Shell Shock-Another Sample

Here are 1,200 words I wrote tonight, fresh of the press. Totally unedited, so please don't mind whatever mistakes there might be.

A cannon sounded from somewhere far behind the German lines, the start of a bombardment to weaken the Allied lines. Soon a hundred other cannons echoed the first. And before the last was done the first was firing again. The bombardment would last an undetermined amount of time, a day or more. A sleepless twenty-four hour time where there was nothing to be done but endure.

It was a prelude to an attack. The goal was to soften them up, to destroy every bit of them they could, to blow up the barbed wire and machine gun posts that would hold up and cut down any charge. The bombing continued drowning out any other noise. There was nothing to do but listen to the explosions as they blasted earth that had already been blasted many times before, to pray if one could still believe in a God that listened to the prayers of soldiers.

Steve crawled into a small hole dug into the side of the trench, large enough only for one man. Each of them would be on his own now. There was nothing any of them could do to help another, save tend to their wounds should a shell fall too close.

It was times like this Steve prayed for courage. But his fear distanced him from any chance at real communion with either his own thoughts or feelings or some sense of an outer divinity. But he knew his prayers were merely a way to distract his thoughts from the reality around him. They were no different than the babbling of an inmate in an asylum, the repetition of empty phrases that were nevertheless useful in soothing his neuroses.

His prayers went absent-mindedly on as his mind disconnected from his surroundings. He was losing himself, cutting off the outside world in order to protect his mind from the fear that sought to overwhelm him. The bombs continued to fall but never did they establish any kind of rhythm, never did they fall when expected nor cease from falling when he felt he could take no more. Sometimes, as he sat in his dugout clutching his knees to his chest, he tried to will the bombs not to fall, as if he merely thought hard enough he could have some control over the world in which he was forced to live. He would pray and try to will away the destruction that always threatened horrors still worse than those he was living through.

But prayers and mental distractions could never keep away the dark thoughts for long.

He had seen bodies, too many to count, that had been near the spot where a shell came to earth. He had seen men, some he knew, lying lifeless, their bodies in contorted positions that might have been humorous had it not been so real. He had seen bits and pieces of men lying all about and it all seemed so arbitrary. How does a man’s arm get torn from his body and still look to be in good shape?

Other times a man could be killed by the mere force of a blast, so that he looks perfectly okay and yet something vital deep within has been stopped.

The thing was, the first time he had seen a man torn apart by an explosion it affected him viscerally. But now he had seen it so many times, it was only some new spin upon the standard death by explosion could make him react in the same way, and there were only so many different ways a man could be scattered by the force of an explosion or by shrapnel. The others, those who died in ways similar to those he had seen before, well their deaths just seemed to accumulate in his subconscious, never bothering to register in his conscious mind.

It was only in his dreams that he became aware of the dead he had no time to notice in his waking moments. In his sleep they were given his full attention. They haunted him, though he did not know why. He had not killed them, did not wish them ill. Perhaps it was that they were jealous that they had been taken while he yet lived. Perhaps, being dead, they knew things he did not know. Maybe they stayed with him because they knew he was destined to join them.

In calm moments, on leave away from the front, he knew such thoughts were nonsensical. But here at the front, there was no sense, there was only madness. The laws of the other world, the one he had known his entire life, did not apply here. And the world he learned of here was encroaching more and more upon that other life, making it less real. The two worlds could not both exist. There could not be a world of forests when his eyes stared at the cratered wasteland that separated the warring parties. He no longer remembered what a tree looked like with leaves on it, could only visualize charred stubs that reminded him of the blasted men who had passed through this way.

It would only be two days before he rotated out of the front lines, but it was quite realistic that he would not live that long. And so his entire world was a hole in the ground and the raining missiles that were sent to destroy and kill.

It just started. It only just started. It would go on even when the sun had set, would perhaps continue until the sun rose again. And then the soldiers would come, hoping to sweep away all that opposed them.

The whistling of a shell brought his mind out of his dark thoughts and into his dismal present. It was close. But not close enough to be a danger, he decided after a moment. The anxiety that had risen in him began to recede somewhat. He heard it fall to earth and explode with a violence that raked his nerves even though he knew he was physically safe. Each bomb that fell added to the anxiety that never left him, just as each bomb did some damage to the Allied lines, their ability to defend themselves when the attack began.

Hours into the bombardment, he began to feel a degree of numbness. It was the most he could hope for, that the terror eventually surrendered to a certain emptiness within him. He felt a great weariness, as though he might be unable to stand up should the need arise. The intensity was too much for a human to endure for long, so that the body began to shut down. It was only the missile that seemed to approach too closely that snapped him from his torpor.

The earth shook when a shell hit nearby. It was at such times that the dead earth seemed the victim of the living, that all it wanted to do was lie peacefully but was tortured by the living. It almost seemed a cosmic dance, wherein the living allowed the dead no peace, while the dead claimed more than its share of those who sought to disturb them. It was hard to choose a side, hard to know whether it was life or death who was the enemy. It was getting hard to know what side he was on, which he was fighting for.

Shell Shock Cover Reveal

I haven't even finished the first draft for Shell Shock yet, but I've already got the cover, which I thought I'd share with you:

 As you can see from the covers, Shell Shock is a sequel to my book Seven Stones. It's unmistakable by the design, though there is no overt reference to it.

There is one more yet to come, though I have yet to come up with a name. I'll have to try real hard to have it as two words, both starting with an "S", as I have with my first two. Also, I'll try to have an "O" in the second word somewhere in the middle so my cover creator can place something inside it as she has on Seven Stones and Shell Shock.

My cover designer is the wonderful Elizabeth Mackey, by the way. You can see more of her work here:

Shell Shock Update

I've crossed the 90,000 mark on my newest novel, and while I'm not finished yet, I'm getting there. Here's a sample of what I've written today, with no real editing done to it yet.

Rothary climbed up on the fire step and with little thought or hesitation crawled out of the trench. Not far from him he saw the hole created by the mortar that had recently exploded, the crater still smoking. It seemed to be in the same direction of the wounded German, and so he made his way to it. Crawling the twenty or so yards, the occasional rifle fire sounding from both trenches, he rolled into the crater. Just in time, as he heard the sound of a flare being sent up. In a moment the sky was as bright as day. He clung to what shadows he could find in the depth of the pit dug by the mortar, the heat of the rocks and the earth making breath difficult.

The brief light faltered, making the night even darker than it had been. As soon as his eyes adjusted somewhat, he made his way towards the sound that had come to dominate his thoughts, fearful that another flair might expose him to the enemy.

The way was filled with corpses. Corpses and mere parts of corpses, so that he had to crawl his way over them to make his way forward. There was no path around them, it was a maze that must be crawled over rather than walked through.

More than one of the bodies he made his way around or over still had life in it. One breathed, quietly, as if sleeping. Another whimpered like a child with a fever. None of them mattered. It was the one he had shot that was the problem. It was he who had taken over Rothary’s mind, had replaced the fear with feelings stranger still. He called him on, beckoned him to see what he had done, promising to show him what he had become. They were connected. Whatever happened to the one affected the other. Whatever Rothary would do to the German would have repercussions that would be with him his whole life.

He crept along the battlefield—a man on a pilgrimage—in search of revelation. In the distance was heard some new bombardment beginning, a part of the larger war he was part of. But he was alone, now, just the German and he.

He located by his sound the man he sought. He was just one body in a sea of others, but his labored breath gave him away. Occasional gurgling sounds coming from fluid that was filling his lungs punctuated his breathing. He was nearing the end, but his body’s struggle against the inevitable stretched out the ending like a badly written play.

Rothary crawled alongside him, placing the man’s body as a barrier against any fire that should come from the enemy trenches. He looked into the man’s face, but like Cavanaugh’s, could only make out the barest of features in the dark night. Rothary’s sight only provided a framework for his mind to impress upon its own ideas of the man.

Just pain. That was all Rothary could see in the other. Whatever he had been in life had contracted into something so small as to be unworthy of being called human. Whatever he had been—husband, son, father—had drained from him with his lifeblood. This man who lay on a battlefield hundreds of miles from home was no longer any of that. If others in Germany believed he was, it was only in their imaginations. He was merely a dying man, an embodiment of the darker realities of life. He was not German or English, he was just flesh in its death throws.

And it was up to him to put an end to that pain that spread to all those in hearing range. Whatever regret he felt in shooting the man in the first place, he felt his duty now was to end the suffering. It was his duty as a soldier, as well as his duty as the one who had caused it in the first place.

He pulled out his pistol, placed its nozzle (?) pointing at the head of the other. He wanted to kill him, and he was still not sure why. Pity welled in him, but so did a hatred that may have been illogical but nevertheless was. War caused such feelings and he was not responsible for the war. Duty too spoke to him, about the need to do the job. He wanted to know, wanted to give this man’s death some meaning so that perhaps someday he could forgive himself, make sense of his life and move on when the war was nothing but a memory and a scar carved across the face of Europe. But more than anything he wanted to put an end to the horrible, gasping sound the other made. That was paramount in his mind. Rationalizations could be found later.

He stared at the other, his proximity that of a lover. He wanted to see, wanted to know, what it was he was killing. But the darkness kept the other in shadow, a mystery except for his agony: that, he understood too well.

This was not a stranger but someone he felt he knew intimately. He understood his fear, his hopes, his disgust with what he had seen. He was Rothary, he was no different than him. He was still asking questions as his finger tightened on the trigger, still hoping for answers. But as the violence erupted from the barrel of the gun into the other’s skull, he realized he had no answers. Nor did he understand why he had killed the other. He had no idea whether he had acted in fear or in hate, in pity or in despair. The gun fell from his hands as tears began to fall from his eyes. The breathing stopped but the horror it had induced did not stop. Nor would it ever. He would hear the sound of the other’s breathing as long as life remained in him. Each breath he took the other would be taking with him. Each breath he took would be torturous, would fill him with the loathing he had felt that day.

The Best We Can Do?

So after all the reasoned debate and the thoughtful media analysis of the Republican and Democratic campaigns, we have winnowed away all the lesser contenders so that only the worthiest remain, the two candidates undisputedly most qualified to lead our nation for the next four or eight years.

And yet I can’t help noticing that both of them have negative favorability ratings, at last look 54% for Hillary and a whopping 60% for Trump. This is unfavorable we’re talking about, one can only imagine what the actual percent of favorable impressions are, since there is undoubtedly a degree of undecided or neutral percentage points in there. Somehow the media never seems to tell us exactly what percent of us actually like either of them. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, because we’re not going to be voting for the one we like anyhow but rather we’ll be voting against the one we most dislike. But judging from the people I talk to, my estimate on likeability for either of them would be about 1%.

How did this happen?! How, in a nation of over 300 million people have we not been able to find two candidates we actually like, let alone even one? In any other sort of competition it would boil down to the best of the best. If it were a beauty contest, we’d almost all agree that the winner would at least be pretty. Were it an athletic competition, few would deny there was at least one of the best represented in the final showdown, the other perhaps being a merely “good” team that lucked its way onto center stage. But even good is better than what we have. Similarly, in any list of best movies the vast majority can agree that the top two are at least films worthy of viewing. You might prefer Casablanca, but you still have to give Citizen Cane its due. But when it comes to choosing a president we are incapable of finding two candidates who get a passing grade—a D-, for God’s sake—in the eyes of the electorate.

Once we get to this point, isn’t it logical to stop the debate about which of the two really bad candidates we want and instead discuss what the hell brought us to this point in the first place? What is wrong with our electoral process that we end up in this situation election after election? I know the pressure is on to vote against the really bad candidate (in your eyes) rather than the merely bad (in your eyes) candidate, but that is not the answer to the real problem, which is bad candidates. We’ve been down this road too many times and it has led to Clinton vs. Trump. Do you really want to play the same game one more time, kick the can down the road and wait and see what 2020 brings us? Go ahead, imagine the worst, the reality will be worse yet. Eighteen months ago I thought Clinton vs. Bush was the worst possible scenario.

Where else in our lives are we willing to accept such a choice? If you needed surgery would you go with the doctor less disliked or would you perhaps delay the procedure until a better option presented itself? If your toilet was broken would you choose the plumber in the Yellow Pages that displeased a mere 54% of his customers or would you not rather attempt to do the job yourself? Would you not demand better, would you not seek some other option than the two given you?

At what point do we refuse to play this game any longer? At what point do we stop moving our token along the path we are told we must travel and instead tip the whole damn board over?

Seriously, what’s wrong with us? Let’s put aside for a moment what is wrong with our candidates, because that question won’t provide us with the answers we’re looking for. Let us rather ask what’s wrong with us as a nation, as a society, when we cannot get two decent candidates. Don’t you think the first quality we would demand of a leader is that he or she should be moral and honest? Isn’t that what we used to revere in leaders such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln? If morality is not a high priority for us in those we vote for, then we ourselves are not moral and we are lost as a nation. And if morality is not a high priority in who we vote for, there is no reason in bothering to listen to the self-righteous outrage that both sides hurl against each other. If you plan to vote for either of these candidates, can it with your moralizing.

Here’s the thing: we deserve better! But like a woman who’s been beaten down by one no-good man after another, we have forgotten our self-respect. And if we lose our self-respect, it further encourages the abuser to tell us how lucky we are to have him/her. The abuser tears you down, makes you feel like you can’t get and don’t deserve anything better. And you WON’T get anything better until you find it within you to demand respect, demand dignity. More than anything else, you’ve got to stop making excuses for the abuser. You have to see things as they are and stop accepting the narrative of someone who’s taking advantage of you. Only you can make that decision. They will never decide to set you free, they will never treat you the way you deserve to be treated on their own. Sometimes you have to walk away, be willing to face all of the terrible threats that they’ve been using to make you live a life of fear.

Abused people begin to hate themselves as their fear of the abuser overtakes them. Then they begin to hate and fear others. That’s what elections are about now: hate and fear. We no longer vote for what we want but against what we hate and fear.

There’s a word to describe such behavior: dysfunctional. The left and the right are like spouses who can’t stand each other and yet can’t justify their own behavior without having the other to blame. It’s a trap we are stuck in, but just like an alcoholic it’s up to us to change the destructive pattern we’ve created.

It’s up to you! The future of your country and most likely the world is up to you! Stop blaming others and accept responsibility. Stop believing that we just have to hate the right people and trust the right people and it will all magically fix itself. Reality is presenting us with some serious questions and you know deep in your hearts that the answer is neither Trump nor Clinton. This is what adults do, they realize they can’t hand it off to someone else and expect them to solve their problems. You’re the parent now, you’re the grownup. If you don’t do it nobody else will.

This is your country. This is your life. You can’t resign yourself to the two choices provided by others when you know, You KNOW, deep in your hearts, that neither presidential candidate is truly motivated by what is best for their country but instead by selfish concerns. You can’t pretend it’s okay, can’t pretend there are simplistic solutions to the crises our nation now faces.

We cannot play this game any longer. Even if you are too weak to avoid voting for one of these two candidates, at least spare us all your hate-filled diatribes. When you vote for what you feel is the lesser of two evils, don’t try to make others believe they are evil for not voting for your candidate. And for the love of God, don’t try dragging others into the cesspool with you. Because in the end it’s not about Donald and Hillary, it’s about you and me. We have to learn to get beyond the partisanship, and that means getting beyond the idea that we have to uncritically defend what is indefensible.

We’re better than this. America is better than this. Let us once more show the world the potential of the U.S.A. Let us act in a way that would make people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King proud, let us remember our heritage and strive to pass on to our descendents the best of what we have been able to create. Let’s show them that we’re not just another country that rose to great heights only to fall into complacency, decadency, greed, and violence.

And while we’re at it, let’s show each other we’re better than the politicians who represent us. Trump and Clinton are not candidates but bombs with lit fuses in a crowded room we try to hurl at the other side in hopes of injuring the other more than we ourselves are injured. Damaging the other side is not the same thing as winning. The bottom line is, fighting with the other side will never bring about the changes we need to make, it will only lead us lower in our death spiral. We need to find ways to compromise, and more than that we will need to work to understand and, yes, even love those who disagree with us.

It is not too late, but we cannot walk the same road that has brought us to this point. We feel we have no choices but we better start looking harder. Our continued conviction in failed patterns of behavior has brought us to this point and clinging to them further is like a drowning man embracing a boulder. You have a choice of boulders right now, and whichever one may seem bigger in your eyes at this moment, the option of letting go is the better choice. United we will stand, divided we will drown.

Hatred and fear. That’s what is guiding us as Americans now. We’re better than that. At least I hope we are.

Disturbing Research For My Novel In The Making, Shell Shock

My upcoming book, Shell Shock, involves World War I, and I have been doing rather a lot of research on the war in order to make sure I produce a work that is factually accurate. Well, as factually accurate as a work of fiction involving supernatural aspects can be, I suppose. Like a video game developer, I feel the need to build a world with depth, therefore I have had to cover a lot of ground in my research in order to make sure my story has a wide open environment in which to play itself out. And when it comes to research, I always tend to overdo it. Part of it is a desire to create the best possible final product. Part of it, too, is a way of procrastinating doing the actual work of writing. Whatever the explanation, there will be a lot of notes I end up taking that will never make it into the book. Therefore I share with you now some facts which I have noted that I found to be interesting to myself. And when I say interesting, I mean deeply disturbing. Anything in quotations was quoted by those who actually experienced it.

In World War I, shovels were nearly as important as guns. They were used to dig trenches, in which the soldiers could hide from the near-constant bombardment of artillery, and they were used to dig graves for the millions who died in the trenches and in the area between the trenches, No Man’s Land. So many died in offensives that were nothing more than thousands running out into open territory to be mowed down by machine guns, that they often sat in No Man’s Land until the opportunity to retrieve them arose, which was sometimes a month or more. The dead were buried in shallow graves behind the trenches. As artillery was constantly blowing up both trenches and graveyards, digging new trenches would often mean digging through the corpses of the fallen.

The smell of the front lines “assailed you well before you could see it—a noxious compound of excrement, urine, smoke, cordite, lime, creosol, putrification.”

Rats, when corpses were scarce, would attack sleeping soldiers. When corpses were plentiful, they became gourmands, selecting only the finest bits of the corpses, which were for them the eyeballs and livers.

Factories in the towns behind the front lines ran saws day and night in order to build crosses for the graves of soldiers.

There were “Many on both sides who took a malicious pleasure in sniping at burial parties.”

When charging the enemy trenches, stopping to aid a fallen soldier was considered cowardice in the face of the enemy.

It was not the experienced troops who were better able to weather the storm of a sustained attack but the newcomers. "Rookies expect to become hardened by battle when in fact they are eroded by it."

After an attack, the cries and pleas of the wounded could be heard in no man’s land, but there was nothing their fellow soldiers could do to help them. To stick one’s head above the trenches would be as much as committing suicide, so one would have to not only endure the constant barrages, but when the artillery finally ceased, the cries of the dying would replace the sound of shells.

When possible, stretcher crews would go out into no man’s land and retrieve the wounded. It was not uncommon for a crew to pick up a wounded soldier but if another soldier was found who seemed more likely to survive, they would set the first one down in order to take the second.

Troops were given canvas bags in which to gather what they could and “often have I picked up the remains of a fine, brave man on a shovel, just a little heap of bones and maggots to be carried to the common burial place.”

“Limbs of the dead fell off as you lifted them. Bodies covered with a coat of flies that flew into your face, eyes, mouth as you approached.”

“Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.”

Gibbs, Philip. Now It Can Be Told (p. 50).  . Kindle Edition.

“Nobody could stand more than three hours of heavy shelling before they started feeling sleepy and numb, like being under anesthesia.” By the time the bombardment stopped and the ground attack began, they were “ripe for the picking”. When in the midst of an artillery attack, it was too loud to talk, so that every soldiers was cut off from the other, each of them entirely alone with their thoughts. At the battle of Verdun, the French endured nine days of bombing. “By the ninth day, almost every soldier was crying.”

“Lulls in shelling brought the sound of millions of flies disturbed from feasting on the dead and the high-pitched screaming of rats.

“Shimmering cloud of flies smelling of corpses…choking the combatants with its fetid odor.”

“Bodies crawled with maggots, making a noise like rustling silk as they gnawed their way through some dead man’s guts.”

In the first day of fighting in the Somme, 57,000 British and British Empire troops were killed, wounded, or missing in action. “One could walk across no man’s land on British bodies without setting foot on the ground.” The 1^st Newfoundland Battalion lost 91% of its men in the first 40 minutes of the Battle of the Somme.

Random Thoughts Part 20

All novels and schools of thought begin with a single small seed of an idea. Here are some seeds from which someday mighty books might spring. Or not.

The pain of existence is the pain of a piece of a puzzle that does not know where it fits.

Inside every cynical person there is a weakling who was looking for an opportunity to quit believing.

We have stopped using the word citizen and replaced it with consumer, and I find that very sad.

We see not only with our eyes but also with our heart, so all that we perceive is colored by our hatred and our love.

No matter how we try, we can never return to the past. But the irony of it is that if we try and run away from the past, it always catches up to us.

If someone exposes himself to your child, that person is arrested. If a person exposes himself to your child through the media, that is called freedom of speech and we blame the parents for not being responsible.

Belief means holding on to an idea, faith means letting go.

There are in hell pits so deep that no matter what you throw into them, they shall never be filled. They are not there as instruments of torture for the wicked, they are those who suffer in hell of their own free will. They are called cynics.

When you are witness to genius, it is not your job to accept or reject what is stated but to incorporate it into your own philosophy.

Intelligence is overrated. Two dogs who sniff each others’ butts learn more about each other in a moment than many humans understand about those they’ve known for a lifetime.

If we do not realize the spirituality that underlies politics we will never find political solutions. All answers we come up with will be simplistic, incomplete, and eventually harmful.

If The Bible was meant to be taken literally, there would only be one Gospel, not four, would only be one creation story, not two. Jesus lived and people wrote stories about him. The Bible is a collection of stories. Letting go of simplistic answers might just plunge you into a realm of belief and faith far beyond anything you believed was possible. But first you must let go. That, my friend, is the first step, it is perhaps the single greatest act of faith you’ll ever take.

The fact that we as humans do not have eyes in the back of our heads goes to show that we as a species were designed to look after each other.

The fool attempts to predict the next big wave while ignoring the tide.

If you get your news, movies, and music for free, what you will get is merely propaganda and advertising.

You cannot use vulgarity without turning thought from the abstract to the concrete, from the sublime to the mundane, from the intelligent to the silly. Vulgar words cheapen. Sometimes the words can communicate intense passion, but it is not the enduring kind of passion but that which passes in the use of the word. Dropping of such words are akin to having a bowel movement. Once released one has no desire to stay in the same room as it.

KFC took the fried and Super Sugar Crisps took the sugar not out of their product but out of their marketing. That is how a consumer society deals with dangers to your health.

Humans are happiest with a simple life and advertisers are happiest when they are able to make you buy more by making you insecure and unhappy.

The more you shape the world the more you become responsible for it.

Let's Build A Wall

Things were different in my grandfather’s day. Back then, when someone wanted to employ immigrants to drive down wages for American workers, they did it the legal way, by getting politicians elected who would increase the immigration quotas. It’s not fair that we punish those who buy politicians the old-fashioned way by allowing people to hire illegal immigrants.

And so I make what may sound like an unkind suggestion, but one I feel is necessary. I believe anyone found employing illegal aliens should be rounded up and immediately deported to Panama, The Cayman Islands, or whatever country they claim as their corporation’s nation of origin in order to avoid paying income taxes. For simplicity sake, let’s just send them all to the Cayman Islands. That way we can build a 50 foot wall around it. And make them pay for it! And we’ll make them pay living wages to those who build it too, not the $3 an hour under the table they were paying their illegal employees who were too afraid to speak out.

After all, it’s not right that those who hire illegal aliens are being treated better than our veterans. After fighting wars overseas that make for even more people fleeing their countries in hopes of finding a better life in the U.S of A., our soldiers come home to find their jobs are taken by those same refugees. Meanwhile, our government is paying those same companies who hire illegal immigrants here at home to rebuild the countries we blew up at their behest. And like as not they’re not using American labor to rebuild Saddam’s prisons.

Don’t tell me Americans won’t do the jobs immigrants do, it’s just a matter of how much money they want in return for their work. Let me explain the law of supply and demand to those who don’t get it: the less supply, the greater the demand. The less workers available, the greater the wages those workers are able to demand. Of course, those who hire illegals know it, that’s why they’re willing to open the immigration floodgates in order to reduce wages.

They say they can’t find anyone here that is willing to pick fruit or clean their pools for them, but guess what? If they paid enough, I’d gladly do it. Raise the wages enough and there will be people willing to do any job. Just look at how many attractive young women are willing to marry wrinkly old billionaires. It’s the magic of the market place. Of course, if they pay the pool boy too much they might not be able to afford more than one swimming pool per mansion, but nobody’s promised anything in this life.

It hurts me to see people tampering with the magic of the market place. After all, the market is only able to work its magic when it is allowed to act freely. The market is sacred. It is the source of all that is pure and good in the world. Flooding a nation with excess labor is equivalent to the Federal Reserve flooding the market with un-backed currency: it is destined to crash the system eventually.

So what do you think, Donald? Isn’t that a better idea than trying to trace every Western Union payment sent by all the less-than-minimum-wage workers in the country? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to build a wall around the Caymans than the entire Mexican border? Wouldn’t the Cayman Islands be a nice place to vacation after a tiring presidential campaign?

Because you know Donald Trump has made some serious money hiring illegal immigrants rather than the American workers whose vote he’s got wrapped around his little finger. Construction and hotels? Nah, no illegals involved in those trades.

I’d be interested to know how much money Trump puts in his pocket for every illegal worker he got to replace an American one. I’m guessing the average would be around twenty grand each per year, which doesn’t include the overall dampening of wages for everyone else. And I’m guessing we’re looking at thousands of workers, because Donald Trump has his fingers in a lot of pies. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. That may not be a lot of money to Trump, but I’ll bet it’s plenty to a veteran who’s looking for work.

Come to think of it, if those who hire illegal immigrants are so concerned about saving money, I’m sure it would be cheaper to deport them somewhere like Siberia or Somalia. With the money we’d save, we could make that fence 100 feet tall!