Not in My
Backyard
by Walt
Giersbach
“New
survey says 73 percent … opposed to country
taking in Guantánamo prisoners”
Associated Press headline 1/31/09
Federal
Corrections Office
Washington, D.C.
Dear Sirs:
I am the mayor
of Arlos Creek, Mississippi. You may have heard
of us folk in that there New York Times
article, “The Town Time Misplaced.” Yes,
it is true that we are so poor that we can’t
even afford a comma in our name. (That be our
little joke.)
Well, to get
to the point of my writing, we hear you’ve
got a bunch of financial rascals that have bilked
the public. There was that Bernard Madoff guy who
spirited away 50 billion, and that Caribbean
banker who made off with another few millions.
And I spose the Feds will collar some more Wall
Street pirates, mortgage shysters and slicky boys
in the near future.
The way we see
it down here, you’d be puttin a lot of good
talent to waste if you just stuck them in a jail
somewheres, gardening flowers and such. We’d
be more than happy to take them in Arlos Creek.
We have a pretty good jail built in ’36 and
no one to populate it. We also think this Mr.
Madoff could look over our budget while he’s
in our hoosegow, and if he teased the books a bit
we might afford a new traffic light. That’d
be a heap of help since some rowdies broke our
only light in 1982.
Our town
banker, Jerry Crutchfield (he’s president of
what President Obama calls one of the “good
banks”) thought we would also want that guy
from Lehman Brothers to come visit. He could put
a little pep into our money situation.
We are a right
friendly town. Yes, we are mostly Baptists—the
dunkin kind—but Ralph Stokely who owns the
lumberyard volunteered to convert to being Jewish.
That way those bankers could feel at home. His
wife, I might add, makes bagels for sale at the
church, where they say they go great with peanut
butter.
A lotta people
got money in their mattresses. Not here, you
understand, but the counties down on the Gulf
that have a bunch of casinos and a senator in
their pocket. We think we could give em a run for
their money if we had our share of slick money
boys too.
So if you end
up with a bunch of prisoners and don’t know
where to park them, like those terrorists at
Guantanamo, well, you might send a busload down
to Arlos Creek. We set a mighty fine table and
would be lookin to have some visitors who know
their way around a dollar.
Yours
sincerely,
Leroy Bancroft
Mayor
p.s. Your
prisoners may be smarty-pants, but Emily
Chatsworth over at our Library says,
“Don’t send us no pedants.” I
agree. We got enough child molesters in the state
capital.
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