Concerning the Brown Peril

Dear Dr. Bones,

This piece addresses a completely different problem raised by Funders of Fratboy (L.L.C.) -- and echoed by the cultists of St. Elizabeth of Warrenbuffet insofar as *they* can not plausibly object to carpertbagging as a spiritual principle.

At any rate: though a carpetbag will do nicely to tote one’s AstroTurf™ about in, ¿How does one make sure that there are no little crimmigrants or criminaliens (_cimices lectulariæ_, or oissibly even worst pests undocumented yet in prose or rhyme) hitchin’ a free ride?

Happy days.
--JHM

(( I really did think from the link that the story would be about His Pickupship. Something ’rong with me, no doubt, that I skipped over the subtitle as if it were not there.

(( The come-on was "The Brown Peril," a soundbark which, as the learned _Slate_ scribblers eventually reveal, dates from 1908. Political self-whighteousness prevented them from noticing that way back then it started out as a joke (¿?) on Charlie Chan and his enemies.

(( Some real epidemiologist should have a look. Messers Johns and Fairchild mess about with things in a puzzling way. In the late 1860’s bedbugs seem to be distinctly neocon(federate) in their distribution, to really go with Mark I scalawags and carpetbaggers and clue-clutchers. Yet then forty years on,

a doctor with the New York City Department of Health had the temerity to declare in the _Times_ that bedbugs had sacked Gotham. He assured readers that “a short zoological excursion” through any apartment or hotel suite would yield evidence of the “brown peril.”

(( Naturally one’s Massachusetts Exceptionalism (Pat. Pend.) prohibits one from supposing the Little Friends of Morpheus ever got much farther than, say, Scarsdale and New Canaan. ))