In the news this week: the problem of illegal aliens. Some of you may even have heard the new “all-Martian” version of the national anthem, which was buzzed into people’s minds on Friday using some sort of horrible Martian mental death ray.

Oh say can you—zzzzzrrrp!
By the glaxnix zoid rezza zeerp!
What so eep! Eep! Eep! Eep! we hailed
By the twilight’s last zzzrrvev-rep! Zap!

My father’s people came here from Mars—at least that’s what my mother always said—so I have to admit I take these issues rather personally. I still remember my grandmother sitting out by the pool on a summer day, retracting and extending her scary metallic antennae.
“Don’t ever be ashamed of your people, Jenny,” she used to say. “Remember, Martians are just like anybody else, except we can use telepathy to make people’s minds explode.”
She was a sweet old thing. All the kids called her “Gampy,” although her real name, of course was Telecaster-Nine-Warp-ZAXXOZZ. To be fair, my Irish grandfather sometimes got tired of being married to the only woman in our neighborhood with a giant pulsating brain. “But remember Jenny,” he’d say to me. “It’s better to be married to someone with a giant pulsating brain than the opposite.”
I still wonder what he meant by this.
Martians, of course, aren’t the only aliens waiting for their shot at the American dream. You don’t hear so much about them, but the Venusians have an ancient culture as well, based on free love and communal ownership of property and worshipping the deep spirituality of nature. Oh, wait, that’s Hallowell! Well, anyway, I’m sure Venus is a very nice place as well, excepting for its atmosphere which is a constant hailstorm of deadly methane, ammonia, Top Job and Spam. You want to know what Venus is like? Think Los Angeles, without George Hamilton.
Yes, yes, I can hear Lou Dobbs saying, that’s all well and good, but once these characters get here they start demanding access to the fruits of American civilization, like, for instance, three-dollar-a-gallon gas. Is that why we’re paying taxes? So a bunch of women (as I understand Venus is populated entirely by women) with tentacles, gills, and hideous prehensile tongues can take away our jobs, our menfolk, and the national anthem?
You’ve probably heard the “Venusian” version of the national anthem by now, recorded by a chorus of horny Venusian gals and slowed down by the Internal Revenue Service to a pitch audible by humans:

Oh say can you—oh never mind
What I really want to do
Is to mmmm—pour fruit juice
On your pecs from this shoe.
Your broad stripes and bright stars
And the rest make me pine
For your big Yankee fists
On my gills, you wild swine!

The Congress has been wrestling this last week with the aliens issue, and thank god the the Republicans and Democrats have finally set their bipartisan differences aside, and are working toward a compromise solution that will benefit all Americans. Ha! Ha! Ha!
No, just kidding. What actually happened was that Senator Kennedy said that Senator Brownback was a “fundamentalist nut-job” and Senator Brownback, for his part, said that Senator Kennedy looked like a “big swole-up potato.”
Shortly after this, they started calling each other names.
It made me think, not for the first time, that maybe Mars or Venus wouldn’t be such a bad place to live sometimes, at least compared to Washington. There are worse things to breathe than Top Job, as it turns out.
In the meantime, aliens continue to cross through the radiation belt, day after day, slowly but surely becoming part of our culture, ready or not.
Who knows? Maybe one day soon we’ll elect the first president who isn’t even human. Can you imagine it, the country run by some inarticulate buffoon who can barely speak English, some crazy nut who’d divide the country, and launch wars against planets that haven’t even attacked us?
Oh what am I thinking? Something like that? Happening here? That’d be out of this world.