by Ernest Hogan
Then he said
that Trump was the second coming of Quetzalcoatl! He claimed that all
the talk about building a security fence along the border and other
kinds of anti-Hispanic paranoia were just his way of winning the
Anglo vote. Being president of the US won't be good enough for him –
his long-range plans include reviving the Aztec Empire and becoming
Emperor of the entire continent of North America.
The above is slightly altered excerpt from a story I wrote back in
the 1990s. I just changed a name and it became up-to-date. Of course,
“Burrito Meltdown” wasn't published until 2002, and in a British
anthology because no American market would touch it.
Maybe Saturday Night Live could use it. The dirtiest trick we could
do would be to say that Trump was one of us. Besides, his fans
believe all that far-out fiction about Obama.
In some ways, times change fast. Old satire tends to become dated and
has to be explained to the younger generation, except when it comes
to racism. Stories, cartoons, and gags that I thought would be old
and incomprehensible work just as well today as they did decades ago.
The more things change the more they stay the same. It's déjà vu
all over again.
What ever happened to progress?
It follows a trend I've noticed in American presidential elections
over the decades. When they get started, the Republicans dust off the
Brown Menace – y'known illegal aliens, that savage horde sneaking
across the border to rape, pillage, and sell drugs. Then there are rumors of cannibalism and human sacrifice, severed heads being found
in the desert, and to quote another “Burrito Meltdown” character:
I'm not
prejudiced, but if it were up to me, it would be illegal to speak
anything but English in public.
Okay, I stole that line. It was blurted by a young woman I used to
work with, but we still see those sentiments being expressed. Maybe
she's gone into politics.
Brown
Menace fever burns bright during the early days of the campaign. Why
not? It's a handy package of clichés that elects hacks in Arizona all
the time.
Usually, as we get
closer to Election Day, a need to reach out to Latino voters arises.
All the nasty hate-speech is forgotten, surviving candidates don
sombreros, and protected by the secret service, they visit their local
barrios to demonstrate how they don't know how to eat tacos and
tamales – sometimes they even try to speak Spanish – while
mariachis play in the background. It's usually funnier than Saturday
Night Live.
Though this time,
I must admit it's looking different. What's with the socialist? And Cruz?
Rubio? Are the people who thought they had bought and paid for the
country really getting nervous? That
could get interesting and scary.
Meanwhile, I'll dust off some old stories, cartoons, and gags, like
this “Burrito Meltdown” paragraph:
Brown-skinned nanorevolutionaries
holding surgical lasers in their teeth crawled up American DNA
strands, then started slashing like mad, scrambling genetic
information and letting loose millions of free radicals, which soon
developed cancerous tumors, until there was nothing left but huge
blobs of undifferentiated tissue that quivered mindlessly to a
frantic Latin beat.
From
Elizabeth Hand's review of Stories for Chip in
Fantasy & Science Fiction: 'Ernest Hogan's reprint, the mindbending psychedelic fantasia "Guerrilla
Mural of a Siren's Song," explores the Delanyesque theme of
artist and muse in a tale that itself could be classified as a
psychotropic drug.'
