald Trump’s team dedicated to making America great again. In need of a remunerative job, I came up with the following list of suggestions for Mr Trump with the caveat that I hold the intellectual rights to all of them:
Even before Mr Trump begins the construction of the Mexico-US wall to stop illegal immigrants, drug dealers, undercutters of American wages and other undesirables entering the country, he ought to think of a wall to the north. I have, as has the rest of the world, observed and noted vast unrest within the United States at President Trump’s election. There have been marches in the American cities and millions of women and talented professionals — as opposed to red-necks and the unemployed of the rural communities and the rust-belt — have united in protest calling the election in some sense “illegitimate”.
While assuring the President that I do not share this view of election illegitimacy, as it seems to me to have stuck to the constitutional book, I can see the disaster that awaits the US. So even before the Mexican wall, immediate construction should begin on a Canadian Wall stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific to prevent American women and professionals — scientists, journalists, lawyers, teachers, doctors and Jane Fonda escaping to Canada. If such a wall is not built and millions of women, fearing oppression and a reversal of the gains of the feminist movement flee to Canada, it will leave the US with a dangerously uneven gender ratio. This could result in millions of men crossing over to Mexico in search of women to marry. Even worse, it could result in vast trafficking of Russian women to the United States. Mr Trump, it is rumoured, has set a precedent for relations with such women on his visits to Moscow and President Vladimir Putin has even boasted that Russian prostitutes are the best in the world. I can venture no confirmations and make no recommendations of this sort as I am, as my grandmother would have said “innocent and ignorant” in the matter of these particular female professional skills.
A corollary to the Canadian Wall project is, as Trump’s advisers may have figured out, a nationwide operation to gather all the ladders in the country and, if they are made of wood, initiate huge bonfires of these in the American Football stadiums of the cities. If they are made of metal, the US Navy should, through an executive order be commanded to take them out to the Sargasso sea — where it is reputed objects and even ships disappear — and dump them. I am aware that even today Mexicans use tunnels under the existing barbed-wire construction and frustrate the aim of the barriers. Mr Trump may consider banning the manufacture of all digging equipment, mechanised or even manual such as spades etc. I have seen, as no doubt gentle reader you have, very many films in which brave Americans dig their way, a centimetre at a time, out of prisoner of war camps, using only the coffee spoons that the fascistic enemy guards allow them. The tenacity of American women determined to get to Canada is not to be underestimated. The bonfire of the ladders, and a concomitant ban on their manufacture, will result in the loss of some jobs, but this unemployment can be counterbalanced by recruiting a new anti-ladder police force. In my youth I witnessed a clever servant on a friend’s vast estate in India, tying pieces of wood with string to contrive home-made ladders — the equivalent of illegal liquor in the days of prohibition. I suppose we can look forward to a Hollywood movie about an Al Capone of the illegal ladder empire!
Mr Trump ought to take immediate executive action to dynamite the Statue of Liberty, which stands in New York harbour. It is, after all, a foreign construction, gifted to the US by the French nation and it has the unhelpful message of welcoming the “poor and huddled” masses of the unfortunate old world to the prairies and frontiers of the “new”. These poor and huddled people, arriving from non-Muslim countries will undoubtedly bring plague and may even be Mexicans who have come by boat via Venezuela and Trinidad, buying false passports along the way and changing their names from Abdul and Mohammed to Farage, May and Johnson. Vigilance is never to be underestimated and the corollary to this suggestion has to be the recruitment of a few million visa officials, border and coast guards. Unemployment solved at a stroke! If the dynamiting of the Statue of Liberty is thought to have left a vacancy in the seascape, I propose that a statue of President Trump of the same size as that of the lady replace it — but instead of a torch, holding aloft some appropriate object like a pair of handcuffs or a revolver.
Now, gentle reader, this last suggestion of mine is inspired by watching Mr Trump on the TV news saying that he is in favour of allowing the interrogative services of the US to use waterboarding and other forms of torture because his advisers tell him that it’s most effective. The yeller-bellies squeal when the cowboys get to work, dude! Waterboarding may be a cheap form of torture but what the Trump administration should do to tackle growing unemployment is research medieval machines and manufacture, for instance, body-stretching and head-clamping equipment. Apart from using these as promised in a hundred Guantanamo Bays, they could be exported to Syria when US relations with Bashar al-Assad are restored. Win-win all the way!
